Seasonal News

Right on the heels of this weekend's announcement that Dollhouse has been renewed for a second season comes the sadder but slightly less surprising news that The Sarah Connor Chronicles has been canceled. (Also, Chuck gets a third season, but, you know: formula + the geek equivalent of frat humor + half-naked ladies = not a terrifically long shot.)

This is, of course, very upsetting, but unlike Niall I'm not convinced that, if the decision actually did come down to only one of these two shows, the wrong choice was made. It's true, Sarah Connor is the better show (though this says more about Dollhouse's problems than Sarah Connor's strengths), and you don't need to work very hard to read an uncomfortable statement into the fact that the show about scantily clad, brainwashed sex slaves has been renewed while the one about the difficult warrior woman who only takes off her clothes to treat one of her frequent bullet or stab wounds has been axed. But it seems to me that after two seasons, Sarah Connor has had the chance that Dollhouse has now been given to find both its footing and its audience, and has, for the most part, squandered it. Yes, the second season finale was excellent, and raised the possibility of several very interesting future plotlines--John making his way in a future in which his destiny no longer hangs over him, Sarah and Ellison on the run in the present, Savannah Weaver as an intermediary between the two periods--but it did so by razing the structure of the second season to the ground, and in so doing acknowledged how problematic and, frankly, how boring and listless that season was.

Both Dollhouse and Sarah Connor are shows with interesting concepts and deeply flawed executions, but the creative team in charge of Dollhouse has a proven track record of not only producing excellent shows but of producing excellent shows with deeply flawed first seasons. Whereas when the Sarah Connor writers were given the chance to take their show to the next level, they buried it in the mud, getting mired in navel-gazing and drawn-out, poorly plotted storylines that didn't do nearly enough in terms of character development to justify their running time. If you're going to gamble on either one of these shows making the transition into excellence, it seems to me that Dollhouse is clearly the one to go with.

Of course, in an ideal world I'd have liked to see both shows get the chance to improve, as even deeply flawed SF has become a rare commodity on our screens. And really, the true shame isn't that one of these shows was chosen over the other, but that they both have to scramble to survive while Heroes, whose vaunted return to form fizzled into something only slightly less disappointing than its previous two volumes, has got a seemingly endless lease on life.

More Saturday Afternoon Sci Fi

I'll probably have some more substantial thoughts about Battlestar Galactica in a day or two, but in the meantime it's worth noting that it was a big weekend for science fiction all around, with several interesting developments.

• The Sarah Connor Chronicles, "The Last Voyage of the Jimmy Carter" - a strong conclusion to last week's equally strong episode, which brings the Jesse-Riley storyline to a satisfying close. There are lots of good character scenes, and the flashbacks-to-the-future aboard the doomed Jimmy Carter are tense and quite creepy, and do more than the rest of the season put together to make Jesse sympathetic while stressing that she's caused as much suffering and horror as was caused her. On the other hand, the plotting is still middling-to-poor, most notably in the first and only encounter between John and Jesse, when the two of them have to pause what is otherwise a riveting conversation in order for John to spew exposition, alternately telling us things we've known for ages and retroactively altering the plots of preceding episodes by revealing that he knew about Riley's deception for months. It is also presumably an unintended irony that in an episode that is all about John confronting the burden of leadership and stepping a small way into that role, we learn that this whole tragedy--Riley, the submariners, and perhaps Jesse's deaths, John and Derek's hearbreak, the destruction of the Jimmy Carter, the loss of a potential T-1000 ally (who is presumably Weaver--her comment in the present about humans being a disappointment seems to suggest this)--was caused by an abject failure of leadership on future John's part (as well as, to a lesser extent, Jesse).
  
  Still, on the whole this two-parter was the best story the show has produced in a long time, which perversely enough aggravates me, because it is also the story that's given Sarah the least to do. This after a stultifying sequence of pointless Sarah-centric episodes that did nothing to advance either the plot or my understanding of her character. Is it really too much to a ask that this show's writers come up with interesting and exciting stories for their main character?


• Dollhouse, "Man on the Street" - this was the episode that was supposed to win us all over to the show, and while that would certainly be taking it too far, it's a definite step up in quality. Most notably, the episode moves away from the assignment of the week format that's been so unsatisfactory (though steadily improving) these last few weeks, and instead delivers a heaping plateful of plot and revelations (some--such as the identity of Sierra's abuser--were painfully obvious, while others--such as the truth about Mellie--were predictable but still a lot of fun to have confirmed). After several stories that seemed to be deliberately moving away from the idea of the dollhouse as a high-tech whorehouse, this episode returned to the sexual angle in force, and hammered in the skeeviness of what's being done to the dolls by both their handlers and their clients. I like this approach better, but at the same time it brings us right back to the difficulty that all the preceding episodes have tried, and mostly failed, to get around--that even the richest, most jaded, most particular people would probably be just as happy with a garden variety high-class call girl as they would with a programmable person. Add to this the man on the street interviews, which while not terrifically interesting seemed to be trying to imagine what effect the existence of dolls would have on the world, and it just becomes painfully obvious that Dollhouse should have been an out-and-out, future-set science fiction show about a world in which doll technology is commonly accepted (per the last interview about such technology changing the meaning of what it is to be human), not a crypto-SF present-day story.


