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Genres

Fox’s 24 to Go Even Darker

December 5, 2006

I’ve mentioned on several occasions the turn toward "darker" programming on network TV this year, and one of the pioneers and models for that approach, the Fox series 24, will become even darker this season. An article in USA Today notes that protagonist Jack Bauer will reach a new low to begin the season: Central character Jack Bauer isn’t dead, but he’s feeling that way going into Season Six (premieres Jan. 14, 8 p.m. ET/PT), said Kiefer Sutherland, who won an Emmy in August for his portrayal of the stoic counterterrorism hero. Bauer, whose kidnapping by Chinese agents closed last season, returns in the premiere, set 20 months later, as a haggard, beaten man. "Jack’s at his darkest place. He’s dead inside. Even in Season Two, when he was terribly mournful at the loss of his wife, he was feeling pain but he was alive. (Now), there’s an indifference which is almost primal. It’s absolutely a new place to start with the character," Sutherland said on the red carpet. As I’ve noted earlier on this site, "darker" new series primetime programming has had a bad run this year, as viewers have not responded favorably in general to the new shows

Can We Judge Literature?

November 29, 2006

By S. T. Karnick

I stirred up some concerns among PKD fans with my Philip K. Dick article, which was cross-posted at The Reform Club site. Francis Poretto commented thoughtfully there, suggesting that there is no way to discern true greatness in a writer. After stating, "For my money, a great writer is one who inspires me to great emotion," Francis asks, "How shall I judge Dick, or any writer, great, even if permitted to use my criterion?" It’s a fair question, and one that I implicitly answered in my original comment on PKD. Francis correctly observes that a numerical analysis of how a particular author measures up to an individual’s chosen standards is impossible. Hence, he suggests, it’s silly to engage in such discussions. "I think you can see where this is going," he concludes. I can indeed see where that is going, and I am rather surprised to see someone who is most decidedly not a philosophical relativist taking the position Francis is staking out in regard to literature. Certainly it’s true that we cannot hope to judge the quality of literary works and the overall achievements of their authors by some sort of quantitative analysis, but that is absolutely not the

Philip K. Dick Canonized

November 28, 2006

By S. T. Karnick

It’s official: Philip K. Dick is a great writer, according to the Library of America. As the Galley Cat at Media Bistro reports: Buried at the tail end of Mark Sarvas’s interview with Jonathan Lethem comes news of one project on the novelist’s plate: "I’m helping preside over the utter and irreversible canonization of one of my (formerly outsider) heroes, Philip K. Dick: I’m writing endnotes for The Library of America, which is doing a volume of four of his novels from the sixties, which I also helped select." I suppose that if Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and H. P. Lovecraft are great writers, then Dick is too. But in my view, this event is most important as further evidence of how poor the mainstream American novel was during the previous century. Solid but unspectactular and fairly uninsightful genre authors (though this last limitation does not apply to Dick) are touted as among the best the nation had to offer, and this is true because the mainstream novelists were so often confused, self-important, and wrongheaded. A good many of Philip K. Dick’s books and stories are well worth reading, but he really worked largely on frankly pulp material. His great

Deja Vu and Time Travel Fiction

November 22, 2006

By S. T. Karnick

Two time travel movies are premiering today, and a none of those astounding mysteries of the universe that Hollywood creates every couple of months. Tony Scott’s Deja Vu (directed with his usual great skill and creativity) is the bigger-budgeted and promoted film, and will probably do well at the box office. Darren Arnofsky’s The Fountain promises to be a bit quirkier and probably won’t make as much money but might obtain more critical accolades. Time travel fictions are certainly interesting and have been around for a long time. Peter Suderman suggests, in National Review Online, that their appeal is based on a natural human obsession with mortality, which time travel naturally brings to the fore. I can’t say I agree that human mortality is a special interest in time travel fictions, given that pretty much any narrative has a good deal to do with human mortality. I think that the real appeal of time travel is in the possibility of changing things—time travel is the ultimate power trip. We’ve all done things we wish we hadn’t, and failed to do things we wish we had. (Cf. the Lutheran rite of confession and absolution.) And we’ve all experienced things that

