Anyone Still Watching Basic Cable?

Remember when basic cable's scripted TV offerings seemed a fairly major part of pop culture? The Disney Channel had shows like That's So Raven and Hannah Montana (despite not watching the channel at all then, I knew there was something called a "Hannah Montana," even if I wasn't sure what exactly it was, an actual person or a character or maybe just a figure of speech), and Nickelodeon had iCarly. AMC's Mad Men was more a hit with Midcult-loving critics  and their upmarket followers than the general audience, but Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead were both confirmed popular sensations--while at the more grown-up but still lighter end of the spectrum, USA had Monk, and TNT had Leverage.

As Brad Adgate acknowledged in Forbes recently, hits like these are pretty much nonexistent these days. Where iCarly creator Dan Schneider watched his show pulling in 10 million viewers then on its best nights, his more recent Henry Danger, which Nickelodeon touted in a recent commercial as the #1 Kid's Comedy on TV, was bringing in under 1 million--bespeaking an astonishing collapse in that market. And it seems pretty much the same story elsewhere in this part of TVland.

Of course, this raises the question--just how will basic cable respond? The cancellation of Disney XD's Kirby Buckets in hindsight seems to have been indicative of a shift away from original, scripted, live-action fare in favor of other material--animation, gaming and the rest. It may be that this was an easier course for this particular channel, with its slighter market and margin for failure, and connections with Marvel and so forth, but it seems possible that other channels will be walking the same path, looking for other ways in which to cater to a shrunken base of viewers. One way might be their similarly turning to nonscripted fare. Another might be their doing what the networks have generally done, passing on more "adventurous" material in favor of more conventional fare--like the procedurals they keep churning out, very profitably.

Still Waiting on '90s Nostalgia

I have, from time to time, remarked the hints of a belated interest in '90s nostalgia (in the feature film version of Baywatch, or the sitcom Schooled, for example), but by and large these have just proven flickers (the Baywatch film was no blockbuster, Schooled cancelled after a mere two seasons), while a glance at the line-up of films initially scheduled for release in 2020 made clear that where nostalgia was concerned the '80s, after all these years, remained king.

And so I found myself thinking about the faintness of '90s nostalgia to date, developing some thoughts I had earlier a little further. It seems to me that one can simultaneously say several different things about the '90s--each true about different aspects of it, and altogether meaning that the era lends itself less well to nostalgia.

#1. The '90s Never Happened.

To the extent that people imagined the '90s would, in politics, values and the rest represent a break with the '80s--a reaction against Reaganomics and neoliberalism and neoconservatism and Cold War, a shift of our thinking in a more socially and ecologically conscientious, internationalist, de-militarized direction, or even a rebirth of countercultural radicalism ("Once we get outta the 80's, the 90's are going to make the 60's look like the 50's" '60s radical Huey Walker promised in Flashback)--the '90s never happened, amounting instead to a brief and quickly crushed hope that I suspect few even remember. What happened instead was that the '80s simply went on and on in this respect, the right pressing rightward rather than retreating amid the "end of history." (A glance at the Clinton administration's record of social and economic policymaking--government budget-cutting, welfare "reform," deregulation for finance, low taxes on the rich, Alan Greenspan at the Federal Reserve, free trade, etc., etc.--certainly, makes it all too clear that it was a "continuation of Reaganomics by other parties.") And we cannot be nostalgic for what never happened, can we? (Indeed, it seems to me to say a lot that those things of the '80s for which we see nostalgia are, by and large, the things of childhood--while those who express a dissenting impulse, for lack of anything else, still look back to before the '80s, as we see in films like Roman J. Israel, Esq., or Joker.)

#2. The '90s Did Happen, But Was a Transitional Period Rather Than a Distinct Phenomena of its Own.
I have certainly had this impression thinking about film during this period--the action film in particular. We all know the distinctively "'80s action film" Hollywood turned out in that decade--Schwarzenegger and Chuck Norris and Rambo and Die Hard and the rest. And we all know the sort of action film that has prevailed in the twenty-first century--dominated by superheroes and their heroics, with Spiderman, Batman and the Avengers delivering one billion dollar hit after another. But what about the '90s? Close examination, time and again, has convinced me that it was a transitional era where people still flocked to see Schwarzenegger in Eraser, while Hollywood, in spite of the early success of the Tim Burton Batman franchise, was making mostly second-string superhero movies, and Independence Day was novel enough to be a major event (while two decades later its sequel was predictably lost in the ever-larger summer crowd).

#3. The '90s Happened--it's the Period After the '90s That Didn't.
Perhaps the most unambiguous change in the sort of details of daily life that nostalgia-hawkers interest themselves in is perhaps what people call "technology." Yet, what in the heady '90s seemed to be the beginning of a new wave of digital wonders can, in hindsight, seem like the climax. Personal computing, Internet connections, cellular telephony all exploded then--and while they have got cheaper and more portable and faster enabling fuller exploitation of their potentials, it seems that nothing since has been quite so radical. Indeed, much of what was expected to follow soon--bodily immersive virtual reality, telepresence, self-driving vehicles and other equally dramatic artificial intelligence aids to daily living--proved rather further off than imagined, things we are still waiting for now two decades on, with "digital personal assistants" like Alexa still for the most part a novelty, and many still feeling themselves in a position to express a "Git a Hoss"-like disdain for the idea that cars will drive themselves anytime soon. The result is that rather than being in the '80s we remain in the '90s--and equally cannot get nostalgic for what never departed.

Of course, none of this means that there are not things that I look at and find to be particularly "'90s." Thus does it go with, for instance, those syndicated action hours one can still see rerun on channels like H & I (for now). They offer a style of entertainment not quite so available before, and clearly vanished since. Yet such items strike me as sufficiently minor as to leave those building entertainment out of nostalgia little to work with.

No Time to Die: Commercial Prospects

If memory serves, No Time to Die was the first blockbuster-grade movie to see its release deferred as a result of the pandemic--in this case all the way to late November (more than seven months after its initial release date). This will mean its coming out five years after Spectre--the longest gap in series' history apart from the span of time between Licence to Kill and Goldeneye.

