CS Weekly Archive > The Big Picture > 11/30/07

Strikewatch:
What to Watch When
the TV Season Runs Dry

By jason davis

With the Writer's Guild strike rapidly exhausting the reserves of produced television programming, CS Weekly's former DVD Manager offers up a wide array of viewing options that will both entertain and educate the content-starved writer.

If you'd told me in 1997 that 10 years hence virtually anything I might want to watch (including cancelled and obscure TV shows of ages past) would be available on discs the size of a CD and that laserdisc-style supplements would become the norm for almost every release, I would have laughed in your face and gone back to switching out my 12-inch Star Wars laserdiscs so I could see the second half of the movie. We live in an era where an astonishing amount of our motion picture history is available in a high-quality format that not only offers unprecedented access to the movie or TV show, but also expounds upon it with commentaries, documentaries, and a host of other ingenious supplements designed to facilitate the enjoyment of the work at hand.

Now, with the writers on strike to receive more equitable compensation for the home video boom fostered by the DVD format, fresh programming on the TV is an endangered species, and I find myself turning increasingly to my DVD shelves to fill my evenings with entertainment and provide inspiration for my own writing. During my three years as CS Weekly's DVD Manager and principal reviewer, I often ran across phenomenal writing that, for one reason or another, never got reviewed in our weekly DVD round ups. With the networks exhausting the extant episodes of their series in the upcoming weeks, I thought it time to raid my notes and share with you some of the treasures I've discovered along the way.

If you're ever taken notice of the annual Peabody Awards for excellence in radio and television, you might have noted Gideon's Daughter amongst the winners in 2007. That film, aired originally on the UK's BBC One before premiering -- and earning a pair of Golden Globes—on BBC America, was written and directed by a man named Stephen Poliakoff. Poliakoff's filmography stretches back to the late 1970s and consists mainly of one-off television dramas. Throughout the '90s, he wrote and directed a series of theatrical films, including a compelling examination of voluntary incest in Close My Eyes (starring Alan Rickman and Clive Owen) and the seduction of a businessman by a familial cult in The Tribe (starring Joely Richardson and Anna Friel). Though many of his key themes—relationships within the professional sphere, the destruction of the past at the behest of the present, and the evolving definition of family—are evident in these earlier works, it's his recent television output that I commend to you as an example of the rich characterizations that can be achieved on screen with the right combination of elegance and economy.

Shooting the Past finds an illustrious photographic archive jeopardized by the needs of big business and chronicles the employees' attempts to explain the relevance of their institution in an era that no longer values it. Poliakoff's writing conjures a world unto itself—a musty library inhabited by eccentric and damaged individuals dedicated to saving their vast collection of images from being devoured by the corporate world—and enlists the viewer in their cause somewhere along the way. The photo archive is almost a character in itself. The curators' facility for conjuring curiosities from its bowels becomes an almost magical game of show and tell as compelling mysteries are offered up and solved in the course of the main story—one of which holds the key to the archive's survival. Poliakoff is a master of creating a mélange of mystery and nostalgia that adds a narrative hook to an already emotionally rich drama of characters at crossroads in their life. Perfect Strangers (known in the US as Almost Strangers) manages the same medley as an estranged scion (Harry Potter's Michael Gambon) attends a massive family reunion and confronts mysteries from his past even as his grown son (Pride & Prejudice's Matthew Mcfadyen) redefines himself among his previously unknown cousins. Friends and Crocodiles explores the evolving relationship of an eccentric business renegade (Life's Damian Lewis) and his secretary (The Last of the Mohicans's Jodhi May) across 20 years of modern business, encompassing the excess of the '80s and the dot-com bomb of the late '90s. These works, plus the aforementioned Gideon's Daughter and the historical account of autism found in The Lost Prince, offer a glimpse of Poliakoff at the top of his game, creating characters and situations that linger in the mind like old friends and bittersweet reminiscences.

