tv

Blink-o-vision

I know television marketers talk about “capturing eyeballs,” but this is ridiculous:

They say the constant miniaturisation of technology will lead to TV sets being shrunk to the size of contact lenses and powered by body heat.Channels could be changed by voice commands or a wave of the hand, says a report on the future of home entertainment.

Ian Pearson, a ‘futurologist’ who advises companies on new technologies, said of the TV contact lens: ‘You will just pop it into your eye in the morning and take it out at the end of the day.’

Digital tattoos, meanwhile, will pick up on the emotions portrayed by actors in TV shows and create impulses allowing us to feel the same emotions.

Via TV Squad, with whom I agree this sounds like an exceptionally bad idea. Why not just induce hallucinations the old-fashioned way? (Via Gerry Canavan.)

How very meta

Over at Fraggmented, John Seavey has an interesting post about what he calls “The Metastory Trap”:

Put simply, the metastory trap comes when a long-running series of separate-but-linked stories gets more interested in its metastory than the individual stories that compose it. Put even more simply, you get caught in a metastory trap when you’re more worried about your arc than you are about your individual installments. Put even more simply, you’re caught in a metastory trap when you write “Countdown to Infinite Crisis”. *rimshot*

It’s worth reading, although I’m not sure I agree with all of it or with all of the examples he cites. (And I think it goes without saying that some of those examples offer up at least mild spoilers.)

I was a little disenchanted with the Anya/Xander relationship at the end of Season 6 of Buffy too, for instance, but I also think its development was organic to the story the writers were trying to tell at the time. It didnt feel like just another ratcheting up of plot twists for its own sake. I thought the further developments in Season 7 (particularly the Anya-centered episode “Selfless”) just further underscored this. You didn’t have to like that story or the way it was told — and heaven knows I had my own problems with most of Season 7 — but I think there’s a big difference between allowing a story to grow naturally beyond its beginnings, and forcing everything to change because that’s all you know how to do. Both are likely to alienate viewers, but I think only the latter deserves to.

In other words, a show doesn’t have to be what it once was in order to be true to those beginnings.

The whole idea of a “Metastory Trap” gets thrown for a loop by shows like Lost or Heroes, which from their very beginnings were all about the overarching metastory, more than any individual episode. I think Lost has figured out how to make this work, precisely because the writers know the shape of their metastory. Unlike those for whom metastory is a trap, they’re not just making stuff up as they go along.* They’re really not telling a series of separate-but-linked stories, but rather one very long, multi-season story. You’d have a tough time starting with Lost from almost anywhere but the beginning, but that seems more by design than by accident.

One of Seavey’s other examples, Babylon 5, is a little more problematic. Its first season may have given the illusion that the show was about stand-alone stories, and that the writers only racheted up the meta in later seasons when fans responded eagerly. But I think B5 was clearly intended as a single 5-year story. I think there are some problems with how J. Michael Straczynski told that story — particularly that the fifth season is something of anticlimax — but it’s hard to see how it “fell into” the metastory trap, when what it really did was dive in headfirst.

As did a show like Twin Peaks, which I think you could argue fell into something like a reverse metastory trap: once its overarching storyline was gone and its original mystery solved, its attempts to tell separate, smaller stories within the same universe failed to generate the same excitement. Personally, I liked the reveal of Laura Palmer’s killer — and I’m not sure the show could have sustained the tension of not revealing it much longer — but it’s not tough to see why viewers left when the metastory they signed up for went away.

If any one show did fall into the trap, it’s that other antecedent of Lost, The X-Files. By the show’s end, the metastory had become the elephant in the room, and many fans (myself included) often wished it would just go away. The show threatened to choke under the weight of its own mythos. It’s no wonder Chris Carter decided to go another route with his recent X-Files movie I Want to Believe. Then again, it’s no wonder that movie failed; the mythos had become such a part of the show that die-hard fans were disappointed to find no new evidence of it. And everybody else…well, everybody else had pretty much stopped caring ten years earlier.

