Tonight's season 4 premiere of THE WALKING DEAD was entitled "30 Days
Without An Accident," and by coincidence, this also marks 30 TWD
articles I've blogged here--at least one on every episode since the
middle of season 2--and even that's just a fraction of my
total work on TWD. A lot more of it has been scattered across message
boards here and there, particularly on the Internet Movie Database.
There may even be a new TWD project on the horizon for me (still
too early to say on that one). The articles have proven incredibly
popular, which is why the possible new project. They're also incredibly
trying at times. Way back toward the end of season 2, I'd started to
feel as if I'd said all I had to say about Glen Mazzara's awful version
of the series. Worse, I came to be plagued by the thought that I may
have even said everything in my original article, and the ones that
followed had merely been appendices that unnecessarily expanded on the
issues I'd raised in it. I had, I felt, fallen into a pattern of
repeating myself. This repetition mirrored the events on TWD itself, and
as season 3 proceeded and I was looking for new approaches to covering
it, I began to play with even that, sometimes repetitiously offering up
the same points I'd made in the past in a deliberate mockery of TWD's
writing. If anyone ever caught on to it, they never said. Collectively, I've done more work on TWD than any of the series'
writers did in that same period, and put a lot more thought into it as well. I seem to have given voice to some widespread discontent with
TWD--demand for the mostly-critical things I have to say about it has
always been strong, and hopefully that's not just a reflection of the kind of knee-jerk
backlash one sees against anything that becomes popular. Somewhere
along the line I realized I was like the central character in Stephen
King's novel "Misery." Not trapped by a monstrous, dangerously obsessive
fan, but trapped with a subject I'd come to hate.
I started writing about TWD during a very difficult time in my
life, the aftermath of a full-blown personal cataclysm of which I'm
still feeling the effects (and probably always will). It was the first
thing about which I was able to substantially write after a period when I
didn't even know if I had anything in me anymore. At times, I was a bit
ashamed that I was writing so much about it while all manner of good
and great movies and television series came and went with barely a
mention here. I stayed with it long after I would have left it because I
have a friend who loves it but has no other means of seeing it. He's a
good friend; he's helped me out a lot over the years. Subjecting myself
to TWD is a very small price to pay for the enjoyment he derives from
it. Then my parents started watching it, and, again, I'm their only
means of seeing it. If I have to see it and feel so terribly displeased
with it, went my thinking, I'm damn well going to write about it. Part
of writing about it also became an exercise in discipline--I made myself
do it no matter how I felt, because I had a need to know I still could.
Part of me has always hoped the noxious blend of incompetence and
indifference that had made TWD such an utterly miserable experience
would finally play itself out and something better would emerge. Maybe
something that even lived up to the promise shown by the series in its
earliest days.
And maybe this has just happened.
The suits at AMC have earned a very bad reputation for their
treatment of those behind their original series, but it was impossible
to view with anything but glee their firing of Glen Mazzara from his
post as TWD's showrunner. Stated bluntly, Mazzara had been a pestilence
on the series, utterly contemptuous of all of its central premises, a
devout acolyte of the worst breed of soap melodrama, and a painfully
incompetent and lazy storyteller. TWD couldn't have gotten any worse
than under his reign, and his departure meant there was finally a chance
for it to get better. With "30 Days Wthout An Accident," we got the
first look at Gimple's TWD. It's still too soon to make any overly
sweeping pronouncements, but if tonight's ep is any indication, this
year may see the rebirth of TWD.
The episode was, on its own, no classic, to be sure, and not
without problems--Carl's time on screen is mostly unfortunate--but it
was such a departure from what we've been getting from TWD for the last
two seasons that it was virtually revolutionary. The first rule of
screenwriting is "show, don't tell." It's also the first rule Mazzara's
TWD flushed. Thankfully, Gimple, who also wrote tonight's ep, embraces
it. One of the smaller but remarkable moments tonight involved a new
character on a supply run who walks by a shelf filled with liquor and
suddenly becomes quite conflicted about being there with it. There's no
dialogue. It's all conveyed physically. Another good little moment was
the pre-credit opening with Rick listening to some down-home gospel[1]
while tending a field. Having unearthed an inexplicably buried pistol,
he pauses for a second, takes out one of his earphones, and the piteous
cries of the undead, kept at bay by the nearby fence, rise to drown out
the music. Rick is somewhat taken aback by their volume, offers a glance
their way and quickly puts the earphone back in place and goes about
his business. These aren't, in themselves, terribly subtle moments, but it points in the right direction and is the sort of
thing that, except in Gimple's prior scripts, had become virtually non-existent on Mazzara's overwrought,
over-the-top, subtlety-of-a-hammer-to-the-face soap TWD. It's something I hope to see continue.
Gimple's last two scripts--two of only three from season 3 that
weren't
outright awful--had shown a penchant toward strong characterization.
This carried over tonight. Many of the central characters had good
scenes. Hershel's remarks about the need to outfit Rick with a proper
farmer's kit was a funny little moment. Daryl had an amusing one with
one of the new characters who was trying to guess what Daryl did before
the zombie apocalypse (in some amusing metatextual commentary, Daryl is
treated as a celebrity by the prison survivors--again, the sort of thing
you'd never see on Mazzara's TWD). Gimple set up individual storylines
for nearly all of the central characters, storylines he can milk as the
season continues.
Another strong and admirable departure from Mazzara's TWD--one
that address one of my longstanding gripes--is that survival concerns
are now front-and-center, the thing around which our characters lives
revolve. TWD is, as the comic legend says, "a tale of survival horror,"
but
Mazzara hated this and set survival concerns at odds with nearly
everything else that happened, while presenting such concerns, whenever
expressed, in contexts intended to refute them or make them look
entirely inappropriate. Not Gimple. Tonight, everything is basic
survival.[2] The characters' days are dictated by doing what it takes to
get by, and their interactions occur in that context. This is conveyed
by even inconsequential shots of the prison grounds, where it's clear
the characters have significantly fortified the facility.
