Archive for TV

TV

More on The Office

I’m still rewatching The Office, watching an episode after listening to the podcast episode from The Office Ladies, and I’m noticing character details that even they don’t seem to have registered. The one that’s hitting me in this go-round is that Jim is what Michael is trying to be, while Michael is what Jim is in danger of turning into.

Michael wants to be the life of the party, the one who keeps morale in the office up with his hilarious jokes and pranks. He sees himself as well-liked and successful, the hot bachelor who can snag any woman. But he doesn’t seem to have any dreams of moving beyond where he is. He’s found his niche of success as regional manager of a paper company, and he only does anything toward moving beyond that when his position is threatened. He likes being the big fish in a small pond, and his dreams are pure dreams — stand-up comedy, screenwriting, improv, acting, being a secret agent. They aren’t anything he actually does much about. He writes a screenplay, which stays in a drawer (where it belongs, to be honest). He doesn’t seem to have made any effort to improve, so it was merely about playing out his personal fantasy of being a secret agent, not a serious effort to become a screenwriter. He takes the improv class, but considers himself to already be a genius, so he resists any effort at guidance by the instructor and alienates the rest of the class by being a poor collaborator.

Jim actually is the life of the party who keeps morale up in the office with his jokes and pranks, but a big difference is that his morale boosting comes from him paying attention to what the other people want and what will boost them. When Michael’s out of the office and Jim comes up with fun things to do, like the Office Olympics or the screenplay table read, he doesn’t build it around himself. He focuses on encouraging the others and drawing them out, like giving timid Phyllis the role of the sexy girlfriend in the table read or finding a “sport” for everyone in the Olympics. He even often overcomes his own dislike for Michael by soothing his ego, like giving him an Olympic medal in a stirring closing ceremony or joining him for a karaoke duet when Michael crashes his party at his home. Jim is the guy popular with women, managing to win the women Michael wants but turns off with his weird behavior. Michael talks about how cute Pam is (or used to be), but Pam falls in love with Jim. Jim’s the one who takes the hot girl (a pre-famous Amy Adams) home after Michael spends the day trying to impress her.

But Michael is also a cautionary tale for Jim, what could happen to him if he stays where he is. Is the best he can hope for being regional manager of a paper company someday? Will his jokes and office antics go from being a morale boost to making his staff cringe and keeping the HR department busy? Will he continue to have dreams that he never acts on? That’s why the later seasons are difficult to watch for me because he seems to realize all this, himself, but when he tries to act on his pent-up dreams instead of just playing them out in a computer game, he gets cast as the bad guy and it nearly destroys his marriage because it draws attention away from his family and leaves his wife carrying the load. That’s unfortunate because he had supported her so strongly in pursuing her dreams, but at that time they were just dating and didn’t have two small kids to deal with, so the situations aren’t equal. I’m not at that point in the rewatch yet. I’m still in season two, when Jim is pining for an engaged (but clearly unhappy) Pam and avoiding going after other, better jobs because that means being away from Pam.

Last night’s episode was “The Injury,” which may be the ultimate episode of this series. It doesn’t get into any of the ongoing arcs, but it so perfectly represents what the show is about, with Michael being so childish and demanding about his minor injury that he completely misses Dwight’s more serious injury (and then still tries to take the spotlight even after they realize Dwight has a concussion), and Jim having to step up and be the adult in the room to take care of Dwight and deal with Michael (the scene with the spray bottle in the van is one of the funniest things ever on television).

One thing I love about this series is that the documentary format did away with the studio audience/laugh track thing for TV comedy and let the TV audience decide for ourselves when to laugh. I’ve now reached the point where I can’t watch old-school sitcoms with a laugh track.

I found something I wrote back in late 2020, probably for a TV forum, on how various characters on The Office would deal with the pandemic, if you teleported the season 2-3 cast/situation to 2020 (rather than where they’d have actually been in 2020). I may have to post that next week, especially if I still have Book Brain and can’t come up with anything else.

My Books, TV

Returning to The Office

I recently stumbled, quite belatedly, onto The Office Ladies podcast, in which Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey (Pam and Angela on The Office), who became best friends during the process of making the series, do a rewatch and dish on the behind-the-scenes info about the making of each episode. I was aware that this existed, but I’m not really a podcast person. Then the episodes that are on YouTube showed up as “recommended” for me, and it turns out that they’re perfect for listening while I do Sudoku, crossword puzzles or online jigsaw puzzles. And that got me started rewatching the series to catch the things they mention. I did a partial rewatch a few years ago but got sidetracked before I finished it. Now I’ve been going back and looking for the things they point out in the podcast.

I actually watched this series in the first place because when they showed Pam in one of the promos, I immediately said, “That’s Katie!” and had to watch to see who this character was. The series premiered a couple of months before the first Enchanted, Inc. book was published, so it had already been entirely written and edited and the review copies had even been printed. That means The Office in no way influenced my series. But it was like seeing my own character that I’d already written come to life.

