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altarielThese are the notes I made in advance of the BSFA/SFF panel. The discussion went off in other and equally interesting directions, but I thought these notes might be of interest anyway.
• How might we be using the term ‘literary’? One might be synonymous with ‘quality’: what makes ‘good’ television according to some general standard of ‘good’ culture?
• This could quite quickly get bogged down into a discussion of high vs. low culture which even now forms a background pulse to television studies, as an unspoken justification for studying these particular cultural products. [On the day we discussed the desire of SF readers and writers for ‘respectability’.] As a result we could easily end up doing a kind of boundary work, in which we claim the cultural high ground for particular forms of television as high, as literary, as quality: for example, the one-off single-authored play (rooted in Play for Today, or The Wednesday Play) or the short high-profile serial (things like State of Play, Edge of Darkness). (Some people might point to Torchwood: Children of Earth here as a recent example; I personally wouldn’t.)
• I don’t much want to do that kind of boundary work, partly because I consume television pretty indiscriminately and don’t want to justify the habit.
• But also, because that kind of claim for ‘high cultural’ status misses a couple of important features about television for me: firstly, its mass and popular appeal; and also, because, when I think about the literary nature of television, in the sense of thinking about the nature of television writing, it seems to me that many of television’s chief treasures are tucked away in smaller and more ordinary moments, in smaller and more ordinary programmes. Television’s closest literary forms, for me, are the short story and the play, not the film or the novel. [On the day, IIRC, we discussed long-running, novel-like series such as Battlestar Galactica, Lost, The X-Files; discussing whether it was the sense of an unfolding storyline moving steadily towards resolution or the permanently unresolved narrative that gave them their appeal.]
• A successful example of television writing. The Doctor Who episode ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’: an emotional drama that – for me – contains credible individuals, whether they are the King of France, his mistress, her lover the time-travelling alien, and the time-travelling alien’s girlfriend. If I tried to say in a single word what I think makes this episode successful, that word would be intimacy. (I’m swiping that notion very inaccurately from Jason Jacobs’ book on 50s television drama, The Intimate Screen.) ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’ is about unrequited love, chances missed, paths not taken – a story that, obviously, you could tell in an realist fashion, but the fantastical elements of the story (space ship, time travel, magic door) aren’t accoutrements, I think, they’re essential to heightening the emotional stakes. Also, they’re kind of cool.
• And this idea of intimacy, for me, encapsulates a particular quality of television: the smallness of the screen – even in these widescreen days – which circumscribes the emotional space and intensifies the emotional stakes, and which works in combination with the character-focused nature of its writing. Even now that we can convincingly ‘do’ aliens, and planets that don’t look like Betchworth Quarry, for me they don’t matter if the characters are lacking truth. (An example of what I mean by ‘lack of truth’ might be the behaviour of the soldiers rounding up children in Torchwood: Children of Earth, or the treaty negotiations in the recent Doctor Who episode ‘Cold Blood’.)
• But I’ve now got myself to the point where I’m starting to wonder whether television is actually a good delivery mechanism for SF! I think television can do terrific action adventure/soap, which is basically what, say, Firefly and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine are; so are Chuck and Burn Notice, my current must-see shows. But I’ve now convinced myself that television doesn’t really do the numinous.
• I think if we’re looking to television to provide an outward-looking sense of wonder, then we’re probably always going to be disappointed, even as special effects improve. Because television’s space is intimate. It’s domestic. It’s about a small number of people gathered in a small space – whether that’s Central Perk, the Westminster Village, Albert Square, the Big Brother house, or the Liberator – and it’s about the plausible unfolding of the stories of these people.
• How might we be using the term ‘literary’? One might be synonymous with ‘quality’: what makes ‘good’ television according to some general standard of ‘good’ culture?