Gone--hopefully straight to hell--are the braindead days when the
characters just moved into one grubby cellblock and let zombies roam
through the rest of their home while ignoring its potential. There's a
great moment when Carol is doing "story time" for the young children
they've taken in and she sets aside her book, rolls out a selection of
cutlery, and begins explaining to the class how to use bladed weapons.
There's a hint that what she's doing may be regarded as inappropriate,
but let's hope that doesn't blow up into much of anything.
Rick's central preoccupation tonight was a survivor he finds in
the forest while checking traps he's set for animals. She and her
husband have apparently been living on their own throughout the zombie
uprising. They have, she tells Rick, done terrible things to survive. Is
it possible to come back from such things? She doesn't think so,[3] and
what episodes like her tale and its ultimate disposition add to the
story of TWD is immeasurable. Show, don't tell. This is the world of
TWD. This is what it does to people.[4] It's the sort of incident that, in
Mazzara's TWD, would have probably been rejected as pointless and irrelevant. Another of the sorts of thing I hope continue.
I'm still skeptical about how much of this will continue. Season 3 had a relatively good opener, too, then collapsed. Tonight's ep was much better than that one, though. Gimple
wrote this episode, but as showrunner, he has apparently retained most
of Mazzara's nepotistically-assembled writing staff, the hacks who have
made the last two seasons such a chore. Will this radical new direction--which is really just a return to the original direction--continue, or will it fizzle? I'm definitely curious, and, for the first time in a very long time, I'm actually looking forward to TWD.
--j.
---
[1] An inspired musical choice, "Precious Memories." As Rick looks over the rotting dead outside his fence, how they linger, indeed.
[2] Tonight's ep featured an imaginative and well-played action sequence in a department store--the roof, on which there are a slew of zombies, begins to collapses and suddenly it's raining zombies on our heroes below. And further dashing the expectations engendered by Mazzara's TWD in a positive way, the new black guy, when trapped in the zombie downpour by a falling shelf, doesn't die!
[3] And that question could be seen as a bit of metatextual commentary, too--can TWD come back from the last two godawful seasons? Time will tell.
[4] And I'd like to think--though it's far-fetched--that this incident was inserted as a sort of "fuck you" to Mazzara's entire approach to TWD, specifically for his screwing up Jim's end in season 1. The character Jim lost his family to zombies. In the comic, he's bitten during a zombie attack on the survivors' camp and, dying, asks to be left on the outskirts of Atlanta so that, when he comes back, maybe he can find his family and be together with them again. In season 1 of TWD, Jim was also bitten by a zombie during an attack, but Mazzara, the writer of record on the relevant episode, removed all the creepy business about him wanting to try to find his family and just had a scene that tried to be sad, with the long-faced group leaving Jim sitting under the shade of a tree. I reacted very badly to this. It seemed to destroy a powerful moment in favor of generic melodrama, and, unfortunately, was indicative of what was to follow once Mazzara got his hands on TWD. With the incident tonight, we saw something like that actually played out. It felt like a righting of the ship.
Monday, October 14, 2013
Sunday, October 13, 2013
An Evaluation of THE WALKING DEAD's Scott Gimple
October strikes, and another season of THE WALKING DEAD is upon us. I'm hoping this doesn't mean another season in which I mostly just end up bashing TWD. The Powers That Be at AMC fired TWD showrunner Glen Mazzara at the end of the last season, and as Mazzara oversaw the systematic destruction of a once-very-promising series and its conversion into the disgraceful mess I've described here in nearly 30 articles to date, it's impossible to see this as anything other than a very wise move. But will his replacement, Scott Gimple, be better? The long trailer for the upcoming season gives some little glimmer of hope. Among other things, it looks as if Gimple is going to double back and cover some of the very good material that occurred in the comic prior to the prison group's encounter with Woodbury and the Governor, material Mazzara simply pissed away. In advance of the new season, I thought I'd offer an evaluation of Gimple's TWD work to date.
In television, a series like TWD is worked out in a room full of writers. When details of episodes are nailed down to varying degrees, they're assigned to individual writers, who craft the actual scripts. This is an important caveat in what I'm about to describe; no writer has complete creative control over his scripts. With that in mind, Scott Gmple has, to date, been the writer-of-record on six eps of TWD:
Save the Last One
Pretty Much Dead Already
18 Miles Out
Hounded
Clear
The Sorrowful Life
All but the last two of these were some degree of godawful. "Clear" is the only one that can be regarded as basically good. If "This Sorrowful Life" is overly burdened with far too much of the usual TWD rubbish, it still manages to rise about most of what we get from the series. Those two eps (if not necessarily the others) suggest Gimple is strong on characterization, which is one of TWD's weakest points.[1]
Gimple apparently likes Michonne. This may be an overly broad conclusion--the other writers had set the bar for this as low as it gets--but the proposition is given significant force by the fact that he's the only TWD writer to date who has written Michonne as a human being, instead of just an Angry Black Woman caricature. He gave her some good moments in "Clear," and more dialogue in that one ep than she'd had in the rest of the season combined. He did the same in "This Sorrowful Life," and gave her some good moments there, too. Michonne fans may have a friend in Gimple.
Unfortunately, Gimple apparently despises Rick. When, in season 2, the writers rebooted Rick, flushing his season 1 characterization entirely and replacing it with a suddenly weak-willed, overly emotional, indecisive idiot version, Gimple was on hand to author the low-point of that already-pathetic creation: Rick wrangling zombies right through our heroes' camp in "Pretty Much Dead Already." The writers rebooted Rick again for S3 and came up with another version that was also awful but in very different ways, and when, toward the end of S3, they suddenly decided to flush this Rick and bring back the awful season 2 version, Gimple again authored his lowest point, his plot to kidnap Michonne and hand her over to GINO. This was far worse than the previous low, and Gimple has Rick give a speech toward the end, the one declaring the end of the "Ricktatorship," that proves his version of Rick still had no idea what he'd done wrong. In between, Gimple authored "18 Miles Out," in which it was revealed that Rick had kept Randall on the farm for a week without having ever even questioned him about his comrades, a group of armed hostiles of unknown size camped out in their immediate area. In "Clear," Gimple had Rick go on a run for guns, and, with the prison facing an attack that could come at any time, has him drive halfway across the state on a long, dangerous mission to retrieve some weapons Rick himself had already carted off back in the pilot, driving, to get there, past dozens of towns that would have been ripe for weapons looting. Gimple's Rick is a first-class dumbass. His reign could mean hard times for Rick fans.