New Primetime TV Serials Floundering—Here’s Why

November 4, 2006

By S. T. Karnick

New Primetime TV Serials Floundering—Here’s Why

Except for a couple of big successes—NBC’s Heroes and ABC’s Ugly Betty—this year’s new primetime network TV serialized dramas are tanking. As the Washington Post’s Lisa de Moraes reports: The outlook for the many of this fall’s new serialized dramas is not good. ABC’s "Six Degrees" isn’t working; ditto its "The Nine." And Fox’s "Vanished" appears to be on its way soon to join "Smith," "Runaway" and "Kidnapped" in the Great Freshman Serialized Drama Hereafter That’s a pretty strong trend. De Moraes quotes a source suggesting that the new shows have failed because of a lack originality and clarity of concept, but de Moraes seems genuinely puzzled about the situation. The poor performance of the programs has surprised critics, who generally liked them: So, this was going to be the Year of the Serialized Drama. What gives with you people? Why aren’t you watching? You’ve caused considerable hand-wringing among the Reporters Who Cover Television, because they hate to see a good trend story go south and, besides, they generally liked the new crop of serialized shows on the fall lineup. There was some mention among the reporters of viewers not having enough time to commit to another series requiring such

The Future of Christian Cinema

November 2, 2006

By S. T. Karnick

In commenting on our discussion of Christian cinema (see posts immediately below), some visitors brought up a couple of interesting points. One is that any kind of Christian movie ought to be acceptable to both critics and audiences, and the other is that the economic realities of making Christian films today require a more encouraging stance than Barbara Nicolosi and I seem to have taken regarding Facing the Giants. Clearly both these observations are well-intentioned, but I think that adopting these recommendations would greatly harm any nascent Christian cinema, rather than helping it. Let’s examine them individually. First, the premise that any kind of Christian cinema ought to be good enough for Christians, with the implied corollary that any Christian film is at least better then what Hollywood puts out, ignores an imporatant reality: what is on the surface of a film does not always reflect what it all actually means. Many Hollywood films and TV programs, despite their often shabby surfaces, carry meanings that Christians should find quite appealing. If you have any doubts about this, click on the "Movies" and "Television" categories on this page and take a look at some analyses of Hollywood products showing how easily

A Bad Sign for Christian Cinema

November 1, 2006

By S. T. Karnick

Screenwriter and script analyst Barbara Nicolosi is extremely disappointed by the Christian-produced film Facing the Giants. I have not yet gotten around to seeing the film, but I suspect that Ms. Nicolosi is quite right. She points out that Facing the Giants is the cinematic equivalent of Contemporary Christian Music, bland nonsense meant to make Christians feel good and thereby bring in a steady stream of money from a highly defined market segment, what is known in the entertainment business as a cash cow. In addition, Nicolosi argues, Facing the Giants is animated by a devotion to what is known as the Prosperity Gospel, a decidedly perverse notion prevalent among some Evangelicals, which holds that God wants believers to be happy and prosperous in this world (which is surely true to some extent), and that he will give believers such earthly success to the degree that they believe in Him and accept his promises. That is an absurd, unbiblical doctrine that is derived from Puritanism but puts an optimistic, positive spin on it. It is an idea, as Nicolosi notes, that utterly denies numerous direct statements in Scripture, especially the words of Jesus Christ himself. In sum, the Prosperity Gospel

Vote for Banacek!