Her hair in the first few seasons is different than I see Katie. I think Katie looks more like Pam did in later seasons when she didn’t have the long, curly hair (which is ironic, given that I have long, curly hair), and Katie’s probably a bit spunkier than first season Pam. But Pam otherwise fit my description of her being like a girl next door, hair that wasn’t quite blond and wasn’t quite brown, eyes somewhere between green and blue, the kind of person whose description could apply to half the population. She even dresses a lot like I imagined Katie dressing. I guess first season Pam was more like Katie before she gets the job offer, when she’s in her original job at the beginning of the book, before she gains a bit more confidence and gumption from realizing that she has something special about her.

Then there was the office setting. I’d tried to do more of a workplace comedy at first, something a lot like The Office, but with magic — except there was no US The Office at the time, and I didn’t see the British version until later, so I didn’t have a good frame of reference. That idea mostly went by the wayside as the magical plots took over and the characters came to life. Before I decided that Merlin would be the boss and he’d actually be a good boss, I had the idea of the boss being someone more like Michael, mostly because I have had that boss (he even had the same first name). He wasn’t quite that stupid, but he was really big on the whole “having fun” thing and liked to have parties, only ours were usually after work, which forced us to stay late at the office or go to work-related events on weekends. He once came up with this whole incentive program where you set your goals for the week, and if you hit them, you got to leave early on Fridays, but then he’d plan either mandatory meetings or office parties for Friday afternoons, so you couldn’t actually leave. His whole life was the office, and he tried to make it that way for the staff.

I ended up not using that in the book. The only thing that remained from that original character was the bit about Merlin reading all the fad management books, though I ended up using that to show how he thought they were kind of dumb instead of constantly adjusting course based on which book the boss had just read. That came from a different job where the upper management of the company seemed to go through a different management trend every year. When I moved, I finally got rid of some of the stuff they handed out for each year’s theme.

Now I’m so far removed from the working world that I can look at this series almost as a fantasy show set in a strange, unfamiliar realm. It’s funny to look at it now and remember that feeling of deja vu as I remembered my former boss but also saw one of my characters come to life. It’s been about 20 years since they filmed the pilot episode, so Jenna Fischer has aged out of the role of Katie, but that was definitely the type I had in mind as I wrote.

TV, Books

Reboots

It seems like half the movies and TV shows being made right now are reboots of some kind or another. The movie listings have to include dates so that you’ll know which version it is. If you look at the TV schedule, you might think you were back in the mid-80s because all the shows seem to have come from that era. There’s Night Court, The Equalizer, and for a while there were new versions of Magnum, PI and Hawaii 5-0 (I don’t know if they’re still on).

Night Court is a sequel, of sorts, following up on the characters and events of the original series, with the daughter of the original series’ main character taking over the courtroom where her father once presided and the prosecutor from the original series now coming out of retirement to be a public defender. There’s a Frasier reboot that’s also apparently a sequel (I haven’t watched it).

I believe Magnum, Hawaii 5-0 (the only one of this bunch I’ve watched), The Equalizer, and the new Walker, Texas Ranger are all reboots/reimaginings, taking the concept of the original series and doing an entirely new series set in the present day.

I loved the old Night Court but found the new one to be not funny at all. I think part of the problem was that it was still essentially an 80s sitcom, so it felt stale and dated to me. This might have been the perfect opportunity to really reimagine it and change the format. The concept of the series could have made for a good mockumentary, like The Office or Parks and Recreation, since a young judge taking over the courtroom where her father once presided is the sort of thing someone might make a documentary about. It would have been interesting to see these characters when they knew they were on camera.

This got me started pondering what other series they could reboot. They already did Charlies Angels as a movie. Remington Steele could be quite timely in the era of #MeToo. It’s basically a series about sexism and mansplaining, since it’s about a woman who’s an expert in her field but has so much trouble being taken seriously that she has to invent a male boss to be the figurehead for her business, and then when a con artist steps into the role of the imaginary boss, people listen to him even though he has no expertise. It might be interesting to turn it from a romantic comedy to a psychological thriller, given that he’s essentially blackmailing her and holding her business hostage. As much as I loved Pierce Brosnan in the series, it is kind of creepy that the characters fell in love, when you think about it (though I missed the final season or two when they got together because I was in college without TV access).

Since they rebooted Magnum, they could do a follow-up series of Simon and Simon, its schedule mate. That was a series about two brothers who were complete opposites (one a slick preppie, one a laid-back cowboy) running a small private investigation agency in San Diego, and I think the timing works out that they could do a series about their kids having taken over the agency. Make one of the cousins a woman, and maybe she’s the laid-back one who likes the agency the way it is while her male cousin wants to grow the business to be a major agency.