While Merle's attack on GINO and his men in "This Sorrowful Life" was well-conceived, Gimple has generally handled action and suspense rather poorly in his scripts. Back in season 2, the lead-in to his "Save the Last One" had set up what could have been a remarkably tense and exciting situation, with Otis and Shane fleeing through a black maze pursued by zombies in a race-against-the-clock, while, back at the farm, Hershel struggled valiantly to keep the boy alive. Could Shane and Otis avoid becoming dinner for the lurking deads and get the medical equipment back to Hershel before it was too late for Carl? Could Hershel keep Carl alive long enough for them to return? Instead of following through on this, Gimple opened the episode by spoiling the ending (showing Shane alive after whatever has happened), then aggressively murdered any tension the story could have--and should have--built by constantly cutting away to entirely redundant and/or embarrassingly inane filler moments back on the farm. We get a tale of Shane stealing a car in high school, Maggie and Glenn doing the God Talk thing (which had already been absolutely exhausted in the immediately previous episodes), and so on.[2] Gimple did the same thing in "18 Miles Out," repeatedly moving away from the testosterone-fueled Rick/Shane duel to an inane and pathetic Beth suicide plot on the farm. The action in that ep was awful as well, but mostly as a consequence of poor staging and direction, rather than writing. Gimple did have Shane hole up on a bus besieged by the dead and entirely fail to realize he could escape by simply waltzing out the back door, and he had Randall limping around and even kicking and breaking a zombie's arm on a leg that, only a week earlier, had suffered an injury that would have put it entirely out of commission for the better part of a year.
All of Gimple's eps have been stuffed with the vacuous filler that has become TWD's virtual trademark.
Gimple's two most recent eps are, as already noted, a cut well above anything else he'd written. In them, his greatest strength is easily his characterizations and dialogue. Because all of his previous episodes had been just as bad, on this score, as all the other TWD writers, I'd like to be optimistic and hope his later work shows he's just coming into his own. Time will tell on that, I suppose. His first episode as full-fledged showrunner airs tonight.
--j.
---
[1] Glen Mazzara has treated the characters like Play Dough figures in a soap melodrama, rather than anything resembling human beings. This isn't just a problem because it's terminally unengaging--anti-engaging, even--it's also a fatal flaw in Mazzara's TWD, and an indication of how poorly he understood (or cared about) the material. The point of TWD in comic form was, as Robert Kirkman has said, to have a zombie movie that never ends. One of its central concerns is to be a character study about how the zombiefied world affects people over time. That's why soap melodrama is so fundamentally incompatible with it: it's inhuman. People aren't like that and don't behave in that way. More importantly, you can't have a series that studies how people change over a long period when, conceptually speaking, the characters are just Play Dough and are arbitrarily changed--often radically changed--from episode to episode to suit the needs of the week's plot.
[2] That episode, in particular, is like a textbook on how not to write, shoot, and edit something like TWD--every choice the creators made was the wrong one.
In television, a series like TWD is worked out in a room full of writers. When details of episodes are nailed down to varying degrees, they're assigned to individual writers, who craft the actual scripts. This is an important caveat in what I'm about to describe; no writer has complete creative control over his scripts. With that in mind, Scott Gmple has, to date, been the writer-of-record on six eps of TWD:
Save the Last One
Pretty Much Dead Already
18 Miles Out
Hounded
Clear
The Sorrowful Life
All but the last two of these were some degree of godawful. "Clear" is the only one that can be regarded as basically good. If "This Sorrowful Life" is overly burdened with far too much of the usual TWD rubbish, it still manages to rise about most of what we get from the series. Those two eps (if not necessarily the others) suggest Gimple is strong on characterization, which is one of TWD's weakest points.[1]
Gimple apparently likes Michonne. This may be an overly broad conclusion--the other writers had set the bar for this as low as it gets--but the proposition is given significant force by the fact that he's the only TWD writer to date who has written Michonne as a human being, instead of just an Angry Black Woman caricature. He gave her some good moments in "Clear," and more dialogue in that one ep than she'd had in the rest of the season combined. He did the same in "This Sorrowful Life," and gave her some good moments there, too. Michonne fans may have a friend in Gimple.
Unfortunately, Gimple apparently despises Rick. When, in season 2, the writers rebooted Rick, flushing his season 1 characterization entirely and replacing it with a suddenly weak-willed, overly emotional, indecisive idiot version, Gimple was on hand to author the low-point of that already-pathetic creation: Rick wrangling zombies right through our heroes' camp in "Pretty Much Dead Already." The writers rebooted Rick again for S3 and came up with another version that was also awful but in very different ways, and when, toward the end of S3, they suddenly decided to flush this Rick and bring back the awful season 2 version, Gimple again authored his lowest point, his plot to kidnap Michonne and hand her over to GINO. This was far worse than the previous low, and Gimple has Rick give a speech toward the end, the one declaring the end of the "Ricktatorship," that proves his version of Rick still had no idea what he'd done wrong. In between, Gimple authored "18 Miles Out," in which it was revealed that Rick had kept Randall on the farm for a week without having ever even questioned him about his comrades, a group of armed hostiles of unknown size camped out in their immediate area. In "Clear," Gimple had Rick go on a run for guns, and, with the prison facing an attack that could come at any time, has him drive halfway across the state on a long, dangerous mission to retrieve some weapons Rick himself had already carted off back in the pilot, driving, to get there, past dozens of towns that would have been ripe for weapons looting. Gimple's Rick is a first-class dumbass. His reign could mean hard times for Rick fans.