Given the surprises this year has had for us all, and for that installment in the franchise in particular, I am in no mood to make predictions--but still comfortable with hypotheticals. Let us assume the release goes ahead as now scheduled, in something like a normal film market, where a comparison with that older film is actually useful. Goldeneye was, of course, a success, the first Bond movie to break the $100 million barrier, which did not quite mean what it had before, but even adjusted for inflation reversed the generally downward trend in the series' grosses since the '70s, an especially welcome development after the disappointment of Licence to Kill. (I might add that years later it seems to be widely regarded as, The Spy Who Loved Me apart, the best of the Bond films to appear between the original crop of the '60s and the twenty-first century reboot.)

No Time to Die does not have so much to recover from--but at the same time, a generation later, the concept may be that much more worn, the market tougher, while as I remarked not so long ago, if the Bond series has been borrowing ideas rather than generating them for a half century now, the ideas it has been borrowing seem to me less appealing generally, and certainly less easy to assimilate to the character. (Moonraker's sending Bond into space was wacky, and Licence to Kill went too far in reinventing Bond as a "someone killed my favorite second cousin"-type '80s Hollywood action film hero, but all that was less problematic than origin story prequels and family drama and overlong running times and the rest it took from recent action films.)

In considering all that it seems worth acknowledging that there has been a certain amount of noise over the hints that Bond will get married, and replaced by a female (and Black) operative. I have no idea how much it will mean amid all the flashy action stuff, and after all these decades of concessions to a gender politics less forgiving of the old conception (already by the late '70s things were changing, while I would say Casino Royale pretty much finished Bond off in this department all by itself), the bigger issue seems to me to be something more basic. Already by the late '70s the illusion that it was more than "just another action" series was beginning to fade, by the '80s pretty much gone, and if at times it seemed to defy it with a movie that persuaded much of the audience it was an event (because of a longer than usual span of time, because of a new concept), as Casino Royale and Skyfall managed to do, it is an increasingly difficult trick to pull off--while pulling it off seems more essential than ever to selling tickets.

NOTE: Between the time I drafted this post, and my being able to post, there has already been new talk of No Time to Die getting bumped again, all the way over to the summer of 2021. (Things are moving too fast for anyone to keep up with these days.)

What Ever Happened to Tennis?

Recently considering how the image of luxurious, glamorous living film and TV offer has changed I happened to mention the scale of the houses we see--which seems to me a matter of the exploding fortunes of the wealthy. Still, not everything seems easily explicable in such terms, with the changing nature of pastimes an obvious case. In our movies and television shows the rich and glamorous still play plenty of golf--but, I think, rather less tennis, a game that seemed ubiquitous in that kind of fare. Jonathan and Jennifer Hart, after all, were not unknown to be on the tennis court. In the opening montage of the first season of Charlie's Angels, during Farrah Fawcett's bit we see her swinging a tennis racquet. What did the original Bionic Woman do before becoming an OSI agent/junior high school teacher? She was a tennis pro.

And so on and so forth.

All that is rather less evident now.

It seems plausible that this is bound up with the decline of interest in tennis more generally.

The generally accepted version of the story seems to be that tennis was, for the broader public, fresh and new in the late '60s and early '70s--thanks to the airing of major tournaments on television as the sport newly went pro, while it is held that colorful personalities and gender politics (John McEnroe's temper tantrums, Billie Jean King's feminism) sustained interest for some. That could not and did not go on forever, while the relative decline of American players' prominence at the sports upper levels reduced interest in the U.S. (kind of like with boxing). Given that even at its peak tennis was never exactly football or basketball (the U.S. Open no Super Bowl or NBA Championship even at its long ago height), all this meant it was vulnerable when "secondary sports" got squeezed out of press coverage and television broadcast (also like boxing), leaving it a long way from its glory days--and TV writers and producers less expectant that an audience will be suitably impressed by the sight of their protagonist on the court.

Luxury in the Neoliberal Era

A prominent theme of discussion of the Bond novels and films--the more critical kind that rises above a poptimist denigration of earlier works to better promote the new--is the ways in which the original conception has dated. One of the more interesting but less talked-about aspects of this is the earlier Bond novels and films' presentation of what may be called "lifestyle fantasy"--their image of what was luxurious and glamorous. As has been noted time and again, much of what seemed so in the '50s and early '60s--getting on a jet plane, staying in a Carribbean resort--has come to seem commonplace to "middle-class people," and even for those not affluent enough to afford such vacations (often confusing the "lifestyles" they see on TV with how they live), less wildly fantastic than they seemed back in the series' heyday. Much else has simply come to seem old-fashioned--like nightclubs as places where one wears black tie and evening gowns. (Certainly the opening sequence of the first XXX movie offered what a young person of even twenty years ago was apt to think of that.)

I have little to add to my earlier remarks about the Bond series here, but these days I find myself leaving on reruns of older television, and being struck by how, rather than some peculiarity of the James Bond series, this is generally the case. Looking at Hart to Hart's images of luxury, for instance, I find myself thinking about the house in which the Harts live. They have what can only be considered a very large and beautiful home. The vast majority of us, even those of us in the "First World," are unlikely to ever live in anything nearly so spacious or attractive. But today it does not give the impression of opulence that I suspect it was meant to; the grandeur one might associate with people who fly about in private jet planes.

This is most likely a matter of how the past few decades went. An era of spectacular economic growth they have not been for America, or the world. But the richest have got much, much richer. J. Paul Getty, in 1976 the world's richest man with a fortune of $6 billion, would, even with his fortune's size adjusted for inflation (to $27 billion in today's money), not make the list of the 25 wealthiest today. As will probably surprise no one, that list is now headed by Jeff Bezos, whose fortune (recently estimated at $146 billion) is more than five times as large as Getty's was then. And contrary to the drivel some "moralists" still spout about the Puritan virtues as the source of great fortunes, the billionaires have not hesitated to lavish the money on themselves, raising the stakes with regard to luxury--this age now seeing them take billion-dollar compounds as their personal homes.

In short, when it comes to houses, yachts and just about everything else where the expenditure of more money translates to more obvious opulence, the standard has changed, and changed profoundly.

Mr. Spock's Beard and the Hyper-Fragmentation of Pop Culture

Over the years I have time and again been struck by how single episodes of shows like the original Star Trek or The Twilight Zone have lingered in the pop cultural memory so that a half century on TV writers can still make casual reference to even their smaller details, and expect a portion of their audience to remember what they were talking about to make the reference worth the while--as with Star Trek's "Mirror, Mirror."

