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The TV Curve
Cracked, again one of my favorite websites, has an infographic on the rise and fall of TV shows, arguing that they start out shaky in the first season, get better the second, reach a plateau and then start to decline by the sixth.
This is more accurate than they realize. One thing I used to do was copy episode ratings from TV.com and see how the quality of shows changed over time. I love analyzing pointless data — hence the astronomy career. Anyway, the TV.com ratings allowed me to look the evolution of TV shows from a biased but consistent point of view. Biased, because they are online ratings and do not necessarily reflect the general audience’s perception. But consistent, because they are the same or similar audiences (and the registration requirement mitigates vote rigging).
A few things I discovered, based entirely on these ratings:
First, most TV shows tends to follow a pattern very similar to the one described by Cracked.
1) At first, the quality is uneven, slowly improving, but with the occasional clunker thrown in.
2) The show hits its stride and is consistently good.
3) The clunkers begin to reappear and the quality falls.
4) The show ends.
No show, none, exemplifies this pattern better than The X-Files. I started watching in season four, when it was simply outstanding television. The sixth season was still good but the seventh was hurting, the eight was bad and I didn’t even watch the ninth. As the infographic notes, a big problem becomes twisting characters to fit plot … in this case, keeping Mulder and Scully from hopping into the sack because the writers thought it would ruined the show. It would have … but sometimes you got to let characters do what characters are going to do.
Some shows have an accelerated curve. Star Trek hit its stride almost immediately but had a bad third season. I would argue that Friends did the same thing — putting together a couple of great seasons before falling apart and turning its characters into caricatures.
Other shows end before the decay phase can kick in. Babylon 5 was consistently great after the first half of its first season. It decayed a little bit in the early fifth season but recovered by the end. Fortunately, by ending the series at five seasons and having the plot written in advance, Joe prevented the decay phase. Star Trek the Next Generation also lacked a decay phase, although, in my opinion, it was showing some decisive cracks in its seventh season.
Doctor Who shows a number of interesting patterns. The ratings jump when it went to color, stay high through the 70’s, peaking in the late-Pertwee, early-Baker eras. The ratings collapse in the Baker II and McCoy era before recovering with a strong season right before the show was cancelled.
Although I haven’t run the numbers on the latest season, the first four seasons of the new series were rated as high as the classic series, with a slow improvement in both quality and consistency. This improvement is mostly the disappearance of dreck like Love and Monsters.
So how did Doctor Who avoided the typical pattern of improvement, peak and decline? Or at least stretch it out over 26 years? By constantly turning over actors, directors and producers. Doctor Who was constantly remaking itself — from the educational show of Hartnell to the suspense of Troughton to the action-adventure of Pertwee to the gothic horror of early Baker. In fact, the decline of Doctor Who occurred, quite possibly, because a producer who had reinvigorated the show stayed on too long.
That’s one of the great things about Russell T. Davies leaving Doctor Who. He did a great job, but his era was showing cracks at the end, with episodes getting more and more outlandish and ridiculous. Fortunately, Matt Smith and Steven Moffat have, to some extent, reinvented the show and we’re looking at another good run.
Death to The Frogs
It’s World Cup time. One of the few advantages of being in academia is having exposure to people from all around the world. Just looking over the 32 WC teams, I find that I work with or am Facebook friends with people from 19 of the countries. This means I have a lot of people to talk smack to. Most are pretty good-natured about it although Spanish and Italian fans seem more sensitive.
Of course, the greatest smack-talking is reserved for the French. Not only do most Americans dislike France, the French team melted down in such beautifully spectacular fashion, I was openly making comparison to Agincourt (yes, I’m a nerd).
But someone recently asked me why Americans dislike the French so much. Britain, Spain and Germany have long histories and shared borders. So that rivalry is sensible. But why do Americans hate France so much, especially given the positive history between the two countries?
Part of it, of course, is an artifact of World War II. Not only did the French get thrashed easily, a part of the country collaborated with the enemy. More importantly, American soldiers liberating Europe did not get a positive impression of France. In the book Band of Brothers, the soldiers talk specifically about how they came to dislike the French — as opposed to the close bonds they forged with the Brits, Italians, Dutch, Belgians and even the Germans. The biggest reason was that the French seemed to take forever to start rebuilding the comparatively minor damage their country sustained in the war. All the others immediately began rebuilding their shattered nations.
