Where Did All These Dumb Shows Come From?
With Lost’s sixth and final season about to debut, fans like me find themselves in a quandary; this is the season we’ve been dying for, and unfortunately we’re going to get it. And then Lost will be gone… off the air forever. Sure, ABC is probably already planning their spin-offs and tie-in merchandise and Disney theme park attractions, but Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof (the two guys who’ve gone out of their way to tell us that they made Lost) have already said that they are done with Lost after this season, and won’t have anything to do with it. So we have every assurance that this really is it; one of the most ingenious, brilliant, and captivating sci-fi shows ever is ending.
You’d think that something like Lost coming to television would set a new bar for the format. And true, many producers responded by trying to air very similar shows. But they all failed. For instance ABC failed to replicate their own success when they created Invasion and then The Nine. Invasion was a very Lost-like show where alien body snatchers who weren’t all bad invaded a small Florida town after a hurricane. Produced by Shaun Cassidy, it had a lot in common with his mid ’90s Fox series called American Gothic. It lasted one season. Next year ABC tried to follow Lost with a show called The Nine about people trying to get their lives back together after being held hostage in a bank robbery. However, because of whatever happened during the robbery the hostages all had to keep a secret. The entire first season didn’t even air. In last ditch efforts to keep the Lost viewers watching something if not Lost, ABC has launched FlashForward and V with better marketing campaigns. Still, neither show is pulling the same ratings and following of Lost.
Many blame the failures of Invasion and The Nine on poor marketing, season hiatuses, and other stuff that never seems to prevent Lost fans from watching Jack, Kate and Sawyer, whenever and wherever they’re on. But what if Lost clones fail because of something different? What if Lost is just such a smart and enjoyable show that viewers really don’t need another show like it?
Perhaps TV execs at Fox and Starz are thinking something similar. Last week Starz debuted its heavily-publicized Spartacus: Blood and Sand. The first episode featured more than a dozen slashed body parts and three fuck scenes with full-frontal nudity. The dialog is cheese-laden and written with old-world trappings, such as “Thou did’st wish a favor in return?” and grandiose statements about what Rome will and won’t stand for to veil what the characters will and won’t stand for. This is not your daddy’s Spartacus; it’s 300 meets Gladiator with very little Kirk Douglas at all. The series is created by Sam Raimi and Robert Tapert, the guys behind the Evil Dead movies, Hercules and Xena: Warrior Princess. The show is clearly the bastard spawn of all the aforementioned. It’s big, dumb, not that original, and a whole lot of fun with only a threadbare storyline to follow. A big-budget special effects production with nothing to think about, just lots to do. Everything Lost is not.
Spartacus: Blood and Sand
The cast of Human Target
Coming up on its fourth week on air is Human Target, an episodic series vaguely reminiscent of the A-Team where the team is one bodyguard who uses a cover identity to put himself in the line of fire in order to protect his clients. The show is adapted from a DC comic book. Another TV adaptation was previously attempted back in the 90’s with Rick Springfield in the lead. Whoever’s writing this show seems to be purposely breaking every rule of good storytelling in the book, and the dialog is laughably bad. But the action scenes are so good and so over the top that it’s actually worth watching. Human Target appears to be trying to fill the void left by all those bad ’80s action movies that Schwarzenegger and Stallone no longer make. And Jackie Earle Haley (Watchmen, A Nightmare on Elm Street reboot) plays the computer geek, giving the show just the right amount of dignity. Like Spartacus, it’s just big loud and fun.
Whether these new shows are actually successful remains to be seen, though word is Starz has already renewed Spartacus for another season with only one show on air. But it’s interesting to watch television veer from one extreme (smart, intricate Lost) to another (big dumb fun action shows) and wonder if this reverse psychology will actually grab viewers.
February 1, 2010
I’m not a label whore, but in some realms of commerce, I think you really do get what you pay for. Lost is painfully expensive to produce by today’s standards, standards that are skewed by averaging in the bargain-basement cost of reality TV production. I’ll save the thesis for another day, but I think when the economy is down and you dangle the potential for everyman stardom in front of desperate people– well, you catch more fish with that net than creative TV, which doesn’t tease an offer of undeserved celebrity.
The networks, FOX in particular, have a cruddy history in respect to their treatment of imaginative shows, as well. The first post-cancellation episode of Family Guy, where Peter lists all the shows that would have to be canceled before FG could come back, sums it up nicely. My DVD collection reads like the headstones in Westwood Village Memorial Park– full of shows with so much potential that were killed off before their time: Firefly, Keen Eddie, Andy Richter Controls the Universe, Nowhere Man, Arrested Development, and the new Kolchak. I prefer watching these to watching most of the new stuff on TV today. The sixth viewing of the manure episode of Andy Richter is a thousand times more entertaining than 5 minutes of Hell’s Kitchen, American Idol, America’s Got Talent, Dancing with the Stars, Wife Swap, Extreme Home Makeover, The Apprentice, Celebrity Apprentice, and (may the entertainment gods forgive me for watching even those 5 minutes) Jersey Shore.
IMO, the industry rewards the wrong type of success. Sure, your expensive but creative show got rave reviews, but nobody watched it. Now you’re the creative guy who can’t bring in the revenue. It’s all about the Benjamins, and we’ll watch what they give us, unless we have a DVD collection of overlooked quality or are brave enough to give the basic cable networks a shot. I practice what I preach: while the jury’s still out for me on Caprica, we love USA’s line up: Burn Notice, and Monk (RIP) and Psych are solid. Other discriminating TV watchers I know dig on Sons of Anarchy on FX, and before it jumped the shark, Nip/Tuck.
So good TV is out there, but we have to look hard for it and support it when we find it. Thanks, too, for the warning about Sparticus. We were considering ordering it up, but it sounds as though where Rome was Rembrant, Sparticus is Juggs. We’ll pass.