That was the show that taught us all that if we see someone we knew well wearing a beard, it must be the evil alternate universe version of them. (Unless the one we know is evil, in which case the "evil" version of them is actually the good, like with Eric Cartman on South Park.)

That this has been the case seems natural enough in hindsight. People had fewer channels, enough so that anything in network prime-time almost automatically commanded a huge slice of the TV audience by today's standards. For much of the year a first-run show's new season consisted of reruns, just in case they missed it the first time--or refreshing their memories if they hadn't. And then if a show lasted for a while it made its way into syndication and, quite often, way more reruns apt to be watched by a significant share of the viewership, because there were only so many venues, picking from a limited pool of really successful content. And this seems to have especially been the case with fandom-inspiring genre television, to which the TV networks were only willing to go so far in catering, so that their options were limited indeed. So without trying someone only casually interested in science fiction could easily end up seeing the same episodes over and over and over again, just by the way memorizing the more striking or popular of them, with others doing the same, so that casually referencing it before a wide audience was plausible, even easy. That, of course meant more such reference, year in, year out (as the "bearded Spock" becoming a cliché demonstrates), which in turn reinforced its recognizability, translating in its turn to still more reference in a virtuous circle.

In this "peak TV" era the situation is very, very different, with the quantity of outlets and the quantity of their programming exploded, and many of them less casually available (with the prime-time networks' marginalization followed by the basic cable TV boom going bust), or casually accessible to viewers even if they are available to them (because of the increased propensity for story arcs, because of shared universe complexity like with the Arrowverse Crisis on Infinite Earths); with the networks inclined to yank reruns off the air in summer in favor of reality TV garbage and the like; with channels favoring their original, exclusive content over reruns of other people's stuff as the mainstay of their content. (To give one small example I saw Smallville in reruns on TNT, but the current crop of DC Comics-based superhero shows airing on the CW does not turn up there or anywhere else; it's something you have to seek out, or not watch at all--and I'll admit I haven't, and don't expect to be doing it anytime soon.)

The result is the ever-more thorough hyper-fragmentation of the viewing audience--and, I think, even if you are sure that TV today is better than it has ever been before, that even the best that is out there today is far less likely to give us a shared frame of reference. Certainly I do not think any show today, no matter how brilliant, will give us something that a half century on we will recognize as the way we do such bits of those '60s-era shows as the evil alternate universe significance of a beard. And I can't help suspecting that, even if there is much good, or at least potential good, in the profusion of material and options, we are not also losing something that way.

The Problem with Grand Admiral Thrawn

Researching the second edition of Star Wars in Context I found myself delving into some of Lucas' well-known inspirations--like Bruno Bettelheim, and specifically his writing on fairy tales in The Uses of Enchantment. That book, which I suspect is not much read these days (Bettelheim has long since fallen from grace), seems to have profoundly oriented Lucas to the vision he followed in the first film--setting aside the relatively complex and political story of the early scripts in favor of a simpler, more fairy tale-like film.

As explained by Bettelheim, fairy tales are stories dealing with existential, life-and-death matters in a simple form that makes them accessible to children. Part of this is that the good are all good, the bad all bad; and precisely because the young are young, still forming a morality, and so less responsive to good and bad on their own terms than other attractions or repulsions, it matters that the bad are made unattractive, the good more so. (Thus the evil witch is also ugly.)

Darth Vader seems to me exemplary of this. Certainly in the first film there is no ambiguity about the character. This is not to say that Vader wholly lacks traits people could admire. He is perceptive, quick, cunning, determined, whether in handling subordinates, carrying out a raid, conducting himself in a fight, flying a TIE fighter. One can call him intelligent, decisive, forceful--which is why he holds the position of authority and enjoys the power that he does, as the right-hand man of the absolute ruler of a Galactic Empire (apparently, rather more meritocratic than any world we know). However, any admiration for these qualities is preempted by the more immediate concern we are made to feel for the fate of our heroes--and more generally the fact that he keeps killing people like flies (with Empire Strikes Back seeing him do this with subordinates who, in spite of their best efforts, let him down). That he does vile things, that he intimidates and threatens, that he is a menace--an embodiment of evil--overwhelms everything else.

It has struck me that Timothy Zahn's creation, the Imperial Grand Admiral Thrawn, is very different in this way. His good qualities are not only abundant, but foregrounded, and in such a manner as to make him admirable and appealing, even if he is the bad guy. Rather than his intelligence being something we only appreciate if we stop and think, Zahn makes a point of having Thrawn put on one bravura display of performative intelligence for the audience after another, with Admiral Pellaeon playing the sometimes skeptical but suitably impressed Watson to Thrawn's Sherlock Holmes as he uses his deductive skills to navigate one strategic, one tactical, problem after another (all without making Thrawn seem a tiresome know-it-all). Thrawn is cultured, too--an art-lover whose understanding of art work is deep enough that he can derive militarily applicable insights from his examination of a particular culture's painting. He can be very charming when he wants to be. He can be fair with subordinates--rather more so than most people we see--not only punishing incompetence, but rewarding intelligence and initiative with promotion even where that intelligence and initiative did not, on a particular occasion, produce the hoped-for result (as seen in The Last Command). And while Zahn does not probe into his motives too deeply, it does seem at least plausible that while Thrawn is personally ambitious, he does believe himself to be doing the right thing in striving to restore the Empire to its earlier stature.

Indeed, if we go by the fairy tale vision of the original Star Wars, a figure like Grand Admiral Thrawn can seem to have no place in the franchise, at least as understood by the sort of purist who was so quick and vehement in calling out the prequels for their breaches with the fairy tale simplicity established in Episode IV. Yet Thrawn proved hugely popular--perhaps the most popular of the Expanded Universe's creations. In fact, I cannot remember reading a single derogatory comment about him.

