Forget 'The Wire'... Alexis is back with her shoulder pads!
Ed Power wants escapism, not reality, from his TV programmes
When did television become so deathly dull? For most of its life-span, TV has had few illusions as to what it was invented for. Its job was to whisk us away somewhere thrilling and exotic when we collapsed into our armchairs.
If it could do so while managing to be mildly scandalous or squeezing in loads of gratuitous explosions, so much the better.
Now, in this era of so-called 'quality' drama such as The Wire, The Sopranos and, oh God, make it stop, Battlestar Galactica 2.0, TV appears to have decided that it is its solemn duty to remind us what a cruel and pitiless world we live in.
Even the critically lauded comedies of the era -- cringe-inducers such as The Office and Curb Your Enthusiasm -- wish only to have us squirming in our seats.
If TV is escapism, it's worth asking the question: what in our day-to-day lives could be so dreadful as to justify sitting through a double helping of Breaking Bad, a new import from the US about a science teacher with terminal cancer who sets up a crystal meth lab in his basement?
Should you have access to digital television, you'll have received a reminder of the way things used to be. Scour schedules and you'll find re-runs of wonderfully ridiculous 80s drama such as Dynasty (now being aired in its entirety on UKTV).
In many ways, these shows, with their big hair and shoulder pads, were the anti-Wire: they had silly plots, laugh-out-loud costuming and were steamier than a voice-mail from Tiger Woods. Above all, they knew their place in the entertainment food-chain: they were dumb and proud of it.
It's no coincidence that it is to this hammy era of television that Hollywood continues to turn for inspiration. At the moment, plans are under way for a big screen rendering of the A-Team. Meanwhile, adaptations of Starsky and Hutch and Mission Impossible have gone down a storm.
Nobody, it is fair to state, is holding their breath for a movie versions of The Wire or Homicide: Life On The Streets. Life, quite frankly, is too short.
Why fixate on The Wire? Because it is the most lauded piece of popular entertainment this side of the first Arcade Fire album. Set in crime-bedevilled Baltimore, Maryland, the series, which actually finished its fifth and final season in 2008 but lives on in re-runs and on DVD, has attracted a fanbase not so much fanatical as borderline rabid.
The mystery is why they are so exercised about a show that combines the dreariest elements of Ken Loach, Hill Street Blues and the New York Times editorial page.
Yes, it has important things to say about stifling influence of the dead hand of bureaucracy on police-work, the ethnic divide in urban America and why Baltimore isn't the kind of place where you should park your car at night. But couldn't it at least crack a smile every now and then?
The same criticisms might be levelled at the grungy remake of Battle Star Galactica, just released as a behemoth blu-ray box set for Christmas.
Sci-fi fans of a certain age will have warm memories of the too-camp-to-be-true original, in which the A-Team's Dirk Benedict jetted around the universe in a Lego spaceship while dressed as if he'd just come from a swingers' night as Studio 54. It was ludicrous and great fun.
Fast forward 30 years and what do we get? A self-consciously gritty re-make -- sorry "re-imagining" -- which clunkily attempts to pass itself off as commentary on America's War on Terror. Sure, it has weighty things to say about contemporary social issues.
However, the original Star Trek managed to speak to the politics of the times without undergoing a humour bypass in the process. BSG, in contrast, seems to have had its sense of fun surgically extracted. And science fiction without that air of derring-do makes about as much sense as I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! without the creepy crawlies.
Worryingly, the disease is spreading. For the last 10 years, Stargate was a self-consciously OTT sci-fi saga, which managed, for all its hokiness, to win you over through sheer gosh-darn it affability. Alas, the franchise has fallen victim to a chronic case of Serious Television Syndrome.
Debuting in October, Stargate: Universe stars Robert Carlisle as a perm-scowling anti-hero and features lots of stony faced looking people having intense conversations.
Grrr... it's enough to make you want to crack open a party box of Tayto and sit through an entire evening of Magnum PI re-runs in one go.
- Ed Power
Irish Independent