Seavey isn’t wrong that “A series that is all about its metastory rapidly develops a complex, tangled mythos that can obscure the simple, powerful idea at its heart…and turn off new readers/viewers.” But I also think there’s much to be said for a series that rewards patient and regular reading or viewing, that uses a growing mythos (tangled as it may sometimes be) not to obscure its central idea but to examine it, to build from it, and to allow that idea to naturally evolve. Metastory need not be a trap. If the twists and changes in a series are organic and logical, if they don’t feel like a cheat or ploy for short-term excitement, then I think metastory can work to enchance a story. Rather than a trap, it becomes an effective tool.

* Around season two, I had my doubts. But now I really do think they know what they’re doing.

Goodnight, Irene

“Sometimes the best laid plans have been known to go astray”
– John Mellencamp, “Sometimes a Great Notion”

So last week’s Battlestar Galactica, which I’ve finally watched, was pretty much exactly what I expected. (Spoiler warnings in effect.)

Not the specific twists and plot developments — which still seem mostly like unearned shocks and melodrama — but the overall feel and my reaction to it. Like just about all BSG episodes in recent memory, this was an intense (and sometimes very bleak) hour of television that afforded the actors some interesting scenes and suggested some not uninteresting things to come. (Or to have come again, if the cyclical nature of History is really what the show’s all about.) But narratively, it’s kind of a mess, betraying a lot of the same problems that have weighed down the show since at least season 3 — and which have likely been present from the very beginning.

I think my opinion of the show falls somewhere between Gerry Canavan and Abigail Nussbaum’s (links above). By no means have I lost all faith in Battlestar, and at this point I’ll continue to watch to the very end, but I didn’t see anything in “Sometimes a Great Notion” to suggest the last of the series will be less problematic or frustrating than what’s come before.

“And my heart, it lies at the bottom of the ocean”
– John Mellencamp, “Sometimes a Great Notion”

Tuesday various

  • Last night, several local television stations ran a five-minute test of their digital signal, in anticipation of the February 17th switch from analog. My own television, which is the only one in the house not hooked up to cable, and which I use primarily as a platform for watching DVDs, failed the test. All I got was a test pattern, color bars. I’m not too concerned about it, frankly, since I don’t really use the set, but now the Obama team wants to give me more time now to worry about it. Maybe he just wants the time to put the finishing touches on his own restaurant review show. (I’m assuming any restaurant that serves Yes Pecan ice cream gets four stars.)
  • Speaking of bad food, however: Paula Deen wants to kill you. Whereas her colleague at the Food Network just tried to kill the holidays. [via]
  • I don’t know about joining the book club, but I’m up for the challenge of reading all of Gene Wolfe’s “Solar Cycle” novels this year. Especially since I’ve already read The Shadow of the Tortuer, really liked it, and own a copy of The Claw of the Conciliator, the second book in the series. The only “downside” is that Wolfe’s writing can be a little dense and does require some very close reading because of that. It might distract me from reading anything else for awhile. But still, I’m sorely tempted.
  • Speaking of Gene Wolfe, an interesting quote via Chris McLaren from a recent interview:

    The purely commercial writer writes for the editor. The purely artistic writer writes for himself or herself. I write for the reader. As long as the editor buys it, I don’t much care what he thinks of it. If it’s a good solid story, that’s enough for me. But if the reader doesn’t like it, it’s a failure.

    Smart man, that.

  • No optician needed. Self-adjusting eyeglasses:

    The wearer adjusts a dial on the syringe to add or reduce amount of fluid in the membrane, thus changing the power of the lens. When the wearer is happy with the strength of each lens the membrane is sealed by twisting a small screw, and the syringes removed. The principle is so simple, the team has discovered, that with very little guidance people are perfectly capable of creating glasses to their own prescription.

    This obviously won’t work for all vision problems (like my own, astigmatism), but in developing countries, where getting any type of affordable corrective lenses can prove difficult, this sounds like a really good idea. [via]