I wonder if a reboot of Moonlighting would work. That was the series that introduced Bruce Willis. It was about a former model (Cybill Shepherd) who lost all her money when her accountant cheated her and fled the country. One of the few investments she had left was a low-end private investigation agency that was meant to be a tax write-off. She decided to go to work there and actually run it to make money, since it was her remaining source of income, and she clashed with the wacky detective who’d been running the place. A lot of the success of the series was due to Bruce Willis’s personal charisma and the chemistry between him and Shepherd (though apparently they actually loathed each other), so I’m not sure if you could recapture that. I’d just want to see someone play with that concept and be willing to do some of the wild stuff they did, like the black-and-white episode or the one where they did The Taming of the Shrew, but without it flying horribly off the rails in the later seasons. “The Moonlighting Curse” is what they call a series being ruined by the leads getting together romantically, but I don’t think it was the fact that they got together romantically so much as it was the way they got together. They dragged it out a bit too much with the will they/won’t they and a lot of contrived obstacles, then got the monkey wrench of Shepherd’s real-life pregnancy, with twins, so it was impossible to hide it behind a potted plant, and that led to writing the pregnancy in with weird stuff like the fetus’s perspective. I think you could have them get together without it ruining the series if it were done gradually without all the monkey wrenches. The basic personality clashes would still be there.

Thinking about all this made me ponder whether you could do a reboot of a book. I know long-running franchises like the Nancy Drew books get updated. Nancy keeps getting moved forward in time, from the 30s to the 50s and then to the 70s and to modern times. Apparently, she’s now a modern teen with a cell phone and Internet. I just know as a kid I liked the 30s and 50s ones, hated the newer 70s ones because Nancy’s clothes were a lot better on the covers and in the illustrations when she wasn’t wearing bell bottoms.

But would there be any market for taking a book published in the 80s or 90s and rewriting it to take place in the 2020s? Would the author write the same concept differently if they wrote it now? I found myself thinking about that as I approach the 20th anniversary of selling Enchanted, Inc. to a publisher. How would I write it differently if I wrote it now? Not just going in and adding smart phones and changing the pop culture references, but taking that same concept of a woman immune to magic being recruited by a magical company and writing it again. What would be different if I did that? I can’t say for certain, mostly because I have zero interest in doing that, so I can’t wrap my brain around it. It’s not the kind of story I want to tell now.

Looking at my bookcase, there’s nothing that really jumps out at me as a “I wish the author could go back and redo this” situation, though that’s probably because I only have the books I absolutely love on my bookcase (especially after all the purging I did before the move). I wouldn’t have kept the ones that needed a do over.

Is there a book you’d want to see revisited and updated in some way?

In other news, Interview with a Dead Editor is part of a promotion for cozy fantasy-type books today. Check it out to find more cozy reading.

movies, TV

Bi-Starial

Earlier in the year, the New York Times crossword puzzle had a clue that was “the better of two science fiction franchises,” and it worked whether you answered Star Wars or Star Trek (there were two possible answers for the crossing words). I actually had to waver between them and ended up doing the thing where you put both letters in the square, showing it could be either. I’ve never really understood the whole Star Trek vs. Star Wars thing because I’m very much on team Why Not Both. I guess you could say I’m bi-starial. I have a long history with both franchises and my obsession has swayed back and forth, depending on what’s more prominent in my life at any given time.

My mom says she used to nurse me as an infant while watching the original run of the original Star Trek (yes, I’m old), so I guess you could say I’ve been a fan since birth. I have vague memories of seeing episodes as a child, and I watched the animated series. But then I saw the original Star Wars when I was nine and became utterly obsessed with that for about six years.

The Star Wars obsession faded somewhat after Return of the Jedi, I think in part because the story seemed to be over and there was no more speculation about what would happen next to keep me occupied. Also, none of my friends seemed to be into it (I later found there were a lot more closet geeks in my hometown than I realized, but we were all keeping quiet about it and it took us thirty years to find each other), which gave me nothing to keep the obsession going. But then one of the local TV stations started showing Star Trek reruns every afternoon, right around the time we got home from school (my parents worked at the school, so we all commuted together), so it became a family routine to get home from school and watch Star Trek. We’d gone to see the movies, and I knew enough about it to know who the characters were, but I hadn’t really watched the series in any depth, and when I did, that obsession hit. I found some of the novels at the used bookstore and finally appreciated the stories in the movies.

The Star Trek obsession was reinforced when I got to college and the gang on my dorm floor gathered every afternoon to watch before trooping down to the cafeteria for dinner. I was the journalism major surrounded mostly by engineering and computer science majors, so Star Trek was one of the things I could talk to them about and sound reasonably intelligent. The Next Generation came on while I was in college, and we also gathered to watch that, usually after dinner on Saturday nights. I got really into that show and even bought the novels as they came out. We did watch the Star Wars trilogy on our movie nights every so often, so the Star Wars thing was still lurking. It just wasn’t top of mind during those years.