Why have so few sensed any dissonance here? I suspect it is because audiences were less critically-minded in regard to the books than they were to the films. Watching the prequels they were alert to these films not "feeling" like the original trilogy, not recapturing their (imperfect and perhaps romanticized) memory of the experience. They had fewer preconceptions about what a Star Wars book should feel like, and that the book let them create the images for themselves in their minds (rather than presenting them with an abundance of CGI clashing with their visual memories), at the least made any issues less immediate, less visceral. And if the resulting books as a whole do not stay so fairy tale-simple as the originals (the story sprawls, the military detail is more pronounced), Zahn keeps to a minimum the increase in the sorts of complexity that so troubled many a fan (like more elaborate world-building, or the intricacy of the political premise, with all their Brechtian alienations), all as a good deal rings true. (Zahn's novels in a multitude of other ways made a point of evoking the original trilogy without too closely repeating it--Luke returns to Dagobah, significantly, while Lando is back on the make, and so on and so forth.) Moreover, precisely because the Thrawn character did appeal to readers, they were comparatively prepared to forgive the breach with the older conception--perhaps the more after the broadening of the Expanded Universe accustomed them to a more complex, more "adult" fictional universe on paper, where this sort of thing may anyway "play" better than in a two-hour movie, even without such particular expectations as the fans had.

Watching Flatland

I remember when the El Rey network began airing Flatland I was surprised to not have encountered the show before. Back in those years when I was most attentive to science fiction television I only intermittently followed The X-Files. (I had little patience for the mind-numbingly repetitive back-and-forth between credulous Mulder and "skeptical" Scully, or the artless head game that was the mythology.) And I took less interest in the young adult stuff on the WB. (I still haven't seen much of Buffy, and still don't intend to; while seeing Smallville was basically a result of its reruns winding up in a convenient time slot on a channel I often left on between waking up and heading off to work in the morning.) But I by and large kept up with the syndicated action hour-type stuff Flatland seemed to be. Even if I didn't see quite every episode of every one of them (there sure were a lot of them, back then, and some came and went almost before you knew it), I would have expected to at least have heard of this one.

I went online and found that there is virtually nothing there on the show in the way of fan sites, wikis, even data on the relevant Internet Movie Data Base pages (where there is not a single user review, and a mere 28 ratings in all--as compared with, for instance, 7 user reviews and 295 ratings for Adventure, Inc., another little-seen, quickly forgotten, one-season show of the action hour-type from that same year, 2002). To go by the Wikipedia disambiguation page for the word "flatland," the show does not even seem to have a page on the site. In fact I did not come up with evidence of its having aired in North America before, or anywhere else for that matter, a run that I suppose would have been short given how the boom in this format, and its most typical mode of distribution (syndication), collapsed shortly after the show's date of production and never recovered.

None of that made me less interested, of course, and I caught a few episodes. What can I say about the show at this point? Flatland clearly walks the road trod by that earlier show which helped launch that very boom in syndicated action hours, Highlander: The Series. Like Highlander (57 user reviews and 13,292 ratings, in case you're wondering), it is a story of a continuing millennia-old battle between immortal superbeings today in an old and glamorous world-city, largely as seen by the ordinary (or are they?) humans who have found themselves caught up in those events. Befitting the long past behind all this we have a good deal of intercutting between the contemporary world and a historical costume past, colorfully filling us in on the backstory of the loves and hates and other histories and relationships of these figures. We have those beings fighting things out by way of stylish, supernatural-tinged and visual effects-enhanced personal, physical combat. And in line with their "high concept" inspiration (the mid-'80s was a golden age for music video-TV commercial style filmmaking, with Highlander right up there with classics of the form like Flashdance and Rocky IV and Top Gun), nearly everything is as plush and sleek and glossy as if it came out of an upmarket catalog ad, with an occasional grimy or "industrial" backdrop lending some visual texture.

Still, if I had seen it before the formula is a solid one, and this show's particular variations on it definitely have their appeal. From a metafictional standpoint the casting of Dennis Hopper as an immortal super-being with the fate of the world in his hands is fairly striking given his career of playing megalomaniacs--and if Peter Biskind's stories about Hopper are to be believed, Hopper's not just talking that way in his movie roles. (Claiming in the wake of his success with Easy Rider that his "may be the most creative generation in the last nineteenth centuries," Hopper compared himself with Jesus, while he opens the episodes of Flatland by reciting, as if they were his own, the words of the Buddha as commonly rendered in contemporary English--"Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment"--just before introducing himself as "Smith.") Un-metafictionally, Hopper and the rest of the cast do quite well, while Shanghai (the "Paris of the East") is most certainly a suitable backdrop for this kind of drama, and the airy Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon-style wire-fu makes a very acceptable alternative to Highlander's head-slicing swordplay.

I grant that it is not what the "peak TV" cheerleaders who wet their pants over The Sopranos and Mad Men and Netflix's House of Cards remake and expected all the rest of us to do the same celebrate as great television, but I enjoyed what I saw of it, and was dismayed to see El Rey yank it and all the other '90s action hours they had brought back to the TV schedule (Stargate: SG-1, Starhunter, Xena: Warrior Princess, Relic Hunter) back off the air in favor of their mostly unscripted originals (while this viewer goes elsewhere in the meantime).

Reevaluating Christopher Nolan's Batman Films

Some years ago I offered my thoughts on The Dark Knight Rises--which were less than complimentary. But I had received its two predecessors more favorably.

One reason was that when those earlier movies came out I had been ready to give certain foolishnesses a pass.

Looking at Batman Begins, for instance, there was plenty that seemed off to me on even a first viewing. The worldwide journey Bruce Wayne is on when the film begins, undertaken for the sake of "investigating the criminal mind," struck me as a silly self-indulgence on the part of the billionaire--criminological priv-lit--a wealthy wannabe vigilante's equivalent of Eat, Pray, Love. And that silliness was tied in with a still bigger silliness. It is by no means a new realization that the biggest and worst crimes are not generally labeled crimes at all--while even if one does not, for example, consider the conquest and enslavement of countries, the exploitation of the disenfranchised and the ruination of the environment to be crimes, the line between ordinary business and what is normally recognized as crime in the narrowest sense has never been more than finely drawn, and has only got blurrier over time. However, Nolan did not seem to have caught on to this, Batman's world one where, at least normally, the criminal were all clearly on one side, the "decent, law-abiding citizens" on the other. As it was 2005 there were those who saw in it something of a statement on the War on Terror, but people were always doing that kind of Zeitgeist criticism, and on the relevant level the film seemed to me too flimsy to take seriously.