Sticking with UK dramatists for a moment, Dennis Potter is a name worth knowing. Though his cinematic adaptation of The Singing Detective (starring Robert Downey, Jr.) boils the complicated six-episode television narratives into a coherent abridgment, there's no replacing the original for layers upon layers of meta-fiction. The story of grievously ill mystery novelist Philip Marlow (Gambon, once again), The Singing Detective effortlessly slips from Marlow's hospital ward back to his tortured childhood and into the pages of his books. Characters recur in each of the story's disparate realities, and the onus is on the audience to make sense of the novelist's fevered imaginings and to construct the literal and emotional reality of the tale. The series is television at its most densely layered and intricately plotted. And I haven't even mentioned the musical numbers that prefigure Moulin Rouge's outré use of pop songs to propel the story.

Russell T Davies, the principal force behind the revitalized Doctor Who, is our last storyteller from the far side of the Atlantic. Shortly before taking the reigns of the long-running fantasy series, Davies teamed with future Who star Christopher Eccleston to tell the story of a working-class Manchester man who realizes one evening that he's the son of God. The Second Coming follows Steve Baxter (Eccleston) from his divine epiphany through the religious chaos that results, and reaches a controversial climax that offers a thought-provoking perspective on religion in general and Christianity specifically. The two-part story exemplifies the importance of asking tough questions and offers up answers that, although they might be highly inflammatory, make sound dramatic sense. Though Davies will no doubt be remembered best for his contribution to Doctor Who, The Second Coming echoes many of the values found in that populist work and certainly leaves an impression in the best traditions of Art.

Crossing the Atlantic and delving back into the middle of the last century, we find one of America's premiere television scenarists accruing Emmys by the fistful for his standalone dramas—a format painfully absent from today's network schedules. Before Rod Serling created The Twilight Zone, he showed us an executive (Ed Begley) facing the harsh realities of a business that no longer wanted or needed him in Patterns. Requiem for a Heavyweight—in which an aging boxer (Jack Palance) must give up the gloves or die—followed, as did The Comedian—about a TV celebrity who (Mickey Rooney) destroys everyone around him. With each script, Serling's name became closer associated with fine storytelling, until he eventually parlayed his prestige to create the series for which he's best known today. Sadly, the live productions of these classics from TV's golden age are difficult to come by. Luckily, both Patterns and Requiem were filmed from Serling's scripts, and the theatrical versions are still available. The Comedian, and a later play, "The Velvet Valley"—which tellingly chronicles the plight of a TV writer who climbs fast and furiously only to find himself at the mercy of the money men—are available in their original form.

Segueing from Serling to a young writer who once crafted a teleplay from his notes, J. Michael Straczynski (writer of the forthcoming Changeling, directed by Clint Eastwood) accomplished a singular feat in the creation of political science fiction series Babylon 5. Essentially a novel for television, the five-year storyline unfolded with a greater degree of continuity and foreshadowing than is typical for the day-to-day grind of the medium. Despite unexpected cast changes and the near truncation of the series after season four, Straczynski managed to bring his humanistic tale of mankind coming of age amidst the stars into port with minimal narrative casualties. The real beauty of the series can only be fully appreciated from the vantage point of hindsight as subsequent episodes seem to rewrite their predecessors with dramatic revelations that constantly reshape the chess board that serves as a metaphor to the eponymous diplomatic space station. Offering real value for money, the series offers a totally new experience on second viewing, as foreknowledge of the characters' eventual fates colors scenes that previously played in a more conventional fashion. Like the current critical darling Battlestar Galactica, Babylon 5 is about the human experience first and foremost. The trappings of science fiction may provide a patina of exoticness to the proceedings, but even the most alien characters are as human as you and I.

The 2007-2008 TV season may be on indefinite hiatus, but the miracle of DVD insures that little-known TV treasures past and present are available to fill your primetime hours with engaging programming and a lot of inspiration as to the medium's potential.

Gideon's Daughter, The Singing Detective courtesy BBC Home Video

Babylon 5 courtesy Warner Bros. Home Video

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