While Merle's attack on GINO and his men in "This Sorrowful Life" was well-conceived, Gimple has generally handled action and suspense rather poorly in his scripts. Back in season 2, the lead-in to his "Save the Last One" had set up what could have been a remarkably tense and exciting situation, with Otis and Shane fleeing through a black maze pursued by zombies in a race-against-the-clock, while, back at the farm, Hershel struggled valiantly to keep the boy alive. Could Shane and Otis avoid becoming dinner for the lurking deads and get the medical equipment back to Hershel before it was too late for Carl? Could Hershel keep Carl alive long enough for them to return? Instead of following through on this, Gimple opened the episode by spoiling the ending (showing Shane alive after whatever has happened), then aggressively murdered any tension the story could have--and should have--built by constantly cutting away to entirely redundant and/or embarrassingly inane filler moments back on the farm. We get a tale of Shane stealing a car in high school, Maggie and Glenn doing the God Talk thing (which had already been absolutely exhausted in the immediately previous episodes), and so on.[2] Gimple did the same thing in "18 Miles Out," repeatedly moving away from the testosterone-fueled Rick/Shane duel to an inane and pathetic Beth suicide plot on the farm. The action in that ep was awful as well, but mostly as a consequence of poor staging and direction, rather than writing. Gimple did have Shane hole up on a bus besieged by the dead and entirely fail to realize he could escape by simply waltzing out the back door, and he had Randall limping around and even kicking and breaking a zombie's arm on a leg that, only a week earlier, had suffered an injury that would have put it entirely out of commission for the better part of a year.
All of Gimple's eps have been stuffed with the vacuous filler that has become TWD's virtual trademark.
Gimple's two most recent eps are, as already noted, a cut well above anything else he'd written. In them, his greatest strength is easily his characterizations and dialogue. Because all of his previous episodes had been just as bad, on this score, as all the other TWD writers, I'd like to be optimistic and hope his later work shows he's just coming into his own. Time will tell on that, I suppose. His first episode as full-fledged showrunner airs tonight.
--j.
---
[1] Glen Mazzara has treated the characters like Play Dough figures in a soap melodrama, rather than anything resembling human beings. This isn't just a problem because it's terminally unengaging--anti-engaging, even--it's also a fatal flaw in Mazzara's TWD, and an indication of how poorly he understood (or cared about) the material. The point of TWD in comic form was, as Robert Kirkman has said, to have a zombie movie that never ends. One of its central concerns is to be a character study about how the zombiefied world affects people over time. That's why soap melodrama is so fundamentally incompatible with it: it's inhuman. People aren't like that and don't behave in that way. More importantly, you can't have a series that studies how people change over a long period when, conceptually speaking, the characters are just Play Dough and are arbitrarily changed--often radically changed--from episode to episode to suit the needs of the week's plot.
[2] That episode, in particular, is like a textbook on how not to write, shoot, and edit something like TWD--every choice the creators made was the wrong one.
Sunday, September 15, 2013
British History Posse
In absence of a new article, a pair of new memes on a treasured subject...
The women of this magnificent age of history-related British television programming. From left to right, some of the ladies of Time Team (Carenza Lewis, Mary Ann Ochota, Raksha Dave, and Scarlett Rose McGrail), Janina Ramirez, Alice Roberts, Francesca Stavrakopoulou, and Bettany Hughes.
Unfortunately, the remarkably healthy state of this genre in the U.K. isn't matched in the U.S.:
--j.
The women of this magnificent age of history-related British television programming. From left to right, some of the ladies of Time Team (Carenza Lewis, Mary Ann Ochota, Raksha Dave, and Scarlett Rose McGrail), Janina Ramirez, Alice Roberts, Francesca Stavrakopoulou, and Bettany Hughes.
Unfortunately, the remarkably healthy state of this genre in the U.K. isn't matched in the U.S.:
--j.
Friday, August 2, 2013
Going To War With THE WALKING DEAD
Toward the end of season 3 of AMC's unfortunate television adaptation of THE WALKING DEAD, I came across a meme I thought rather amusing. TWD memes are, of course, a dime-a-dozen on the internet, and at some point (on a day when I clearly had far too much time on my hands), I opted to cheapen their worth even more by creating a few variations of my own. I never did anything with them, so I figured I'd just post them here.
An adequate summation of the second half of that season. Still another...
Nicely sums up the attitude of TWD's creators toward its fans.
--j.
An adequate summation of the second half of that season. Still another...
Nicely sums up the attitude of TWD's creators toward its fans.
--j.
Wednesday, July 31, 2013
Monday, July 22, 2013
Old Movies?
"Y'know, I don't like to call films 'old films.' Nobody ever says, 'have you read that old play by Shakespeare?' Or 'have you read that old book by Steinbeck?' Or 'did you hear that old symphony by Mozart?' Nobody ever says that. It's only 'old movies.' Well, I don't believe in that. I think they're older movies, and made in an earlier period, but they're not old if you haven't seen 'em--they're new."
--Peter Bogdanovich,
from the documentary BY BOGDANOVICH (2011)
--Peter Bogdanovich,
from the documentary BY BOGDANOVICH (2011)
Wednesday, May 8, 2013
Bacon Breaking: Following THE FOLLOWING Season 1
Television tends to suck. It isn't true, as some have suggested, that recent years have seen a general turnaround in the quality of the medium in the U.S. For all the hype, most tv these days is the same old space-wasting seven-and-six it's always been. It is true, however, that these last few years have seen the appearance of a handful of tv-based projects that are often every bit as good as and sometimes even better than the best the cinema is presently offering. Realizing the fortune to be made in producing original programming, the
cable channels have provided creators with an environment wherein
content restrictions are much looser, wherein shows are free to be much
more daring in both their subject-matter and in their approach to it and
wherein one can survive and thrive with a much lower ratings-base than
on the big networks. As a consequence, the cable channels have become
the source of nearly all of the great tv work of recent years.[1] The much-vaunted Golden Age of Television in the 1950s was really, in its totality, a handful of great shows in a sea of otherwise forgettable ones and if that's what qualifies as a Golden Age when it comes to television, I suppose one could say we're living through one right now. I am, in general, a movie guy, not a tv guy. I'm no chauvinist on the point, but it is, initially at least, a well-founded prejudice. Still, I've managed to become embroiled in more television in the last two or three years than I had in the previous twenty combined.[2]
THE FOLLOWING, my subject here, appears on a major network--Fox--instead of cable. Monday saw the conclusion of its freshman season, which seems as good a time as any to offer up some thoughts on it.