Still, if it was risible on the level of sociology and politics, I did not expect much more from a superhero movie, and there was a little psychological interest, at least--which seemed novel enough in those days, and at least less of a downer than it appeared in, say, 1995's Batman Forever (when I experienced it as a pure and simple annoyance, out of place in that movie's lighter treatment of the character). It helped that the superhero boom was still fairly fresh, and this more superficially serious and artful approach still novel.

All of this carried over to my reading of the sequel, The Dark Knight, three years later. I enjoyed it as Jungian psychodrama--a level on which I think it is still interesting (even as I find that kind of thing less worthwhile than before)--and brushed off the talk of it as much else.

Alas, The Dark Knight Rises afforded no room for that--Nolan's insistence on making a point that I can least offensively call "questionable" impossible to shrug off, all while simply not being as good a film as the prior ones in the formal ways. (The third installment was, as so many third entries in film trilogies are, not just less fresh and outright repetitive, but less tight and coherent also, so that it was not just a fascist film, but a badly made fascist film.)

And if anything, the Ben Affleck-era take on Batman (what I saw in the perhaps not insignificantly Nolan-produced Batman vs. Superman, and its follow-up Suicide Squad) was still less pleasant. In fact, it soon had me thinking again of how in 2010 I wondered on this blog if it was not time to "Give the Superheroes a Rest?"

Ten years later, it seems fair to say that the studios didn't give us a rest--so I guess I just gave myself a rest from their not giving us a rest.

Annoying, Empty Phrases: "It's a Reflection of Our Times"

One phrase that has long annoyed me (yes, I know there are a lot of them) is "It's a reflection of our times"--or in regard to the past, "It's a reflection of its times."

The reason is that in saying that one does not say anything at all. After all, anything and everything can in some way be regarded as a reflection of its times--even in its ostentatiously rejecting some aspect of those times.

The real issue is what we are seeing reflected, and how, and why, and what they think of it. That is what they should be talking about.

But certain simpletons regard simply uttering the pretentious phrase as the speaking of something profound, and the speaker--apt to be such a simpleton themselves--preens as if they have just offered esoteric wisdom.

More irksome still is the phrase's so often being an uncritical and (ironically, given the inclusion of the term "the times") ahistorical celebration of the new, even where what is being reflected is so terrible that no right-thinking person should be able to regard it with equanimity.

And so once again: groan.

The '60s-Era Batman Series: Reflections

Earlier this year H & I has started rerunning a number of older series, with its Sunday afternoon line-up now dominated by action-adventure shows of the '90s--Sheena, Relic Hunter, Beastmaster, Mutant X, and the one that in many ways started it all, Highlander: The Series. They also rerun a pair of episodes of the '60s era Batman as part of the package.

I had seen a good many episodes of the show back in childhood, but had only the vaguest recollections of them before happening on these reruns--which proved to be a pleasant surprise. The episodes certainly have their pleasures--not least a lightness of tone I find a relief from our inundation by pretention and edgelordism in these days of "peak TV." They are dealing with what was undeniably silly source material, and rather than trying to convince us it is not silly, embracing that silliness and having fun with it without going flippantly, smugly postmodernist on us. The scripts can be surprisingly literate and witty, and often satisfyingly satirical. (Batman's run for mayor against the Penguin, which the Washington Post's Phillip Bump found rather relevant in 2016, cleverly skewers the vulgarity and vapidity of our electoral rituals.) And the cast was remarkable--with the villains in particular a parade of Hollywood legends (Mr. Freeze alone was played by George Sanders, Otto Preminger and Eli Wallach).

For his part, Adam West made the Batman role his own in a way I can only compare with William Shatner's contemporaneous accomplishment with the character of James T. Kirk--perfectly playing a very different conception of the character than we are used to today. Rather than the mad vigilante stalking the streets by night looking for trouble, this Batman was practically a police consultant, generally heading off on some adventure only when getting a call from Commissioner Gordon--like some costumed Sherlock Holmes. When confronting villains it was typically they and not he who first resorted to violence--and he struck back only as much as he had to. And whether in his persona as Batman, or Bruce Wayne, if there was anything questionable about the order he was upholding or the way in which he upheld it, Wayne/Batman came off as consistently displaying a high regard for the rule of law, due process, democracy and human beings generally, always ready to believe that people could change themselves for the better and reform if given a proper chance--so much so that I was struck by the sheer number of episodes that closed with Wayne using his resources to assist those who had made "mistakes" in the past in rehabilitating themselves.

Indeed, rather than a raving reactionary he came off as naive--but for all that, an idealist and a man of virtually unfailing integrity and humanity.

In fact, it all made me rethink the character--and what our conception of him has meant.

Back in the '80s the conclusion increasingly drawn was that anyone who did what Batman did had to be a mad fascist. My thought earlier was that the view of Batman-as-wacko, Batman-as-fascist was a worthwhile, even important, insight. But it now seems that I have to qualify that as having meaning only if we treat this story of a super-rich vigilante who dresses as an anthropomorphic bat as more than it was ever meant to be (this all too obvious fancy never meant to withstand psychological or sociological scrutiny), while the "insight" said more about how our culture was changing. Writers like Frank Miller set forth the idea critically (well, once upon a time), but later on the filmmakers and even the actors seem to have reveled in the fascist vision. Christopher Nolan, certainly, made his sympathies clear by the regrettable last of his three Batman films, while the portrayal of the figure by Ben Affleck, from whom something else might have been hoped, was clearer on this from the start as his growling, graying, visibly deranged incarnation of the figure set about trying to bring Superman down.

It was not the case that Batman had to be a fascist. Rather it was the case that the mainstream of political and cultural commentary was moving toward the misanthropic vision of fascism that caused Batman to increasingly be conceived in such terms--a trend of which those who like to throw about phrases like "It's a reflection of our times" in response to anything someone else says tend to be rather uncritical.

Those decrying the turn politics has taken in recent decades, however, should not take that lightly.

Star Trek: Picard; Et Tu, Next Generation?