There was a slight resurgence in the Star Wars interest after I graduated from college when the original Timothy Zahn novels came out, actually continuing the story, but I didn’t much like most of the Expanded Universe books that came afterward. Then Deep Space Nine came on, and I was back to Star Trek obsession. I started watching both Voyager and Enterprise, but I didn’t finish those series (I did come back to watch the Voyager finale, though). The Star Wars Special Editions came out during this phase, and I did go see those with friends from work, but The Phantom Menace didn’t revive the Star Wars obsession too much. It was Attack of the Clones that did that, and that came after Deep Space Nine ended, so there was no Star Trek at the time. This was the first new Star Wars movie to come out when I was in a place in my life when I could see it as often as I wanted to, and I actually wanted to, so one of my friends and I went to see it three times that summer. Revenge of the Sith is oddly paired with Enchanted, Inc. in my mind, since they came out at around the same time. Revenge of the Sith came out the week before Enchanted, Inc., and then I saw it a second time the day I had my author photo taken (I saw the movie in the same dress that I’m wearing in that photo).

There was then a dry spell in between, when there wasn’t any new Star Wars or Star Trek. I mostly drifted to Doctor Who during that time. The Clone Wars animated series was on, but I wasn’t aware of it at the time. I picked up on Rebels about halfway through its run. Then the Star Wars firehose opened and we started getting tons of new Star Wars stuff with all the new movies, and then the various TV series. I’m back to being that nine-year-old kid who’s utterly obsessed, but there’s a lot more material to immerse myself in. I don’t have to just reread the novelization of one movie while listening to the soundtrack in order to get my fix.

At the same time, though, they’ve also started giving us a lot of new Star Trek. I didn’t have Paramount+ so I hadn’t seen much of it. I saw part of the first episode of Discovery when they showed it on CBS during the pandemic, but that station wasn’t coming in well for me and I gave up after getting mostly glitches. The one I got into was Strange New Worlds, when they had the first season on Prime Video as one of their “free this month” previews.

That series follows the Enterprise under the command of Captain Pike (the one in the wheelchair-like device in the episode that was repurposed from the unaired original pilot), with a very young Spock and Uhura. A young Kirk shows up from time to time. I feel like this series captures the vibe of the original series, but in an updated way. They even manage to get the aesthetic so that it feels like it could be from the same era, but somehow without it looking too dated (the way they manage to get Andor to look like the original Star Wars without it screaming that it’s from the 70s). My brother gave me Paramount+ at Christmas, so I’ve been able to catch up on watching the rest of that series.

I’ve also picked up on Lower Decks, an animated Star Trek series that’s both a good Trek show and a spoof of Star Trek. It follows the ensigns who don’t work on the bridge, who do the grunt work, on a ship that isn’t the flagship of the fleet. They’re on the “second contact” ship, the one that comes in to handle the paperwork after a ship like the Enterprise has made first contact. It’s set after The Next Generation (Riker is captain of his own ship, finally). The show pokes gentle fun at all the Trek tropes by showing them from the point of view of the crewmembers who are just trying to do their jobs. For added fun, there was an episode of Strange New Worlds that had the characters from this animated series be transported back in time to the Enterprise and converted to live action (using the same actors who voice the roles). The episodes for this series are only a half-hour long, so this is what I watch when I don’t have time for anything longer.

I started watching Picard with my brother at Thanksgiving, but I haven’t had a chance to finish it. I also want to revisit the original series, since I know I missed a lot of connections and references on Strange New Worlds.

I feel like we’re in a golden age of Stuff Starting With “Star.” I could watch nothing but Star Wars and Star Trek and fill all my entertainment hours. With there being so much of both, I’m kind of teetering between the Wars and Trek obsessions. I may be leaning closer to the Wars, just because I think I’m more emotionally engaged with that universe and it’s essentially fantasy in a science fiction setting, which is more my jam, but I don’t feel like it has to be a competition. It’s more like “Yay, lots of fun stuff!”

My Books, TV

Time-Traveling Historians

My latest TV obsession is the series of historical farming documentaries from the BBC. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I was watching one set in the 1600s (Tales from the Green Valley). I’d already watched the Tudor Monastery Farm series. Then the YouTube algorithm started serving me more. Last week, I watched the Wartime Farm series about World War II. I’m currently watching Victorian Farm.

The basic format of these is that a group of historians and archaeologists spend a year living as though they’re farmers in a particular era, using technology of the time, to see how it all works and whether they could have survived. They go from planting a crop to harvesting the crop and everything in between, eating the food, wearing the clothes, and living the life, in general. They’ll bring in subject matter experts to learn about a particular task or craft of the time. The cast sometimes varies, but there are some regulars who pop up, and that means my brain starts creating narratives about all this.

It started when I watched the Wartime Farm series right after the one set in the 1620s. The historians were talking about how their experience couldn’t replicate exactly what people of the time experienced, since they knew when and how it would end, and that was uncertain for the people of the time. They were going through all this with high expectations, trying to increase food production since most of their imports had been cut off, and they didn’t know when or if they might be invaded. Although the scholars were spending one year, they kept adjusting conditions based on different years of the war to show how things changed, like the availability of some things. They were talking about having to go back to some of the older ways that had been more or less lost because they were having to make do, and since I’d just watched some of these same people living in the 1620s, I thought they had an unfair advantage over actual 1940s farmers because they’d done things like make medicinal preparations out of foraged herbs, had made their own cheese, had thatched a roof, had worked a field using horses instead of a tractor.