The series tells the dark, very much film noir tale of former FBI hand Ryan Hardy, who, back when he still worked for The Man, once apprehended a brilliant and vicious serial killer named Joe Carroll. Carroll had been a professor of literature specializing in Romantic writers and particularly obsessed with Edgar Allan Poe. He modeled his crimes on his interpretations of Poe's work. Hardy caught him in the middle of an attempted murder and managed to save the intended victim, but in their confrontation, he was grievously wounded. Grafted to a pacemaker as a result, he left the bureau, authored a bestseller about the case and took to combating his personal demons with demon rum. A decade later, Carroll escapes from prison and the bureau ropes in Hardy as an adviser. He manages to catch Carroll again, but only after the killer has managed to murder the last victim of his original killing spree--the one Hardy saved a decade earlier. It turns out Carroll has been spending every waking moment of his captivity devising his revenge on Ryan Hardy and he's been developing a cult following from prison, building a sort of twisted religion around Poe and attracting, via the internet, a coterie of killers, crazies and miscreants for the purpose of carrying out his plan.
As that basic outline suggests, THE FOLLOWING is, conceptually speaking, very derivative. There are big, meaty chunks of Thomas Harris in the stew ("Red Dragon", "The Silence of the Lambs" and their screen adaptations), along with bits of flicks like SE7EN, COPYCAT, IN THE LINE OF FIRE, even James McTeigue's recent Poe flick THE RAVEN. The lifts are reflected in every physical aspect of the series, from the direction to the editing to the musical choices. It would, however, be wrong to simply dismiss THE FOLLOWING as just some rip-off. The series is the creation of SCREAM scribe Kevin Williamson, who always offers up appreciative tips of the hat to the genres in which he often works. THE FOLLOWING uses a few worn items from the toolkit of the better killer thrillers but the tale it tells is its own. The real question in judging it is, how well does it work?
And in season 1, it worked pretty damn well most of the time, which is no small accomplishment. While the series legitimately takes critical lumps for its conceptual cannibalization, the fact that it's being done as a single story in the serial (as opposed to episodic) television format does make it bold and even original. Pulling off a killer thriller in weekly installments is a daunting task. It's never been done before. It has never even been attempted. These sorts of stories work as features because filmmakers can put an audience on a roller-coaster, send them for a brief, white-knuckled ride, then, like any other roller-coaster, it reaches the end of the track and it's over. An open-ended series operating under the same rules is a roller-coaster that theoretically never ends. THE FOLLOWING tries to keep viewers on the edge of their seats in as close to perpetuity as it can manage, working at a much more intense pace than most television. Mirroring its noir roots, the atmosphere is one of pervasive evil and constant tension--dark, relentless and thick with the same divine air of doomed romanticism to which Carroll's followers are in thrall. The cultists are acting on a plan worked out by a brilliant mind over an extended period. Many of them have been living phony lives as strategically placed "sleepers" for years, just waiting to be activated so they can carry out their part in Carroll's grand scheme. They could be anywhere. They could be anyone. The viewer is never allowed to lose sight of the fact that they are, at all times, out there somewhere, plotting and carrying out something bad. Integrated into the narrative are tight, economical flashbacks, presented as the memories of the various players in the tale. They're never gratuitous digressions--they're always triggered by events in the present and flesh out the characters, filling in their respective backgrounds. Prior to its premier, a major selling-point of the show was that it marked the television series debut of Kevin Bacon and as Ryan, he's as rock-solid as he's always been, but the show sports a top-shelf cast all the way around.
Not everything about THE FOLLOWING's freshman season worked though. After a great opening salvo of episodes, it made some wrong turns and, for a time, lost its way.
One of the downsides of attempting an open-ended killer thriller is that the less plausible elements that crop up in most such tales--elements that, as long as they aren't overly distracting, can be regarded as a minor flaw in an otherwise good feature film--can become cumulative in a serial. THE FOLLOWING is a fantasy and contrary to the assertions of some mouthy internet critics, it need not hew to documentary realism, but when it comes to putting an audience on this kind of roller-coaster, a great deal of care should be taken to avoid letting things go too far off the tracks in terms of believability, and, unfortunately, this care wasn't always present. The first major credibility hole was blown through the show in the 6th episode ("The Fall"). Overall, it's a great piece of work but its conclusion sinks it like a stone. The background is that a trio of cultists have kidnapped Carroll's son Joey, swiping him from his mother's home, and have been holding him in a remote farmhouse. When, in this episode, its location is uncovered, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies move in, completely surrounding the place. Ludicrously, the cultists are still able to escape with both the boy and relative ease (though one is badly wounded). This led to a tidal-wave of complaints among internet reviewers about the comic incompetence of the feds on the show, which snowballed to the point that anything that could even remotely be interpreted as less than omnicompetent behavior by law enforcement was used to prop up a growing caricature of THE FOLLOWING as a show wherein cretinous cops who couldn't catch a cold in a blizzard were an integral part of the premise. A large number of the complaints that emerged from this were legitimate. An even larger number were not. The damage was done though. That caricature became, from that point, the prism through which a lot of viewers saw the series.[3]
An even more serious misstep occurs in the very next episode, "Let Me Go," wherein it's revealed that Carroll's cult is communally camped out in a sprawling mansion! As bad an idea as that is on its own, given their activities, the cultists, when filing out of the house to welcome Carroll (who has escaped from prison a second time), are absurdly vast in number--far more followers than is either remotely plausible or necessary. THE FOLLOWING is essentially a personal revenge story. Joe Carroll isn't just angry at Hardy for catching him; he's burned that Hardy struck up a brief romance with his ex-wife Claire after his arrest. It became serious. Hardy resists relationships. Claire loved him and became the love of his life. He gave her up for what he thought were noble reasons but he still loves her and Carroll hates him for it. Carroll put together his cult to enact revenge on Hardy, to murder innocents and make Hardy feel responsibility for it, to make Hardy absolutely miserable. To break him. Carroll is even making a book of it--"our sequel," he calls it (he refers to the horrible missions with which he assigns his followers as "chapters"). When Carroll is revealed to have an entire army camped out in a huge mansion, this immediately suggests there's something much bigger in the works, that we're no longer seeing the intimate story of personal revenge it had been up to that point. The fundamental nature of the tale is altered and it's revealed to be a different one, one to which viewers have no connection and in which they have no investment.