I have, for the most part, ignored Star Trek since the untimely but unsurprising demise of Star Trek: Enterprise. I have seen the first two of the post-reboot films, but none of the shows. Because of the decision of CBS to consign the shows to streaming rather than network TV--making it a matter of subscribing or not looking at all, rather than possibly, casually glancing at something a flip of the channel away--I did not bother, especially given the predictably unpromising characterization of Discovery as having walked away from everything that, to a Trek traditionalist, made the show great. (Indeed, that so much of the first season was spent in the Mirror Universe seems very suggestive.)

Still, one could take it all for something removed from the original, "real" set of series', which I thought had been safely set aside--but soon enough there came word of Star Trek: Picard. I was unenthusiastic, because I suspected that we would see its intellectual, socially critical and utopian elements dispensed with in favor of something fashionably "darker."

The little I have bothered to read about it confirms me in that expectation. Where at the height of the Reagan era, with Ayn Rand fanboy Alan Greenspan newly appointed to the Federal Reserve and orienting monetary policy to the fostering of speculative bubble after speculative bubble, with Gordon Gekko declaring that "Greed is good," with Mike Nichols gone from The Graduate to Working Girl (instead of cringing at "Plastics," we were supposed to glory in the thought of a career on Wall Street), Captain Jean-Luc Picard looked financier Ralph Offenhouse in the face and told him that "People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We've eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We've grown out of our infancy"--but as Lee Parsons wrote,

[t]hese ideas are mostly gone from Star Trek: Picard. By way of explanation, Mr. Stewart argues that the world has changed a good deal in the interim.

As Stewart explained in a recent interview with the CBC, "the world that we find ourselves living in now, because it's a very, very tough world indeed," such that in refusing to return to the role for many years he now supposes that he

wanted a different man in a different world with a different set of values perhaps . . . This is a disturbing and frightening and sad time for many thousands of people.

He is still more explicit in an earlier piece that ran in Variety, remarking that the new show "was me responding to the world of Brexit and Trump" (thoughts he details using several of what Captain Spock referred to as "colorful metaphors"). It seems that Stewart himself could no longer believe in the role he had acted so persuasively three decades ago.

It is not in me to altogether blame Patrick Stewart for feeling disheartened. These have been a WRETCHED few decades from the standpoint of the kind of hopes the show represented. But it is still an unhappy thing to see Star Trek "get with the times" in this way; to see one of a very few candles in the darkness snuffed out.

Is Anyone Else Sick of Being Told This is a "Golden Age of TV?"

It seems that since at least The Sopranos, but especially during this past decade, I have heard people say over and over and over again that this is a "golden age" of television--ad nauseum.
And I am, as the term from Latin suggests, truly sick of hearing it.

Still, I do not think people are generally lying when they make the claim. Just fooled.

What I mean by that is not that TV was great then, and lousy now. At any given time most of what is being produced is apt to be mediocre--while the mediocrity (and even the very good) of yesteryear are subject to simple-minded and superficial prejudices which disadvantage it as against what we have now, which makes it look better than it really is--whether as art, or pure and simple entertainment.

I have boiled my argument down to a dozen items. Here they are below, the reasons why new TV--and especially the most ballyhooed, allegedly "quality" stuff new TV has to offer--looks better to so many than it really is (the more so as, through no fault of its own, old TV looks worse).

# 1. Old TV is Old--New TV is New
Thorstein Veblen wrote in The Theory of the Leisure Class about the constant turnover of clothing styles that was already apparent in his day--that basically it was a matter of one essentially unattractive thing becoming tiresome, because it basically is unattractive, and being replaced by another similarly unattractive thing, the principal virtue of which is its affording relief from the sight of the older unattractive thing until people get sick of it in its turn. That principle, too, seems to apply here.

Bluntly put, people prefer new garbage to old garbage--not least because they have had time to recognize old garbage for what it is, something that has not been the case with the newer stuff, which they may in short order go from praising to damning. Displaying such preferences most unthinkingly, of course, are the "cool kids" who would never be caught dead enjoying grandpa's embarrassing old stuff.

#2. Old TV Looks Old--New TV Looks New
Garbage or not, when people today look at an old TV show they see it in black and white, or if it is in color, the shading and lighting and the rest are not what they are accustomed to, while the print may not be in the best shape. Getting past all that they see actors they have never heard of, wearing clothes that are out of style, speaking lines with a diction and rhythm that can feel stilted simply because they belong to a different time.

All of this can be off-putting compared with newer productions, and maybe more than off-putting. The truth is that if the object is to draw the viewer in and make them forget themselves in a character's travails (as Goethe and Schiller wrote of the "dramatic"), then the sense of familiarity and currency are powerful assets, and at any given level of quality this gives newer work an advantage over the old.

#3. Old TV is "Sanitized"--New TV is "Adult" and "Edgy"
It is undeniable that television production prior to the explosion of made-for-premium cable production identified with The Sopranos was more heavily censored when it came to matters like language and depictions of sexuality, and that this is more the case the further back one goes. And there is no question that the relaxed control does afford certain possibilities. Still, I remember even when the Sopranos were new getting the impression that TV critics were basically getting excited because they were hearing bad words, not because the leeway to say bad words was enabling writers to do interesting things--and it seems to me that this kind of simple-mindedness remains a factor in the exaltation of television in our era, while convincing those apt to reflexively imitate the "cool" people that the old stuff was lame, even when it may in ways have been truer to life and more genuinely "adult."

#4. Old TV Looks Cheap--New TV Looks Expensive
As compared with older television today's productions undeniably have bigger budgets, and more conspicuous polish from the standpoint of production values, cinematography and the rest. (Those who get restless if a shot lasts more than three seconds can be at ease.) None of this makes, for example, the writing or acting on a show one iota better. But it has its effect on our subjective experience all the same.

#5. Old TV was Episodic--New TV Has "Arcs"
Don't get me wrong. I like a good story arc. But I'm not sure that it's a sensible default mode for quite so much of the medium. While some stories really do require a lot of hours to tell, many don't--and amount simply to the writers stringing the audience along while they distract us in the meantime with soap operatic who-is-sleeping-with-whom and other filler. (The BBC miniseries told the story of House of Cards in four hours and told it well. By contrast the strain in stretching the same tale into a multi-season series was all too obvious within the first few episodes.) And even were we not awash in bad multi-episodic writing, I do think there is something to be said for being able to look at stories which wrap up in a single, non-binge sitting. (Indeed, does no one else remember how once upon a time the appearance of the words "To Be Continued" at the end of an episode were a cause for annoyance rather than acclaim? Back in 1992 Jerry Seinfeld took that sufficiently for granted as to make an episode's stand-up bit out of it.) Quite often, less is more. But a good many mistake "more" for "much more."