And that’s when it struck me: They’re time travelers! These people are bringing knowledge from the past and from the future. I would say it’s a fun story idea, but Connie Willis has already written the books about the time-traveling historians. I guess this is the next best thing to getting a movie or TV series made from those books. One thing I’m enjoying is that while there is a bit of a story line — will they have a successful harvest? — there’s not a lot of drama. There are no villains or antagonists. It’s just people trying to learn things and make things work. That makes for engaging but relaxing viewing.

I’m also getting really curious about the behind-the-scenes stuff, wondering whether they really are living like this or just when the cameras are on. They tend to do a couple of months in a single episode, so it’s just a day or two that gets shown. Are they wearing these clothes and living in these places all the time with the cameras only on them for a day or two every month, on camera all the time but it gets edited down, or just showing up when they’re doing something the camera will record? They did mention for the 1600s one that they wouldn’t actually be living in the farmhouse for health and safety reasons but would be living nearby, which implies they’re living on-site, even if they are living in trailers or something like that. They also mentioned during the Victorian one that they’re not actually sleeping in the cottage but rather elsewhere on the estate. I’ve read the books by one of the historians, and she mentioned trying the Tudor-era hygiene protocol when they were doing that series and that even the camera crew that wasn’t around all the time didn’t notice any body odor, which also implies that they’re living this way all the time. Do these people have families? Do they get weekend visits?

We had a small farm when I was a teenager, but we mostly just raised a few cows, so I didn’t get the full farm experience, and I don’t romanticize it at all, but these are still fun to watch. I started watching these as research for the Rydding Village books, when I was looking up info on how people were cooking and baking, and this was what the search results brought up. Then I connected them to some books I’d read for research when I realized it was the same historian. The shows are great for being able to visualize what she discussed in the books.

Just staying alive before all the modern conveniences was a lot of work, which was why I came up with the house spirit to help the local healer. I’m not sure how a single woman who needed to keep house would have any time left in the day to earn a living. Laundry would take about as long for a single as for a family, and most people wouldn’t have owned enough clothes to go longer between loads of laundry. That may be why so many people made extra money by taking in laundry. It would free a lot of time to hire someone else to do the wash, and adding a few items to the load of a single person or small family wouldn’t require a lot of extra effort, so it would be monetizing something they had to do anyway. A healer-type person who had to maintain a garden for herbs, prepare medicines, and see patients wouldn’t have much time to also cook, keep the house reasonably clean, and do laundry. And so we have Gladys in my books.

TV

Steampunk Fairies

While I’m on the subject of things that might remind you of some of my books, I’ve been watching Carnival Row on Amazon, and it’s kind of like a mix of my Fairy Tale series and my Rebels series. It’s a steampunk world with the fae in it.

I’m not entirely sure I like it. It’s interesting and I want to see what happens, but I’m not really enjoying watching it. In fact, I have to be doing something else like knitting or working puzzles while I’m watching because it’s a bit unpleasant to just watch. I’d compare it to A Game of Thrones in tone. It’s got that same grim grayness to the look of it, and almost all the characters are pretty awful people. The “good guys” are just less awful than everyone else. In fact, the “hero” has what I guess is meant to be a “save the cat” moment early in the pilot in which he does something reasonably good, and it stands out as unusual in this world although it’s really just basic decency. He’s not totally terrible, yay. There is a character who gets a surprisingly satisfying growth arc and there’s another character I’m hoping will get his act together, though where I am now in the story he’s pretty hate-worthy. I think part of the problem is that the writers focused so much on creating horrible, complex antagonists that they forgot to make the main characters interesting. There’s only so much Orlando Bloom can do with a character who mostly just mopes a lot, and he’s grubby enough that he’s not even that pretty in this.

But the world is pretty fascinating. From what I can tell (I’m still not entirely clear on the backstory, even though I’ve started season 2), there was some kind of war in the world of the fae, and refugees have come to the human world, where they’re treated the way refugees generally are, especially if they’re seen as different (not so well). It’s a kind of Dickensian Victorian world, very steampunky, though the war stuff has a World War I look. There are airships.

The first season is essentially a police procedural set against a lot of political maneuvering. There’s a serial killer, and there doesn’t seem to be a link between the victims—until our hero the police detective finds a surprising link. Meanwhile, there are social issues involving the fae in human society, a politician’s wife scheming for power, and a snobbish sister and brother dealing with a wealthy fae who’s moved into their neighborhood, much to their dismay. In the middle of this is the newly arrived fae woman who thinks her former lover, the police detective, has been dead for years.

