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furtech[Cranky Pants Mode On]
Working at home today with the TV on for company reminds me why I don't bother to watch first-run network tv. I'm watching the cable channels that run network shows (FX, Spike, TNT, USA, A&E, etc.), most of which are still running on the nets. I'm embarrassed to be a CSI fan, but if I think of the show as pure fantasy (all that "magical" science and sexy scientists and settings) I can deal with it.
Two shows I've seen that I can't stand are "Leverage" and "Supernatural". Leverage is a cross between "Mission: Impossible" and "The A-Team". The difference is that Leverage is neither as fun as A-Team, nor as clever as M:I. What bothers me about the show is that the heroes go after two-bit operations with near-infinite resources/skills to punish them. Most of these cases could have been solved by going to law enforcement with their evidence, but instead the "team" has to go way over the top to trick the bad guys. Dumb.
The show that really angers me (and represents why I so dislike Hollywood production culture) is "Supernatural". The one word for this show is "ripoff". From inception to each episode to the greater story arc, this show cavalierly rips off other shows and movies. Originally, Supernatural was to be about tabloid reporters who go around and report on urban myths (and discovering that the monsters are real), blatently ripping off the classic, beloved "Kolchak: the Night Stalker". The network (Warner/CW) didn't buy that, so they found some other show to knock off (take your pick). Each episode rips off a movie or memorable tv show in so bald a fashion that it can't even be called a spoof or satire. There's an episode where the hero has to re-live a day over and over, hundreds of times, until he figures it out. This was so outrageous that they finally have to reference reference the source ("You mean like, "Groundhog Day"?"). Every show reads like vapid fan fiction. And the writers are -proud- of this! There is not an original bone in this beast. The main, series-long arc is an uncredited rip of things that made "Dogma" such an amazing film.
This is the "New" Hollywood: producers and studios have realized that they can rip off any original work, since rarely will any of the authors actually take legal action and, more to their thinking, since writers and creators are going to complain about how the adaptation isn't anything like their book or comic or whatever -anyway-, why not just rip it off and do it "right" (ie, what Hollywood thinks is good, rather than what made the book/comic/whatever popular in the first place-- good story, good characters, etc.). ou don't even have to pay for it this way. Because the people behind Supernatural actually rub elbows with fans, they're beloved in media fandom despite the obvious moral and ethical shortcomings of their actions.
I wish that there was something that could be done, but with the studio's high-paid lawyers deconstructing all the similarities reductio ad absurdum, even a remake could be shown to be a completely different film. Even the two-bit Hollywood pitch is based on this kind of thing: "Yeah, it's like , "X-Men" meets "High School: The Musical"-- pure gold!"
And yes, I'm guilty of enabling this to go on happening every time I see a film or turn on the TV. I hate me!
Working at home today with the TV on for company reminds me why I don't bother to watch first-run network tv. I'm watching the cable channels that run network shows (FX, Spike, TNT, USA, A&E, etc.), most of which are still running on the nets. I'm embarrassed to be a CSI fan, but if I think of the show as pure fantasy (all that "magical" science and sexy scientists and settings) I can deal with it.
Two shows I've seen that I can't stand are "Leverage" and "Supernatural". Leverage is a cross between "Mission: Impossible" and "The A-Team". The difference is that Leverage is neither as fun as A-Team, nor as clever as M:I. What bothers me about the show is that the heroes go after two-bit operations with near-infinite resources/skills to punish them. Most of these cases could have been solved by going to law enforcement with their evidence, but instead the "team" has to go way over the top to trick the bad guys. Dumb.
The show that really angers me (and represents why I so dislike Hollywood production culture) is "Supernatural". The one word for this show is "ripoff". From inception to each episode to the greater story arc, this show cavalierly rips off other shows and movies. Originally, Supernatural was to be about tabloid reporters who go around and report on urban myths (and discovering that the monsters are real), blatently ripping off the classic, beloved "Kolchak: the Night Stalker". The network (Warner/CW) didn't buy that, so they found some other show to knock off (take your pick). Each episode rips off a movie or memorable tv show in so bald a fashion that it can't even be called a spoof or satire. There's an episode where the hero has to re-live a day over and over, hundreds of times, until he figures it out. This was so outrageous that they finally have to reference reference the source ("You mean like, "Groundhog Day"?"). Every show reads like vapid fan fiction. And the writers are -proud- of this! There is not an original bone in this beast. The main, series-long arc is an uncredited rip of things that made "Dogma" such an amazing film.
This is the "New" Hollywood: producers and studios have realized that they can rip off any original work, since rarely will any of the authors actually take legal action and, more to their thinking, since writers and creators are going to complain about how the adaptation isn't anything like their book or comic or whatever -anyway-, why not just rip it off and do it "right" (ie, what Hollywood thinks is good, rather than what made the book/comic/whatever popular in the first place-- good story, good characters, etc.). ou don't even have to pay for it this way. Because the people behind Supernatural actually rub elbows with fans, they're beloved in media fandom despite the obvious moral and ethical shortcomings of their actions.
I wish that there was something that could be done, but with the studio's high-paid lawyers deconstructing all the similarities reductio ad absurdum, even a remake could be shown to be a completely different film. Even the two-bit Hollywood pitch is based on this kind of thing: "Yeah, it's like , "X-Men" meets "High School: The Musical"-- pure gold!"
And yes, I'm guilty of enabling this to go on happening every time I see a film or turn on the TV. I hate me!
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no subject
Date: 2010-02-16 12:40 am (UTC)I'm not so well informed about genre stuff, so I might be missing more blatent rips, but I didn't find it offensive. Like the Groundhog day ep, they used a familiar premise but I thought the execution was pretty original and different from that film. Making the reference grounded things more than when, say, SG1 did the same thing, because the first thing any vaguely informed viewer would think is "hey, that's like groundhog day". It's a convenient shorthand. Another episode has ghosthunting spods with a camcorder get caught up in a real ghost house; again, you might just say "Blair witch ripoff", but it was played for laughs and any references were fond not cynical. I mean, you might as well berate hot Fuzz or Shaun of the Dead for doing the same thing
no subject
Date: 2010-02-16 03:58 am (UTC)I'm too close to a lot of this stuff and the process is frustrating and not a little unethical (like blockbuster films -never- making a profit, so net-profit participants never see a dime). I'm also a science fiction film/tv geek, and a lot of the source-stuff they use is near and dear to me. You can ref it or spoof it, but do it too much and you're just stealing.
Maybe it's trying to be too many things (a spoof show, a monster/sf show, an original drama, etc.) that (to me) it's never really defined itself (like, say, X-files did).
Needless to say, enjoy away!