#6. Old TV was Straightforward in its Storytelling--New TV is Frequently Arthouse
Good or bad, old TV was essentially straightforward in its storytelling. Good or bad, the more prestigious of the new TV is not. The "show, don't tell"-minded use of subtext can work powerfully, but more often makes for slow, opaque narrative, with perhaps not much behind the opacity. ("Who is Don Draper?") Still, pretentiousness by itself wins points with the middlebrow (as demonstrated by the intensity with which a few cared about who Don Draper was, or at least said they did)--who in the reverse of the bit of confusion I just described under item #5, in this case confuse "less," and often "nothing at all," with "much more."

#7. Old TV Wasn't Often Grimdark--New TV Pretty Much Always Is
What has happened with the Star Trek universe seems to me to exemplify this. The old Trek, whose spirit was not altogether vanished even in its last and weakest incarnation, Enterprise, stood for the triumph of reason and hope, a candle in the postmodernist darkness. The second film of the rebooted Trek film series, however, was all too tellingly subtitled Into Darkness--and so it has been with the small-screen version, with this even going for the return to the timeline of the original in Star Trek: Picard. I, for one, find this off-putting. But that is just one more way in which I am (proudly) unfashionable, aesthetically and intellectually--not going along with the confusion of fascistic misanthropy with "facing the facts," of wallowing in the vilest aspects of reality with entertainment, and of edgelordiness with wit.

#8. Old TV Commonly Aspired to be Just Light Entertainment--New TV Doesn't (Unless it's Okay with Being Deeply Unfashionable)
The tendencies of television to greater edginess, bigger budgets, story arcs, arthouse technique and a grimdark tone are, of course, significant in themselves, each giving the credulous the impression that what they are looking at is of higher quality than what the TV viewer used to get. Yet together they also reflect something larger than deeper, specifically that TV today is less likely to aspire to amuse people sitting down in front of one of a few channels to relax at night, than to fight over addicts with a high tolerance and many more options (more on this below)--with one result a turn from light entertainment to more intense experience. Those accustomed to such TV, looking at the older kind, often think it is trying to be intense and failing--rather than realizing that it was simply not playing the same game.

In fact, considering the situation I suspect that those looking for light entertainment are being underserved by American TV today, with some confirmation of this afforded by those successes that the press is less likely to celebrate. The Hallmark channels, of course, go from one ratings triumph to another, precisely because they are offering here what others are not.

#9. Old TV Was Limited in Quantity--and New TV's Quantity May Have a Quality of its Own
As noted above, once upon a time we had only a handful of channels, each producing only a finite amount of original content, which we pretty much had to watch when it aired, or not at all. Now the vast number of channels and streaming services means a far larger mass of content. If one goes by "Sturgeon's Law" that "ninety percent of everything is crap," and implicitly ten percent is non-crap, then an overall greater volume means a non-crappy ten percent that much bigger, all other things being equal (or even if the average of quality is going down, but not so quickly as the overall volume of output goes up). This does mean that--again, all other things being equal--anyone might be expected to be able to find more items to their individual taste. But the claims of peak TV enthusiasts are rarely so modest as that. And it seems to me that while some may sincerely feel that they enjoy more choice, to others of us it is a matter of more slight variations on the same old thing that was never so appealing to our palate to begin with--the bar for what counts as "choice," per usual for our era, set very low indeed (with the eschewing of light entertainment just one dimension of that scarcity of real choice).

#10. Old TV Was Watched at Home on a TV--New TV is Watched on Anything, Anywhere
I suspect, I think quite plausibly, that watching TV off a small handheld screen in public, while on the go--on a crowded and noisy bus, for instance, while watching out the windows to make sure you don't miss your stop--means less attentive, less critical, watching compared with making the time to sit down in a comfortable chair and look at your show at the end of the day. Indeed, I suspect that this is especially conducive to obscuring the defects of character and story, especially where high production values and flashy direction help cover them up--again, making contemporary TV look better than it really is.

#11. Old TV Was Something We All Watched Together--and New TV Is Something We Watch Alone
The multiplicity of venues for such television has exploded--and many of them are more exclusive. Either you subscribe to Apple TV+, or you don't watch the thing at all--and as of last fall, there were 271 streaming services, largely focusing on original and exclusive content. Few can afford to subscribe to more than a small fraction of them, and even those who can often do not have the time to watch more than a fraction of what their particular subscriptions carry. (These days, I don't even have time to look at all the stuff my humble cable package offers, let alone bother with this kind of thing.) Indeed, within our real-life peer groups--as opposed to like-minded people we hang with on social media--we are likely to be the only people we know watching this or that thing in many a case, and this, too, can foster illusions--not least, that what may just be our particular flavor of garbage is actually gold. More than ever we are each in our own little media bubble these days, which means our illusions are more likely to stand not just for us, but for everyone else who doesn't know any better, or just doesn't care enough to look at the thing for themselves. (They're busy enjoying their own bad stuff that they also insist to everyone else is great.) And of course, amid all that, we are less than ever able to make any pronouncement about the quality of what is generally out there, as compared with what used to be there, because any one of us sees so little of it, and that the bit that we may be particularly predisposed to like.

#12. Old TV has Poptimism Against it--New TV has Poptimism in its Corner
Older TV is constantly being denigrated (not least, by the sort of invidious comparison that inspired this post), and even when this is not the case, has nothing to its advantage like the loud, vehement chorus of cheerleaders provided new TV by the critics who, as the Duke Phillips of the world would have them do, consider it their job to rate the latest outpouring of media-industrial complex product from "good to excellent."

Eventually some people start to believe it.

Taken altogether the dozen factors discussed above--sheer newness, flashy appearance, pretentious technique, "dark and gritty" content in place of light entertainment, and the multitude of factors making us less critical--seem to me a powerful influence on the TV audience. And they are what I hear whenever someone shouts down a favorable word I have to say for a particular old show with "Quit living in the past!"