I should warn that it’s at about the sex/violence language of Game of Thrones. Very graphic violence, a lot of nudity (especially female), some fairly graphic sex scenes, R-rated language. Not family-friendly entertainment. But if you like stories about the fae and the steampunk aesthetic, give it a shot.

One other link to my books is that one of the writing staff members was going to be the head writer for one of the attempts to make an Enchanted, Inc. TV series. I wish that project had worked out because she really grasped the concept. We had a conference call in which she gave me the pitch they were going to give to networks and production companies, and she nailed it, really capturing the spirit of the books. It’s nice to see that she landed somewhere else when that didn’t work out.

Speaking of stories about the fae, I’m participating in a group promo of books about the fae. You can find a whole collection to browse here. This is my first time to try one of these group promo thingies, and it would really help me if you click on the link because then I get credit for sharing it and have a better chance of getting into future promos where we all share each other’s books. Check it out and see if there’s something that looks interesting.

movies, TV, writing

Redemption Arcs

In the book I’m currently working on, for the first time in my career I have scenes written from the perspective of one of the villains. He’s a henchman, not the big bad, and he’s the one sent out as the errand boy for the offstage villain. I haven’t decided yet if this guy is going to get a redemption arc, if maybe he’ll end up turning against the villain and joining the good guys, but pondering that has had me thinking about redemption arcs. I like them in theory. I belong to a religious tradition that’s all about redemption and believes that no one is beyond salvation, but I’m also picky about fictional redemption. I love the moment when a villain flips and joins the good guys, but I want to really feel the redemption, and I don’t want someone who’s done true evil to get off lightly.

A few years ago in a TV discussion forum, I jokingly came up with the redemption equation:

bad deeds=good deeds+remorse+suffering

The idea is that both sides of the equation have to balance for the redemption arc to be satisfying. If the good deeds, the remorse the character feels for the bad deeds, and the suffering don’t seem equal to the bad deeds the character has done, it doesn’t work. By suffering, I mean the consequences for the bad deeds, like prison time or other people not liking them; karmic payback; or mitigating circumstances (like a street kid taken in by the leader of a criminal gang). It doesn’t count if it’s suffering the characters bring on themselves. If you murder your parents, you don’t get suffering points for being an orphan, for instance. The worse the bad deeds are, the more the other things have to make up for it. It does get to the point where the bad deeds are so bad that you can’t imagine making up for it in a way that would allow an audience to accept a redemption. That doesn’t mean the character can’t ever be redeemed, but it may require the character to die for redemption to work. You can’t imagine that character just going on and hanging out with the other good guys.

Not that people haven’t written that. One of my biggest gripes with the TV series Once Upon a Time was the fact that the big bad from season one, someone who was shown to have casually murdered innocents because she was having a bad day and who cursed an entire civilization, was crowned Queen of the Universe by her former victims in the series finale, after she’d spent most of the series being friends with her former victims — and in spite of her never apologizing or acknowledging the harm she’d done. She just stopped being evil, with no explanation for why she stopped, and she never actually changed her attitude.

And I think that’s key to the redemption arc. There has to be a reason the villain stops villaining, and usually it’s the “are we the baddies?” moment, when the villain realizes that they’ve been wrong. If they don’t realize that killing and torturing people is bad or that they were on the wrong side and their reasons for doing evil weren’t valid, why would they change?

This is my problem with the “redemption” of Darth Vader (you knew this would get around to Star Wars, didn’t you?). I don’t know that we ever really got the moment of him realizing he was in the wrong. His redemption involved him choosing his son over the guy he was already planning to betray. That’s still a somewhat selfish move. He couldn’t stir himself to save entire planets, but when it was his son in danger, then he acted. Now, maybe I could be generous and say that hearing Luke refuse to kill him because he’s a Jedi like his father gave him his, “Whoa, I’ve been doing it wrong,” moment, but it’s still not super satisfying to me. It only really works because he immediately dies. It wouldn’t have worked if he’d lived and had become a good guy, hanging out with his kids. I’m not even that keen on the fact that he got to be a Force ghost. I don’t know if that’s the equivalent of Force heaven, but a last-minute change of heart doesn’t seem like it should allow him to hang around as a Force ghost, and I was especially irked when they re-edited it to be his younger self, when they didn’t also change Obi-Wan (and would Luke even have known who that random young guy who looked nothing like the man under the mask was?).

Image of dying, maskless Darth Vader. Text: I chose you over the guy I was planning to betray. You were right, there is good in me!

In the Star Wars world, they did a bit better with the redemption of Kylo Ren. It happened before the very end. He had a chance to really think about what he’d done, and he made an active choice to go help Rey — that wasn’t a spur of the moment decision. And, again, he died, giving up his life for someone else’s. He didn’t get to hang around with the good guys and live happily ever after.