Worse still, the writers continued down this path in subsequent episodes, yet that much bigger event to which they make such a show of building never happens and its substance, if there ever was any, is never revealed. Cultist Roderick, who is, at the time, Carroll's right-hand man, urges Carroll to order the cult to begin this larger scheme, whatever it is. He stresses this, tells Carroll the people assembled at the compound have given up everything for him, that they're quite anxious to get started, that delay is causing a morale problem. The cult is revealed to be involved with nut-right militia people who are providing cultists with paramilitary training. The cult is stockpiling weapons and explosives. As all of this is playing out over multiple episodes, none of it seems connected to anything we've been shown--a fact even the characters are made to comment upon within the story--and as the story continues, none of it ever is connected either. The FBI finds and seizes a cult training compound and whatever grand plan of which it was supposed to play a part is a plot thread that is just sort of allowed to peter out. Were the series' writers simply burning through screentime with all of this? Were they toying with ideas, and unsure of how to proceed?
The latter seems a strong possibility, as the writing, during this stretch of the series, became quite spotty in general. The period from about episodes 10-13 is the nadir of season 1. The series still manages some great--a few even masterly--moments, but it becomes very unfocused, generally mediocre and often quite stupid--mostly a chore, to watch, rather than the joy it had been earlier. The final two episodes, though encumbered by the baggage of what came immediately before, right the ship, to an extent, and are much sharper. A good cliffhanger to end the season.
So THE FOLLOWING season 1 is sort of a mixed bag. It can be dumb, uneven, wildly implausible and even dull. At the same time, it has an intriguing premise, a rock-solid cast, it's well-paced, features lots of twists of plot that keep the audience guessing and its technical merits are uniformly superb.
Its greatest strength, though, is that it manages to get on screen one scene after another of remarkable power, intensity, audacity, originality, ugliness, even, at times, brilliance. The series, at the outset, had a real edge to it, one it never entirely lost. You saw things on it almost every week that had never appeared on a mainstream television screen. At one point, the trio of cultists who have taken Carroll's young son send the boy's mother a video wherein they're gleefully teaching the child to kill things. The three, Jacob, Emma and Paul, are the subject of much attention and find themselves in a twisted love triangle. Jacob's big, embarrassing secret, which he's concealed from his murderous girlfriend (Emma), is that he's never killed anyone. When Paul, who is in on this secret, feels left out after Jacob and Emma reunite, he kidnaps a girl from a local convenience store and ties her in the basement for his own convenience. It's quickly decided she must go, and Jacob, being a virgin, is assigned the task of carving her up. He just can't bring himself to do it and releases her instead. The other two hunt her down as she tries to escape but rather than finishing her off, they simply tie her in the basement again for Jacob to kill later. Jacob finds Emma and Paul in the shower together. "We're not giving up on you," Emma assures him, and they share a group hug beneath the warm spray. A wonderfully twisted moment.[4] Jacob later does finally get to kill someone, but it isn't someone he'd have ever wanted to kill and it provides another incredibly powerful emotional--and transgressive--scene. Ryan gets his share of these big moments as well. His background, as filled in via flashbacks, reveal him to be the kind of tormented Romantic hero Carroll says he is, perpetually surrounded by death. Cursed by it, even. He gave up the love of his life because, he says, he thought he'd be a perpetual reminder of the period of madness through which she'd just passed with Joe Carroll. The real reason, which he never directly admits, is that he gave her up because he feared being close to him would doom her. Something as simple as a moment wherein Claire is trying, rather desperately, to talk Ryan into letting her make some breakfast for him is invested with a remarkable degree of depth and feeling after their relationship has been explained. Even when the series was scraping bottom, it threw in a remarkable series of flashbacks of Ryan, as a teen, witnessing his father's death at the hands of a junkie who was robbing a convenience store. What young Ryan did about this (and has never revealed to anyone) is another jaw-dropper moment. These scenes appear throughout the series and become the things one remembers most of all from this season.
The strengths of THE FOLLOWING are significant. In my view, they outweigh its legitimate weaknesses, though after that rough patch of episodes I'm not sure how strenuously I'd argue against someone who disagreed. Its future is questionable--one of its legitimate weaknesses is that the current storyline probably won't prove sustainable over a long haul of many seasons, particularly after the events of the season finale--but if this can be said to be a new Golden Age of Television, THE FOLLOWING has done enough to earn a slot among the age's noteworthies. It isn't perfect, but it doesn't suck.
--j.
---
[1] Though not all; see ELEMENTARY on CBS and HANNIBAL on NBC--both currently matched against one another on Thursday nights.
[2] Among the best of current tv are AMC's HELL ON WHEELS, MAD MEN, and, most especially, BREAKING BAD (perhaps the single best thing television has ever produced), the History Channel's VIKINGS, and A&E's BATES MOTEL.