Review: Specter of the Past and Vision of the Future, by Timothy Zahn

MILD SPOILERS AHEAD

After revisiting Timothy Zahn's sequel trilogy to the original Star Wars trilogy I found myself picking up the duology which capped off that story, consisting of Specter of the Past (1997) and Vision of the Future (1998).

The original Zahn trilogy was already a diffuse work, and this dulogy is rather more so. The fact is all the more problematic because the tale is made of slighter stuff--villains on their last legs, a con man's pretending to be the second coming of Admiral Thrawn (we know that much from the start), the internal politics among New Republic worlds of which we had previously known little or nothing. The intrigues among the Bothans and Caamasi and Mistryls (and for that matter, the question of what ever happened to J'orj Kardas) could have been interesting given the proper treatment, but they are all thinly sketched (understandably, as anything more would have overbalanced this epic still meant to center on our familiar protagonists), and serve only to leave the two books still more crowded and slower-paced than they already are.

This sets the story we get here up to be something of an anticlimax, and alas, the execution is not all that it might have been, especially from the standpoint of pacing. This is, partly, a matter of overwriting, compounded by the fact that the book, rather than switching back and forth quickly across its various threads, tends toward very lengthy scenes. (The climax of Luke and Mara's adventure, for instance, runs some fifty pages without so much as a glance at the other goings-on.)

Time and again I felt my patience being tried by the fact--and such occasions the more numerous because of how long the books happen to be. Specter of the Past is 344 pages long, while Vision of the Future is rather longer, at 528 very packed pages markedly longer than any of the preceding books (and it seems, longer than any other Star Wars book published as of the time of this writing). Still, I did stick with it to the end, and I can say that the book does manage to build on what came before. The events of the book's narrative do, ultimately, determine what the relationship between Luke and Mara is to be, while it is here that the Empire, or rather the little left of it, concludes its peace treaty with the New Republic. Still, it seems to me that there was, by this point, not so much remaining to be wrapped up, while taken by itself it is not really all that satisfying--certainly not in the nine hundred page form in which we got it. In fact I find myself suspecting that there was a rush here to cash in on the popularity of Zahn's trilogy, the three volumes of which each had a very healthy run on the New York Times bestseller list), and promise readers a sense of this being a similar "event," compromising what might have been a perfectly fine single, epilogue volume of more modest proportions.

Indeed, while I am usually even less likely to have a good word for a prequel than a sequel, I found myself much preferring Zahn's Outbound Flight--a better-proportioned, swifter-paced and more cleverly constructed book that derived rather more interest from the Thrawn character, and that it seems to me has a much juster claim to being more than "another" Star Wars book from the standpoint of the mythos.

The Continuation Bond Novel Writer's Dilemmas: Bond Movie on Paper, or More Fleming? Write Like the Original, or Only Pretend to Do So?

Those who have gone on flogging the James Bond series in print as in film have made much of being true to the original. "Not the last time, but this time," they promise--and it is all as implausible as it is insincere.

Where the matter of the impossibility of making a Bond novel today read like a Bond novel then is concerned, Fleming's attitudes regarding gender and race (in that order, and only these, it would seem) get most of the criticism here, but the differences go far beyond that. The films distilled the stuff of his middle books in particular (Dr. No, Goldfinger, Thunderball) into a very specific formula (freakish villains, gadgets, high-tech complexes blowing up at the end, etc.)--resulting in a tone and a briskness, a density with and emphasis on action and sex and luxury and glamour, not just so intricately structured that fans might complain about any deviation, but far at odds with Fleming's more varied and in many ways odder Bond adventures (compare the film version of You Only Live Twice with the book), and more generally, the darker, slower, more grounded, more character-oriented approach of Fleming that makes quite a shock for the film fan coming to them for the first time.

Still, even if one had never seen a Bond film, knew nothing of them (unlikely for one coming to the books now, but there you have it), they would still likely be struck by Fleming's ostentatiously Literary prose style, with its technique of the "aimless glance" that in showing translated to slowness by not just cinematic but print standards, placed additional demands on the reader's concentration, and from the standpoint of today's action-adventure reader as well as viewer, buried them in the minutiae of things not all that interesting while hastily passing over what they would consider the "good parts." It is all the greater, too, because of just how indifferent Fleming could be to being interesting or accessible to an audience much like himself, which did not know the ins and outs of golf and bridge, which did not share or want to share his anxieties about whether he was going slack in time of peace, or the direction of post-war Britain was going--the heavy freight of upper-class conservative middle aged-ness, the senior British civil servant-ness of the books (which, of course, were what made those social attitudes hard to miss).

Unsurprisingly, while Amis offered up more Fleming, mocking Fleming's critics and the films (and M, whom he'd never much liked) in the process, only Faulks in his idiosyncratic Devil May Care made any real attempt to capture the flavor of Fleming's prose (and even for him, none of that aimless glance stuff!), while the rest were more inclined to write in their own voices rather than pretend to put on a ventriloquist act, while usually spending  a good deal less time on minutely described upper-class games or in Bond's head. There was also an increasing tendency toward the stuff of the films with regard to pace and action, with Gardner and Benson tilting one way and then another, and more often toward the movies rather than the Fleming novels (exemplified by Never Dream of Dying), and even Faulks inclining this way in his 2008 book, though his attempt to write as Fleming did got in the way. (We had, for instance, a scene with Vulcan bombers chasing a nuclear-armed ekranoplan that could have been an atompunk techno-thriller reader's delight--but true to the approach he was taking in his book, Faulks treated it in Fleming's more typical, aimless glance manner, and did the same with what could have been Bond's epic journey home across Soviet territory.) Jeffrey Deaver chucked Fleming altogether when seeming to start from scratch with a thoroughly modern 007 born in 1979, and while his successors William Boyd and Anthony Horowitz headed back to the era of the originals (Boyd pushing forward only slightly into 1969, and Horowitz returning to the '50s), with Horowitz actually incorporating Fleming's own material (stories for the unproduced TV show, not novelistic material) in narratives closely tied to specific Fleming novels (a story set mere weeks after Goldfinger, a prequel to Casino Royale), they are only too obviously written for a twenty-first century readership.