As bad as Once Upon a Time was with that one character, they also managed to do it right. Their version of Captain Hook had some good reasons for being the way he was (explanations, not excuses). He had been wronged. He just went over the top in doing something about it. He had a big realization that he’d wasted his life in revenge and that people didn’t like him because he’d done horrible things. He even later counseled other villains about this and helped turn people away from becoming villains by sharing his advice. When he ran into former victims, he tried to atone and set things right with them. He got hit by a lot of karma on his way to redemption. It seemed like every time he did something bad, he’d get hit by a car, kidnapped, etc. And his suffering didn’t end when he turned good. He did some pretty big heroic acts as a good guy, so he had the good deeds to balance the bad. They did another good redemption arc on the Wonderland spinoff, with a character who was a villain for the first half of the series having a huge turnaround, realizing how badly she’d screwed up. She had to face some of her victims and learn how she affected them, and she had to work to earn the trust of the people she’d hurt, even after she turned good.

I do think it works better for the henchmen to be redeemed, the ones who were following orders or who’d been taught evil. It’s less believable when the big bad, the one who came up with and led the evil schemes, changes sides. Though it might make for a fun story if the big bad did change sides but all the henchmen were still on board with the previous goals and ended up fighting against the former big bad.

I think there’s room for my guy to be redeemed. He hasn’t done any large-scale evil. He’s the kind of weasel who stirs other people up to do his dirty work rather than doing it for himself. He’s suffered some, and he comes from a background that somewhat explains why he’s the way he is. He just made some poor choices in response to those circumstances. He’s enough of a jerk that I can’t imagine him joining the found family of team good guys, but he might realize the big bad has been using him and switch sides in the final showdown. We’ll see.

TV

Seeing Ghosts

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a TV promo for a new show, and it caught my attention when it appeared that this show was about a journalist who talked to ghosts. Gee, where have I heard that before?

The show was Not Dead Yet, and it premiered this week, so I watched it. It turns out to have only a few things in common with my mystery series. It’s more of a chick-litty sitcom (though fortunately without the laugh track) rather than a mystery, and it is based on a book, just not mine. The premise is that a woman in her late 30s finds herself having to start her life over again after the boyfriend she dropped her whole life and career for to follow him to London dumps her. Now she’s back, hoping to pick up where she left off, only to find that her friends have married and started families and have moved up to editor positions in the newspaper where she used to work, while the only job she can get there is writing obituaries. Then she finds that she’s haunted by the people she’s assigned to write about. Each episode appears to be about her dealing with some issue in her life and the ghost trying to help by teaching some kind of life lesson. The ghost only goes away when she turns in the obituary, but then the next one arrives when she gets the next assignment.

In the two episodes that were on this week, she didn’t have to solve the murder of any of the ghosts, and she only sees that one ghost while she’s working on the obituary instead of seeing all ghosts, all the time. But since one of her goals is to get out of writing obituaries and become a “real” reporter again, I’m sure there’s bound to be an episode in which there’s a question about the person’s death and she uses the fact that she can interview the ghost to try to solve it so she can write the crime article.

Aside from the reporter who can talk to ghosts, the other similarities to my series are small. She does use pretending to talk on her cell phone as a way to cover up talking to a ghost in public. And there is a character named Lexi, but she’s not the heroine. She’s sort of the antagonist, the daughter of the newspaper owner who’s now running the paper. The heroine and her friends used to hate this woman, but when the heroine comes back to town, she finds that her friends have become friends with her. The heroine is still kind of at odds with her.

I’m honestly not entirely sure how much I like this series and if I want to watch it on an ongoing basis. I like the ghosts a lot more than I like the heroine, who’s a bit offputting. I know that the show is about her being a flawed person who has a lot of life lessons to learn, but she has a few Too Stupid to Live moments. I have a very low cringe tolerance and suffer from secondhand embarrassment, and there’s a lot of that in this show. But I’m still curious about how they handle the ghost stuff, and I’m worried about unintentionally copying something if I write another of my ghost mysteries, so I kind of feel like I have to watch so I know what to avoid.

If you like the idea of a journalist who can talk to ghosts and are okay with her not having to solve their murders, you might want to check this out. It’s on ABC on Wednesdays, and it looks like it streams on Hulu. If you want the journalist to be solving murders, read my Lucky Lexie mystery series.

movies, TV, writing

Epic Overkill

A couple of weekends ago, I rewatched the Hobbit trilogy. It’s weird that it takes longer to watch the movies than to read the book they’re based on. They took a fairly simple book that was written to read to a kid at bedtime and turned it into a bloated epic. It’s pretty obvious the parts in the movies that came directly from the book. They tend to have a warmth and wit and are on a “human” scale (using the term loosely for this story). It made me think about epic vs. intimate in fiction. I think sometimes when writers or filmmakers go overboard in trying to make things exciting by making them epic, it comes back around to being dull. I kept checking the clock while watching these movies, and usually during the biggest, most “epic” scenes.

I think a lot of that comes down to something I’ve heard said about the news, that two lives lost is a tragedy, and two thousand is a statistic. Seeing one character we care about in a reasonable amount of peril against a foe they have a chance of fighting against can be gripping, but seeing thousands of faceless CGI characters we’ve never “met” in a massive battle is boring.