October 11, 2006

By S. T. Karnick

One of the best television programs ever was actually three or four programs in one. The NBC Mystery Movie ran from 1971 to 1977, on Wednesday nights its first season and then on Sunday nights for the rest of its run. Three series rotated week by week. Additional series were added on Tuesdays and Wednesdays between 1972 and 1974. Presenting a new TV mystery movie each week in a 90-minute slot (which was later expanded to two hours), the program was an immediate success, reaching number 14 in the ratings during its first season and fifth in its second. One of the programs, Columbo, received eight Emmy nominations in its first year alone, and won four of them that year. The, first, most popular, and best remembered programs from this series were Columbo, McCloud, and McMillan and Wife. These programs and some others from the series have been shown in syndication and on cable networks ever since. Selected seasons of all three of these programs are now available on DVD—you can find them by clicking on their names here—but other shows from the series also did well in the ratings and are still remembered fondly. The popular program Quincy, M.E,

“Transcending the Genre”

September 20, 2006

By S. T. Karnick

The one thing most certain to destroy a work of genre fiction is for the author to try to "transcend the genre." You’ve heard of this many times, I’m sure, from the opposing point of view, as critics praise some author for transcending the genre in which they’re working and thereby producing "a real novel." That is hogwash. The result of such endeavors is typically a poor example of both genre fiction and mainstream fiction. I won’t name names here, but much of what has received the most critical praise in the mystery field qualifies strongly for this dubious distinction. Read a few of the most recent Edgar Award winners if you want to be fully versed in the infamous results of authors thinking themselves superior to their audiences. On this point Helen Szamuely has written a good book review for the website of the Social Affairs Unit in Great Britain. Noting the drab results produced by many writers trying to write "real novels" in the mystery genre, Szamuely writes: I blame the critics, starting with Julian Symons and his seminal Bloody Murder. As the author of a number of extremely interesting detective novels himself Symons ought to have

“Golden Age” Detection Fiction

September 2, 2006

By S. T. Karnick

Looking for something to read over the three-day weekend? I have some writers for you to investigate. Jon Jermey, a mystery aficionado and moderator of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction Mailing list on Yahoo, has composed a set of humorous rules for the writing of Golden Age detection fiction, the sort of tale that was made immensely popular by authors such as Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, Dorothy Sayers, John Dickson Carr (aka Carter Dickson), Erle Stanley Gardner, H. C. Bailey, Rex Stout, and so many others during the 1920s and ’30s. The Golden Age, traditional, puzzle mystery style thrived in Britain and America between the two world wars, but was driven out by publishers and critics after World War II when it was arbitrarily decided that a pretense of realism should be paramount in the genre. I say a pretense because the styles that superseded the puzzle form, the hardboiled and police procedural approaches, were just as much romances (in the literary sense) as the puzzle form was. In addition, the importation of ambitious literary devices (as in the non-series novels of Ruth Rendell) to create Serious Crime Fiction did nothing to change the fact that the books were

People on a Plane—with Snakes

August 22, 2006

By S. T. Karnick

The box office performance of a "high concept" film such as Snakes on a Plane is typically based not on the cleverness of the concept but on whether there is actually a good movie in it. Die Hard and Speed, for example, had characters we could care about, and the films put them in situations where they had interesting choices to make. Those that don’t have these things usually fall off at the box office even if they get a good opening weekend. Interestingly, the least entertaining and involving parts of Snakes on a Plane are the two big action scenes in which the serpents attack the passengers on the plane. The snakes operate in a riidiculously implausible manner, even if we accept the filmmakers’ premise that pheromones released on the plane would make the creatures more aggressive. These snakes are much more than "more aggressive"; they’re positively malevolent and volitional. That’s not at all believable—and it’s not the slightest bit necessary, for the film is interesting enough without sci-fi snakes. The first 40 minutes of the picture are devoted to scenes setting the stage for the big action sequences. The central conceit is that a young man who

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Genres

Fox’s 24 to Go Even Darker

Can We Judge Literature?

Philip K. Dick Canonized

Deja Vu and Time Travel Fiction

New Primetime TV Serials Floundering—Here’s Why

The Future of Christian Cinema

A Bad Sign for Christian Cinema

Vote for Banacek!

“Transcending the Genre”

“Golden Age” Detection Fiction

People on a Plane—with Snakes

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