• This could quite quickly get bogged down into a discussion of high vs. low culture which even now forms a background pulse to television studies, as an unspoken justification for studying these particular cultural products. [On the day we discussed the desire of SF readers and writers for ‘respectability’.] As a result we could easily end up doing a kind of boundary work, in which we claim the cultural high ground for particular forms of television as high, as literary, as quality: for example, the one-off single-authored play (rooted in Play for Today, or The Wednesday Play) or the short high-profile serial (things like State of Play, Edge of Darkness). (Some people might point to Torchwood: Children of Earth here as a recent example; I personally wouldn’t.)
• I don’t much want to do that kind of boundary work, partly because I consume television pretty indiscriminately and don’t want to justify the habit.
• But also, because that kind of claim for ‘high cultural’ status misses a couple of important features about television for me: firstly, its mass and popular appeal; and also, because, when I think about the literary nature of television, in the sense of thinking about the nature of television writing, it seems to me that many of television’s chief treasures are tucked away in smaller and more ordinary moments, in smaller and more ordinary programmes. Television’s closest literary forms, for me, are the short story and the play, not the film or the novel. [On the day, IIRC, we discussed long-running, novel-like series such as Battlestar Galactica, Lost, The X-Files; discussing whether it was the sense of an unfolding storyline moving steadily towards resolution or the permanently unresolved narrative that gave them their appeal.]
• A successful example of television writing. The Doctor Who episode ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’: an emotional drama that – for me – contains credible individuals, whether they are the King of France, his mistress, her lover the time-travelling alien, and the time-travelling alien’s girlfriend. If I tried to say in a single word what I think makes this episode successful, that word would be intimacy. (I’m swiping that notion very inaccurately from Jason Jacobs’ book on 50s television drama, The Intimate Screen.) ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’ is about unrequited love, chances missed, paths not taken – a story that, obviously, you could tell in an realist fashion, but the fantastical elements of the story (space ship, time travel, magic door) aren’t accoutrements, I think, they’re essential to heightening the emotional stakes. Also, they’re kind of cool.
• And this idea of intimacy, for me, encapsulates a particular quality of television: the smallness of the screen – even in these widescreen days – which circumscribes the emotional space and intensifies the emotional stakes, and which works in combination with the character-focused nature of its writing. Even now that we can convincingly ‘do’ aliens, and planets that don’t look like Betchworth Quarry, for me they don’t matter if the characters are lacking truth. (An example of what I mean by ‘lack of truth’ might be the behaviour of the soldiers rounding up children in Torchwood: Children of Earth, or the treaty negotiations in the recent Doctor Who episode ‘Cold Blood’.)
• But I’ve now got myself to the point where I’m starting to wonder whether television is actually a good delivery mechanism for SF! I think television can do terrific action adventure/soap, which is basically what, say, Firefly and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine are; so are Chuck and Burn Notice, my current must-see shows. But I’ve now convinced myself that television doesn’t really do the numinous.
• I think if we’re looking to television to provide an outward-looking sense of wonder, then we’re probably always going to be disappointed, even as special effects improve. Because television’s space is intimate. It’s domestic. It’s about a small number of people gathered in a small space – whether that’s Central Perk, the Westminster Village, Albert Square, the Big Brother house, or the Liberator – and it’s about the plausible unfolding of the stories of these people.
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no subject
Date: 2010-06-24 03:03 pm (UTC)http://www.brunching.com/geekhierarchy.html
?
It reminded me of you :-)
no subject
Date: 2010-06-24 03:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-01 02:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-01 09:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-02 02:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-24 03:17 pm (UTC)ETA or in fact the X-files. Most successful when the numinous is elusive and close.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-24 04:03 pm (UTC)You've made me remember "Objects in Space", which I think does this too.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-24 11:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-24 03:47 pm (UTC)But you have to have Nigel Kneale write it. Quatermass and the Pit still stands as superb SF and superb TV. So does The Stone Tape.