[3] The show never hits that extreme a level of implausibility again, but there were far too many moments that abused the audience's willingness to suspend disbelief.
[4] Paul and Jacob are revealed to be bisexual and their sexuality is used as an example of their twisted, evil nature, which is a typically negative portrayal of queerness. THE FOLLOWING later redeems itself, though, by making the viewers care about them and feel for them when their situation turns bleak.
The series tells the dark, very much film noir tale of former FBI hand Ryan Hardy, who, back when he still worked for The Man, once apprehended a brilliant and vicious serial killer named Joe Carroll. Carroll had been a professor of literature specializing in Romantic writers and particularly obsessed with Edgar Allan Poe. He modeled his crimes on his interpretations of Poe's work. Hardy caught him in the middle of an attempted murder and managed to save the intended victim, but in their confrontation, he was grievously wounded. Grafted to a pacemaker as a result, he left the bureau, authored a bestseller about the case and took to combating his personal demons with demon rum. A decade later, Carroll escapes from prison and the bureau ropes in Hardy as an adviser. He manages to catch Carroll again, but only after the killer has managed to murder the last victim of his original killing spree--the one Hardy saved a decade earlier. It turns out Carroll has been spending every waking moment of his captivity devising his revenge on Ryan Hardy and he's been developing a cult following from prison, building a sort of twisted religion around Poe and attracting, via the internet, a coterie of killers, crazies and miscreants for the purpose of carrying out his plan.
As that basic outline suggests, THE FOLLOWING is, conceptually speaking, very derivative. There are big, meaty chunks of Thomas Harris in the stew ("Red Dragon", "The Silence of the Lambs" and their screen adaptations), along with bits of flicks like SE7EN, COPYCAT, IN THE LINE OF FIRE, even James McTeigue's recent Poe flick THE RAVEN. The lifts are reflected in every physical aspect of the series, from the direction to the editing to the musical choices. It would, however, be wrong to simply dismiss THE FOLLOWING as just some rip-off. The series is the creation of SCREAM scribe Kevin Williamson, who always offers up appreciative tips of the hat to the genres in which he often works. THE FOLLOWING uses a few worn items from the toolkit of the better killer thrillers but the tale it tells is its own. The real question in judging it is, how well does it work?
And in season 1, it worked pretty damn well most of the time, which is no small accomplishment. While the series legitimately takes critical lumps for its conceptual cannibalization, the fact that it's being done as a single story in the serial (as opposed to episodic) television format does make it bold and even original. Pulling off a killer thriller in weekly installments is a daunting task. It's never been done before. It has never even been attempted. These sorts of stories work as features because filmmakers can put an audience on a roller-coaster, send them for a brief, white-knuckled ride, then, like any other roller-coaster, it reaches the end of the track and it's over. An open-ended series operating under the same rules is a roller-coaster that theoretically never ends. THE FOLLOWING tries to keep viewers on the edge of their seats in as close to perpetuity as it can manage, working at a much more intense pace than most television. Mirroring its noir roots, the atmosphere is one of pervasive evil and constant tension--dark, relentless and thick with the same divine air of doomed romanticism to which Carroll's followers are in thrall. The cultists are acting on a plan worked out by a brilliant mind over an extended period. Many of them have been living phony lives as strategically placed "sleepers" for years, just waiting to be activated so they can carry out their part in Carroll's grand scheme. They could be anywhere. They could be anyone. The viewer is never allowed to lose sight of the fact that they are, at all times, out there somewhere, plotting and carrying out something bad. Integrated into the narrative are tight, economical flashbacks, presented as the memories of the various players in the tale. They're never gratuitous digressions--they're always triggered by events in the present and flesh out the characters, filling in their respective backgrounds. Prior to its premier, a major selling-point of the show was that it marked the television series debut of Kevin Bacon and as Ryan, he's as rock-solid as he's always been, but the show sports a top-shelf cast all the way around.
Not everything about THE FOLLOWING's freshman season worked though. After a great opening salvo of episodes, it made some wrong turns and, for a time, lost its way.
One of the downsides of attempting an open-ended killer thriller is that the less plausible elements that crop up in most such tales--elements that, as long as they aren't overly distracting, can be regarded as a minor flaw in an otherwise good feature film--can become cumulative in a serial. THE FOLLOWING is a fantasy and contrary to the assertions of some mouthy internet critics, it need not hew to documentary realism, but when it comes to putting an audience on this kind of roller-coaster, a great deal of care should be taken to avoid letting things go too far off the tracks in terms of believability, and, unfortunately, this care wasn't always present. The first major credibility hole was blown through the show in the 6th episode ("The Fall"). Overall, it's a great piece of work but its conclusion sinks it like a stone. The background is that a trio of cultists have kidnapped Carroll's son Joey, swiping him from his mother's home, and have been holding him in a remote farmhouse. When, in this episode, its location is uncovered, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies move in, completely surrounding the place. Ludicrously, the cultists are still able to escape with both the boy and relative ease (though one is badly wounded). This led to a tidal-wave of complaints among internet reviewers about the comic incompetence of the feds on the show, which snowballed to the point that anything that could even remotely be interpreted as less than omnicompetent behavior by law enforcement was used to prop up a growing caricature of THE FOLLOWING as a show wherein cretinous cops who couldn't catch a cold in a blizzard were an integral part of the premise. A large number of the complaints that emerged from this were legitimate. An even larger number were not. The damage was done though. That caricature became, from that point, the prism through which a lot of viewers saw the series.[3]
An even more serious misstep occurs in the very next episode, "Let Me Go," wherein it's revealed that Carroll's cult is communally camped out in a sprawling mansion! As bad an idea as that is on its own, given their activities, the cultists, when filing out of the house to welcome Carroll (who has escaped from prison a second time), are absurdly vast in number--far more followers than is either remotely plausible or necessary. THE FOLLOWING is essentially a personal revenge story. Joe Carroll isn't just angry at Hardy for catching him; he's burned that Hardy struck up a brief romance with his ex-wife Claire after his arrest. It became serious. Hardy resists relationships. Claire loved him and became the love of his life. He gave her up for what he thought were noble reasons but he still loves her and Carroll hates him for it. Carroll put together his cult to enact revenge on Hardy, to murder innocents and make Hardy feel responsibility for it, to make Hardy absolutely miserable. To break him. Carroll is even making a book of it--"our sequel," he calls it (he refers to the horrible missions with which he assigns his followers as "chapters"). When Carroll is revealed to have an entire army camped out in a huge mansion, this immediately suggests there's something much bigger in the works, that we're no longer seeing the intimate story of personal revenge it had been up to that point. The fundamental nature of the tale is altered and it's revealed to be a different one, one to which viewers have no connection and in which they have no investment.
