The Joy of Sets
How do you like your stories? Settling down to engage with a novel, maybe. Your regular fix of Eastenders? Or--I know you're reading this, Alis and Frances--a daily hit of The Archers on the radio? Perhaps you relish the structural perfection of a 90-minute movie.
In recent years there are more ways than ever to tell stories. You can read them written as apps for your iPhone, or take in Shakespeare on Twitter. But few, if any developments can have been as welcome as the box-set. A series which might have evolved over months or even years on TV can be in your living room, one episode the push of a button away from the last. Some stories only reveal their full glory when watched this way - stripped of commercials, characters growing and developing before your eyes. Rome, 22 50-minute episodes, needs time to unfold, and it's hard to imagine a conventional movie delivering anything like the same punch. The Wire shows a depth of ambition and accomplishment that's revealed only across the arc of the five series. (Not all box sets are as felicitous: 24 watched back-to-back is exposed as meretricious buffoonery).
How do you like your stories? Settling down to engage with a novel, maybe. Your regular fix of Eastenders? Or--I know you're reading this, Alis and Frances--a daily hit of The Archers on the radio? Perhaps you relish the structural perfection of a 90-minute movie.
In recent years there are more ways than ever to tell stories. You can read them written as apps for your iPhone, or take in Shakespeare on Twitter. But few, if any developments can have been as welcome as the box-set. A series which might have evolved over months or even years on TV can be in your living room, one episode the push of a button away from the last. Some stories only reveal their full glory when watched this way - stripped of commercials, characters growing and developing before your eyes. Rome, 22 50-minute episodes, needs time to unfold, and it's hard to imagine a conventional movie delivering anything like the same punch. The Wire shows a depth of ambition and accomplishment that's revealed only across the arc of the five series. (Not all box sets are as felicitous: 24 watched back-to-back is exposed as meretricious buffoonery).
Now I've found my way to Battlestar Galactica, perhaps the first grown-up space opera. (In the halcyon days of Star Trek, it probably never occurred to anyone that space opera might want to be). I haven't finished all the seasons yet, so I'll reserve final judgement--but this is shaping up as hugely impressive drama. And from such tawdry inspiration--an unutterably feeble late-70s Star Wars rip-off. The four TV series, on the other hand, really do with hindsight seem amazingly ambitious. Airing from 2003-2008, an old-fashioned story of the last remnants of humanity fleeing killer robots manages to address issues of authoritarianism for the perceived greater good, racism, xenophobia, suicide bombing and torture in a way almost wholly absent from mainstream US drama. If you wanted a nuanced exploration of America in the Iraq years, you had to watch a science-fiction show--at least until Generation Kill came along, and even that lacked Battlestar Galactica's thematic range. Even the cliches are given a bit of life: the standard insubordinate pilot, Starbuck, is a woman (the mesmeric Katee Sackhoff). Grizzled Admiral Adama, played with grim weariness by Edward James Olmos, has flaws so significant we frequently lose sympathy with him. His counterpart, the reluctant President Roslin (Mary McDonnell and her shampoo-ad hair) is half noble war-leader, half tyrant. And those killer robots? They end up commandeering our sympathies.
The episodes are fleeting by so quickly I doubt I can make them last until Game of Thrones launches. I may have to find another classic series. I hear The Sopranos is pretty good...