As for original SF ideas, you only have to look to A for Andromeda.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-24 04:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-24 04:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-24 05:19 pm (UTC)Also it seems to me that, as you've noted, programmes that are nominally science fiction nowadays tend to be much closer to fantasy, horror or action/adventure than used to be the case. Though I still love Doctor Who, it's much closer to fantasy and further from science fiction than it was in the 1960s.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-24 05:35 pm (UTC)With the BBC, at least, it is the attitude that is wrong, and it is an attitude taken from the American programmes they buy in. That is that you don't have to be rational with SF, that SF fans will accept any rubbish so long as the effects are good, and that if is good, it isn't SF.
oops, this got longer than intended :)
Date: 2010-06-24 09:26 pm (UTC)I think the practical constrainst of TV production - in particular series TV - work against TV as high art as much as the historical biases of SF and fantasy (for the latter, the priorities are background - whether hardware or magic/the supernatural - and plot over characters. That's changing, but not as fast as we'd like to think)
Even a film (and goodness knows there's not that many numinous SF films) finds the constraints of budgets, stars, SFX, multiple fingers in the pie make turning a vision into greatness hard enough, and it doesn't have the additional problems of structuring the work to a rigidly set 'timeslot' length, with the climaxes all in the right places for ad breaks, etc. TV also has to be far more immediately receptive to reaction (a film, a book, a painting, once it's done it's done and can't really be undone. A TV series can start being directly meddled with 20 minutes after the execs, let alone the audience see the first episode and want the rest a bit different) and to direct competition (you can buy two books at once, or watch two films in a weekend, but TV ratings are built on what one show people are watching directly - right now)
And to be honest, while I agree that TV has to be about the people first and foremost, it does not (for the same constraining reasons and because of its need - like genre writing - for a mass audience) easily allow for the sheer depth and complexity of character that is the hallmark of great literature. The Girl in the Fireplace worked beautifully, but a whole series of Girl in the Fireplace would have had to be a tiny niche program and be budgeted and cast accordingly :(
I think it could be done, but it would be incredibly hard to pull off.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-24 10:55 pm (UTC)I enjoyed almost all of the Star Trek franchise (I went off Enterprise) and I think it, Babylon 5, Blake's 7, and Farscape did SF very well, having interesting characters, a sense of wonder, and a fair bit of science (and also a lot of complete non-science.
I'd count SG1 and SGA in there too. Though they both got very action-adventure, they had a sense of humour and likeable characters. SGU OTOH so far lacks both. I'm hanging in there to see what will happen, but the only character I have even the slightest emotional investment in is Eli. It's dark (emotionally and literally--why can't they fix the damned lights?), bleak, and hey, even B7 had wit and humour right up till the end. This has gone the BSG way of gritty (an adjective that automatically puts me off) political, and irritating hand-held cameras.
I find the last erects a barrier that prevents intimacy. In general we are the fly on the wall / disembodied observer in the action, but by deliberately showing shaky and seemingly amateur, badly focussed camera work, they make it obvious we're not part of the world, that it's artificial. They deliberately weigh down the disbelief we want to suspend. Why?
SGU is the only SF on at the moment, so I'm loath to give it up. Doctor Who I regard as fantasy (and Torchwood as horror and therefore to be avoided). I'm just glad I do have Burn Notice (despite women being excluded from the target audience, which they failed at), Chuck, and Big Bang. I adore Big Bang. It's the only show that has people like me in it, and I don't know how many times I've shouted, "Yes! That!" at the screen. [looks at ceiling]
no subject
Date: 2010-06-28 05:48 pm (UTC)Re the comment on the unfolding storyline or unresolved narrative and X-Files, personally my answer is yes. I remember watching X-Files as it was broadcast, and I swapped between liking the arc and being less intersted in monster of the week to being bored by the arc and preferring monster of the week. But in our recent re-watch of the series, I enjoyed the arc all the way through. I don't know how much of that was due to knowing what's to come and how much to come there was, knowing how much of an answer there would be and being able to consume the episodes at the pace we chose, not relying on an episode a week and then that the series would be renewed.
As for whether television can deliver SF or not, doesn't that depend on how SF is defined? If it is to exclude the domestic and intimate, then perhaps it can't but I find that hard to reconcile vis a vis me and what I like to watch and read and probably with what I like to believe about myself.