Worse still, the writers continued down this path in subsequent episodes, yet that much bigger event to which they make such a show of building never happens and its substance, if there ever was any, is never revealed. Cultist Roderick, who is, at the time, Carroll's right-hand man, urges Carroll to order the cult to begin this larger scheme, whatever it is. He stresses this, tells Carroll the people assembled at the compound have given up everything for him, that they're quite anxious to get started, that delay is causing a morale problem. The cult is revealed to be involved with nut-right militia people who are providing cultists with paramilitary training. The cult is stockpiling weapons and explosives. As all of this is playing out over multiple episodes, none of it seems connected to anything we've been shown--a fact even the characters are made to comment upon within the story--and as the story continues, none of it ever is connected either. The FBI finds and seizes a cult training compound and whatever grand plan of which it was supposed to play a part is a plot thread that is just sort of allowed to peter out. Were the series' writers simply burning through screentime with all of this? Were they toying with ideas, and unsure of how to proceed?
The latter seems a strong possibility, as the writing, during this stretch of the series, became quite spotty in general. The period from about episodes 10-13 is the nadir of season 1. The series still manages some great--a few even masterly--moments, but it becomes very unfocused, generally mediocre and often quite stupid--mostly a chore, to watch, rather than the joy it had been earlier. The final two episodes, though encumbered by the baggage of what came immediately before, right the ship, to an extent, and are much sharper. A good cliffhanger to end the season.
So THE FOLLOWING season 1 is sort of a mixed bag. It can be dumb, uneven, wildly implausible and even dull. At the same time, it has an intriguing premise, a rock-solid cast, it's well-paced, features lots of twists of plot that keep the audience guessing and its technical merits are uniformly superb.
Its greatest strength, though, is that it manages to get on screen one scene after another of remarkable power, intensity, audacity, originality, ugliness, even, at times, brilliance. The series, at the outset, had a real edge to it, one it never entirely lost. You saw things on it almost every week that had never appeared on a mainstream television screen. At one point, the trio of cultists who have taken Carroll's young son send the boy's mother a video wherein they're gleefully teaching the child to kill things. The three, Jacob, Emma and Paul, are the subject of much attention and find themselves in a twisted love triangle. Jacob's big, embarrassing secret, which he's concealed from his murderous girlfriend (Emma), is that he's never killed anyone. When Paul, who is in on this secret, feels left out after Jacob and Emma reunite, he kidnaps a girl from a local convenience store and ties her in the basement for his own convenience. It's quickly decided she must go, and Jacob, being a virgin, is assigned the task of carving her up. He just can't bring himself to do it and releases her instead. The other two hunt her down as she tries to escape but rather than finishing her off, they simply tie her in the basement again for Jacob to kill later. Jacob finds Emma and Paul in the shower together. "We're not giving up on you," Emma assures him, and they share a group hug beneath the warm spray. A wonderfully twisted moment.[4] Jacob later does finally get to kill someone, but it isn't someone he'd have ever wanted to kill and it provides another incredibly powerful emotional--and transgressive--scene. Ryan gets his share of these big moments as well. His background, as filled in via flashbacks, reveal him to be the kind of tormented Romantic hero Carroll says he is, perpetually surrounded by death. Cursed by it, even. He gave up the love of his life because, he says, he thought he'd be a perpetual reminder of the period of madness through which she'd just passed with Joe Carroll. The real reason, which he never directly admits, is that he gave her up because he feared being close to him would doom her. Something as simple as a moment wherein Claire is trying, rather desperately, to talk Ryan into letting her make some breakfast for him is invested with a remarkable degree of depth and feeling after their relationship has been explained. Even when the series was scraping bottom, it threw in a remarkable series of flashbacks of Ryan, as a teen, witnessing his father's death at the hands of a junkie who was robbing a convenience store. What young Ryan did about this (and has never revealed to anyone) is another jaw-dropper moment. These scenes appear throughout the series and become the things one remembers most of all from this season.
The strengths of THE FOLLOWING are significant. In my view, they outweigh its legitimate weaknesses, though after that rough patch of episodes I'm not sure how strenuously I'd argue against someone who disagreed. Its future is questionable--one of its legitimate weaknesses is that the current storyline probably won't prove sustainable over a long haul of many seasons, particularly after the events of the season finale--but if this can be said to be a new Golden Age of Television, THE FOLLOWING has done enough to earn a slot among the age's noteworthies. It isn't perfect, but it doesn't suck.
--j.
---
[1] Though not all; see ELEMENTARY on CBS and HANNIBAL on NBC--both currently matched against one another on Thursday nights.
[2] Among the best of current tv are AMC's HELL ON WHEELS, MAD MEN, and, most especially, BREAKING BAD (perhaps the single best thing television has ever produced), the History Channel's VIKINGS, and A&E's BATES MOTEL.
[3] The show never hits that extreme a level of implausibility again, but there were far too many moments that abused the audience's willingness to suspend disbelief.
[4] Paul and Jacob are revealed to be bisexual and their sexuality is used as an example of their twisted, evil nature, which is a typically negative portrayal of queerness. THE FOLLOWING later redeems itself, though, by making the viewers care about them and feel for them when their situation turns bleak.
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