8/14/13
View Logs: Agents of SHIELD Prologue
This is going to be a long one because I have a lot of explaining to do...I'm going to lose like all my viewers saying this (which is probably like 3 people)... but I don't like Joss Whedon. I don't hate him and I don't think he's a bad writer. But I don't think he's really that special. He's great at handling high concept witty dialogue characters but I don't think he can do much beyond that. The first season of Parenthood was alright. Buffy was alright. Firefly and Serenity were great. But Dollhouse sucked. I actually didn't really like The Avengers. To me the movie just seemed like one massive third act action fest and the dialogue, beyond being witty banter, didn't develop much beyond "these people have problems... but they can put it aside to save the world". Yawn...
So there you have it. You must keep in mind that I'm a machine. I'm made of wires, circuits, metal and science. So huge action set pieces of "characters being awesome by punching things" just don't appeal to me. It's nothing there for me to cognitively dissect and analyze... it's just... there. I guess the biggest difference is that I don't treat TV and movies as entertainment. I treat human test subjects as entertainment... but not the screen fiction artform. So I always go into any piece of screen fiction expecting to learn something out of it. Doesn't always have to be profound or deep. Sometimes just seeing and empathizing with a new perspective is enough. Punching things and characters trying to be a smart ass is not enough. Atleast for a bucket of bolts like me.
So I don't have high hopes for Joss' new Avengers TV show. I've always thought that the marvel superhero movies were made almost like a tv show with their own segments split into a few different movies than actual stand alone movies. It's definitely a long story arc that's probably better suited towards a serialized TV format but the very low budget of TV probably didn't appeal to Marvel... then again... the low budget would force the writers to actually focus on the characters and drama rather than having a million things explode...
Anyways back to Agents of SHIELD, I expect the show to be mindless but occasionally "fun". You can probably tell by this point that my taste in stuff tends to be on... the artsy drama side. The very low key but internally intensive dramas of HBO, AMC, Showtime, etc. That said, I'm actually ok with very procedural mainstream network shows. I try my best to remove my bias against network shows and at times I'm actually surprised by how well written entertainment focused procedurals can be. So when I go into Agents of SHIELD, I'm not actively comparing it to Breaking Bad or Downton Abbey but I'll be actively comparing it to mainstream procedurals like Person of Interest and Elementary. I think that's fair don't you? After all, Person of Interest is basically what happens if Batman were two people and the setting was real life. Seriously Person of Interest is a superhero show...
So with that said, I'm not sure if Joss is able to rise up to the ranks of Jonathan Nolan (Co-wrote The Dark Knight with his brother and Person of Interet's showrunner). Despite some shlocky and overly cliched segments, Person of Interest is surprisingly deep. It draws a lot of the emotional and intellectual complexities that The Dark Knight movies were known for and utilizes it well in its world. A TV show that's exactly The Avengers is going to be mundane. Can Joss outdo his own material in The Avengers? I don't want to come back week after week just to keep watching high concept witty banter... again... that's fine and all... but there needs to be more. And I hope... underneath all that hype, gloss, and witty banter... there is something more. Let me truly feel these characters Joss, rather than have a good time hanging out with them. Let me look at Agent Coulson and see a complex person as I do with John Reese and Harold Finch. I must stress that I'm not calling for Agents of SHIELD to be grim and dark. No, grim and dark is what a bad writer does when he attempts to create drama. You can be light and still be really meaningful. Just look at Pushing Daisies.