But to my recollection, the anti-French sentiment really got going in the 1980’s. This was, I think, the result of two things. First, was an explosion of American tourism. Millions of Americans were suddenly visiting countries all over the world. And while most countries — Italy and Switzerland especially — were friendly, France was not. Or, more accurately, Paris was not. People I knew who went into rural France had wonderful times and met numerous friendly welcoming people. One couple I knew were at Normandy on the anniversary of D-Day and got toasted by the Frenchmen in honor of the liberation.
The second thing that stimulated anti-French sentiment was the Libya bombing. In 1986, in response to terrorism and a conflict in the Gulf of Sidra, Reagan ordered the bombing of terrorist camps and other facilities in Libya. What was significant was that France, Spain and Italy refused flyover rights from the UK, so our planes had to divert a long way around. This infuriated Americans, especially when one plane did not come back. Why Spain and Italy were ignored is a bit mysterious (Spain did allow on damaged aircraft to land on their airbase). Why Malta, which warned Libya of the attack, was ignored, is also a mystery.
I think it was this combination of events that really got things going. I can remember, after the Libya raid, Americans returning French cheese, wine and perfume to French embassies. And French actions since then have only tended to exacerbate the situation — opposition to the Iraq War in particular.
Of course, certain politicians and pundits have stoked this fire, since France makes a good whipping boy and a good counter-example to many liberal policies.
I actually think a lot of the sentiment is misguided. In my limited experience, I have not found Europeans in general or French people in particular to be very anti-American. Smack talking aside, most of my European friends were happy to see the US do well in the World Cup. And every day, our shores are hit by thousands of Europeans coming here to visit or work.
They disagree with a lot of our politics. And a lot of pundits have a tendency to confuse being, say, “ant-Bush” with being “anti-American”. But that could be said of a lot of countries.
Update: Confession of a brain cramp. I forgot to include Charles de Gaulle who was critical of the US, left us holding the bag in Vietnam and removed France from NATO command.
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Bouyed by Tim Howard’s soft hands…
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The Bechdel of Doctor Who
I mentioned the Bechdel test below (and mis-spelled it). I noticed tonight that the recent iteration of Doctor Who tends to do well on that test. Moreover, the best writer on the show — Steven Moffat — writes episodes that pass it with flying colors. It’s a perfect illustration of what I was talking about. Moffat isn’t trying to meet some politically-correct quota on female characters. He’s just writing good TV.
The Bechdel Test
I found this to be very illuminating:
This is one of those things that is so fucking obvious that you spend a few minutes slapping yourself in the head for not thinking of it first.
It’s difficult to assess how films do on this test off the top of my head. But after thinking about it for a while, I’m somewhat stunned at just how many films fail it. For example, of the 25 top-rated films on IMDB, going by memory:
Three of the movies — Shawshank Redemption, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and 12 Angry Men have no significant female characters at all.
Eight films — Stars Wars, Empire Strikes Back, the Dark Night, Casablanca, Fight Club, Once Upon a Time in the West, the Usual Suspects and Seven Samurai — have only one significant female character. Same goes, incidentally, for the Star Wars prequels. To be fair, the female characters in several of those films are strong. But they fail the test. My recollection is that One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and City of God also fall into this category.
The LOTR movies and Pulp Fiction have several women, but they do not interact.
Goodfellas and both The Godfather films have several female character who interact. But my recall is that they only discuss the men in their lives. Raiders of the Lost Ark has a brief exchange between Marion and Sala’s wife about monkey, but I don’t think that counts. I’m not sure about The Matrix but I don’t recall a female conversation. There’s a reference to an offscreen conversation between Trinity and the Oracle. But that was about Neo.
Only four of the top 25 films meet this test:
Schindler’s List, despite being dominated by its male characters, has numerous scenes of Jewish women discussing the situation.
Rear Window passes the test. Despite Hitch’s icy blonde reputation, he always had interesting female characters. Psycho fails the test, but mostly because of the way the film is structured.
Silence of the Lambs has some interaction between Clarice and one of her friends at the academy.
But even those four are marginal passes.
So is this indicative of extensive sexism in Hollywood? Yes and no. One problem is that a number of those films deal with subjects — war, crime, prison — which have historically been male-dominated. Others take place in circumstances where there few women — 12 Angry Men, for example, was written when juries were usually all-male.