I had a similar problem with the overkill in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. There were so many cases when our heroes would be overwhelmed by swarms of orcs, and those scenes got kind of ridiculous. It was hard to believe that they could survive those odds without major plot armor. The scene would end up being the hero fighting about six stuntman orcs while dozens of CGI orcs swarmed around. I guess all the bonus extraneous orcs were meant to make the scene exciting, but it had the opposite effect on me. If they’d kept it to the few stuntman orcs, it would have made for a more engaging scene.

I think one way that the Rings of Power series worked for me was that the fights all had reasonable odds. It wasn’t a mass of CGI characters. It was mostly characters we knew fighting a realistic size opponent. We saw more of the one-on-one fighting in a way that seemed like either side had a chance of winning, without the need for plot armor and with skills that fit what we knew about the characters.

I’m in no danger of going too epic because that kind of mass battle doesn’t really interest me, but looking at things this way made me more aware of what interests me. I’m far more engaged by character interactions than I am by battles, and if you want me really engaged, make me care about the people. A few weeks ago, I had to pace the living room during an episode of Andor (to switch franchises) because I was so anxious about what would happen to the characters in a big heist/fight scene. I cared about those people, and the focus was on the characters we knew instead of them trying to make everything massive (it turned out that they actually had some other plans, but COVID restrictions meant they couldn’t do a big crowd scene, and so they wrote around their limitations in a way that made the story work better).

If you make me care, you don’t need all the epic bells and whistles to engage me. The makers of The Hobbit movies wasted a lot of money on CGI when they had strong enough characters (and actors) to keep us involved with something on a smaller scale.

writing, TV

Sympathy for the Villain

I’ve mentioned more than a few times that I’m not a fan of villains. I don’t pull for the bad guys until/unless they truly turn themselves around in a way that shows they know where they went wrong and sincerely feel bad about what they’ve done. I don’t care how sad their backstory is or how sexy and misunderstood they are. I’ll still be on Team Good Guys. And I resent stories that try to make me feel bad for the villains because they grew up poor and were mistreated, or anything like that. In the real world, the real villains on a big scale tend to be those who grew up with privilege and feel entitled.

But the series Andor is doing some interesting things about building (and removing) sympathy for villain characters, and not by doing the usual “sad childhood” things. I’m going to try to keep it vague to avoid spoilers, but I recommend watching this series. Even if you don’t like Star Wars, this isn’t really “Star Warsy.” It’s more of a spy thriller in a science fiction setting. There are no Jedi, there’s no mention of the Force. It’s a look at life under the rule of the Empire for people at all levels of society.

One thing they do to make you look at the villain characters in a different way is to put the various storylines in silos. There’s a storyline about the Imperial Security Bureau that’s tracking down and eliminating threats to the Empire. There’s no doubt that these are the bad guys, but because everyone in the storyline would be considered villains, the protagonist of this storyline is a villain but is sort of the “good guy” for this story, as long as it’s not intersecting with any of the actual good guys. They do all the sorts of things you do to set up a protagonist. This woman is clearly smart and capable, and yet she’s an underdog because she can’t get people to listen to her. She’s figuring out what’s going on with the rebel movement, but she gets in trouble for crossing jurisdictional boundaries instead of praised for spotting a potential threat. I think just about anyone who’s worked in a business setting can relate to feeling like the smartest person in the room but not being able to get anyone to listen because they’re all stuck in petty bureaucratic fiefdoms. When she finally got recognized for her work, I caught myself cheering for her — and then I remembered that this is a bad thing. We don’t want the Empire figuring out what’s going on with the rebels. It was an interesting way to make us sympathize with her and see her as a human being without playing the “poor, sad backstory” card. It won’t make me hate her less when she comes into actual direct conflict with any of the good guy characters, but it does make me see the threat they face. This incredibly competent person who’s had to struggle to be recognized is scarier than your typical mustache-twirling one-dimensional villain.

There’s another character that’s giving me emotional whiplash. In a way, he’s similar to this woman in not being able to get his superiors to listen to him, but what we see first about him is that he’s focused on appearances. The very first thing we learn is that he’s had his uniform tailored and enhanced to have extra decorative piping. It’s such a silly little detail, but it tells us so much about him and sets up what he ends up doing. I hated this guy more than any of the Star Wars villains because he reminded me of people I’ve had to deal with. I referred to him as the Hall Monitor from Hell. When he got consequences I felt bad for him because his consequences were bad, and we also got a glimpse of where he came from, but then when it was clear that he’d learned nothing, I hated him again. Either way, I care, whether it’s wanting to see him get taken down a peg or four or hoping he learns something and gets better.

I’ve struggled with writing villains and tend to keep them offstage, but I’m going to study this and see if I can use any of it in my work. Can I show things from the villain’s perspective and make readers care, even if what they care about is the villain falling into a volcano?