In addition, IMDB’s top 25 movies among women is little different. Most of the women-favored movies are identical to the male-favored list and the new ones aren’t exactly breaking the mold. Amelie and Forest Gump I don’t recall well enough but think they fail. Gone With the Wind passes (more on that in a second). I’ve not seen American History X but doubt that it passes. To Kill a Mockingbird and Beauty and the Beast pass, I think. Up fails, as does WALL-E. So one could argue that women aren’t exactly demanding movies that pass the Bechdel test. Even the conventional “chick flick”, if I can use the term, is mostly about romance.
However, that misses the point, in my opinion. The problem is that our movies have, for the most part, been heavily divided between “chick flicks” about romance and “guy movies” about everything else. This doesn’t have to be the case; it simply represents a blind spot in the mostly male writers, producers and directors of movies and TV. Almost all of the top 25 movies could have passed the Bechdel test if writers gave two shits about creating more than one interesting woman character. The movies that do pass the test didn’t exactly go out their way to do it. They just rounded the movies out a bit, made them fuller and more realistic.
In the end, this trend may be less of symptom of sexism than sexism convolved with writers attempting to economize on character development. One thing I’ve noticed in movies and TV is the startling number of characters who are single children, have deceased parents or have no children of their own. This is mainly because it gets so complicated to write about real people with real families and real circles of friends. Writers also tend to write exclusively male characters since it’s so easy to write your own gender and “Gary Stu” the damned thing. (As an unpublished writer myself, I used to be that way. But I eventually started writing female characters and found them far more interesting.)
As an example of how things could be different, you can contrast Star Trek: The Next Generation against Babylon 5. The latter had interesting female characters who frequently talked about something other than men. The former, however, danced on the blade quite a bit, never seeming to know what to do with its female characters (although it still usually passed the test). This was a principle reason why, in my opinion, B5 was the better show.
As another example — the most successful movie of all time — Gone With the Wind — is a vast war epic that has numerous interactions with women that are not just about men (just mostly about men … Oh, Ashley!) Titanic and Avatar dominated the box office and, I think, both pass the test or at least dance on the blade.
I’m not saying that people should rewrite movies to make sure they pass this test. If nothing else, I don’t want to watch a movie and hear my brain shriek “Bechdel scene” when some pointless all-women conversation is shoe-horned in. The Bechdel test is a thought experiment, not a recipe. Some movies and genres are simply unsuited to having multiple dynamic women characters — Lawrence of Arabia or Master and Commander, for example. “Bechdelling up” books like LOTR would be misguided and smack of tokenism.
No, I think the lesson here is that Hollywood still has a blind spot. Not about women, but about life.
The Churchill Problem
Why do I distrust the social sciences? Stuff like this:
By 2090 future generations will no longer recognise Winston Churchill, new research revealed today.
It seems hard to believe amid the current political storm, but research commissioned by the Royal Mint found that, in 80 years’ time, people will not recognise the former Prime Minister.
As part of the survey, carried out to mark this week’s 70th anniversary of Churchill’s prime ministerial tenure, more than 1,136 people were asked to identify three prominent 20th century PMs including Churchill, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.
One in five (19%) adults failed to name Churchill, with the figure rising to 32% of 25 to 34-year-olds and 44% of those aged 16 to 24.
Following the pattern, researchers projected the rough date when the leaders would no longer be recognised, with Churchill’s demise predicted in 80 years’ time.
Two reasons this study is likely garbage:
1) They asked people to identify Churchill from photos. Historical figures are remembered as names, not images. There are many many historical figures I know very well that I wouldn’t recognize in a police line-up.
2) There is a screaming problem here — age. It’s like that the higher knowledge of adults represents more life experience, more learning and more attention to history. Almost all of the history I have learned — from American History to that of the Roman Empire to my recent efforts in Chinese History — has come long after I turned 24. When I was young, I might have been able to tell you who Mao was. Now, I know precisely who he was and how many millions he murdered. And there are entire historical figures — Septimus Severus, William Tyndale, Cyrus the Great — who I wouldn’t have even known about after I graduated from an expensive liberal arts college.
Historical knowledge is tricky to track. Much trickier than this kind of survey.
Weekend Linkorama
The UVA Panic
It never fails. A terrible murder takes place on a college campus. Next follow the “we’re all in danger” articles. College campi have been and remain some of the safest places in the nation. Can we please not exploit every tragedy to tighten the grip that Administrators have over students?