• Battlestar Galactica, "Daybreak, Part II" - it's hard to imagine an episode that would better encapsulate the complete bankruptcy of this show's plotting and character work. The senselessness of last week's setup is compounded this week when Adama and Lee hand over the leadership of the military and civilian portions of the fleet to, respectively (and I'm still chuckling as I write this) Hoshi and Romo Lampkin, just so that the entire main cast can participate in one last huge space battle regardless of how much sense this makes for their respective characters. Of course, it isn't entirely fair to complain about this since, as I've often said in the past, huge space battles are what this show does best, and indeed the attack on the Cylon colony and rescue of Hera is a tense and well-done sequence, but it's a little sad that a show that's prided itself, with however little justification, on its political storylines, sidelines them in its finale first by concentrating on pyrotechnics, and then by dismantling its political system, in an ending so mind-bogglingly dumb, so steeped in airy-fairy New Age bullshit that even though I truly believed that I was long past being angry at this show I barely managed to make it through the (drawn out and tedious) ending segments of the episode. This is not even to mention the present-day coda, which tries to make some gesture towards a sad statement about man's inhumanity to man, but ends up suggesting that what we really should be worrying about in the real world right now is the possibility of a killer robot attack. Good fucking riddance.

Saturday Afternoon Sci Fi

What is it with TV scheduling?  It was bad enough that something like half of the shows I follow air new episodes on Monday, but now Friday's become a hot spot as well.  On the other hand, maybe it was a good idea to suddenly supersize the quantity of shows I watch on this night, because quality-wise nobody brought their A-game this week.

• Battlestar Galactica, "No Exit": This episode was trying to be one part "Downloaded" and one part "quick!  There's only six episodes left in the series and we still haven't tied our wildly self-contradictory backstory in a satisfying bow!"  It's kind of a dud on both counts.  I liked seeing Ellen again, and liked even more that in her present incarnation she has both a spine and self-respect, since in the past it's seemed like she could only muster up one at a time.  I also liked that the episode made some vague gestures towards some of the issues I raised in my most recent Galactica post, including the question of ultimate guilt in the ongoing Cylon/human dispute, and one possible reason for the most recent chapter--by which I mean not Cavil's moaning about how horrible it is to be human or how horrible humans are in general, but confirmation, if any was needed, that he's a raging psycho.  Sometimes, 'the guy in charge is a raging psycho' is the most satisfying explanation you can give for atrocious acts.
  
  On the other hand, it was an absurdly talky episode in both its halves--Ellen trying to justify herself to Cavil and Sam recalling his and the other four Earth Cylons' history.  Like the architect scene in The Matrix Reloaded, it smacked of the writers' inability to organically set up their backstory in the body of their ongoing plot, and not a little bit of desperation--of their realization that they had too little time to pay off too many debts of their audience's indulgence, while hastily laying the groundwork for the next chapter in the story.  I was too concerned with the very real possibility that Sam is going to be killed off to make way for a Kara/Lee finale (especially given the rather blatant scene-setting for a Boomer/Tyrol reunion) to pay too much attention to the potted history he was spewing, but what I caught had none of the sizzle of genuinely clever writing.  It was convoluted and obviously straining to tie together too many disparate elements for me to expend much energy trying to follow it.  I'm mostly annoyed by the revelation that there's yet another final Cylon (he's Starbuck's father.  The timeline doesn't work at all but he's Starbuck's father, and for the record we were saying it right after "Maelstrom" aired) though thankfully the number of episodes the writers can draw out the mystery of his identity is severely limited.


• The Sarah Connor Chronicles, "The Good Wound": Once again, the show goes for contemplative and moody rather than plotty, and we're long past the point where it can skate by on strong performances and appealing guest characters (especially considering that this episode's empowered-woman-of-the-week was quite flat).  There's constantly a sense on this series that something huge is about to go down--Sarah (or John, or Derek) will find out about Riley and Jesse, Jesse will make an overt move against Cameron, Weaver will tip her hand to either Sarah or Ellison--but every week turns out to be just more buildup.  I sort of liked the use of head!Kyle, and most especially the irony of him being Sarah's voice of reason and compassion when the real Kyle was a violent, damaged fighting machine who made Derek seem well-adjusted in comparison.  It was a nice way of drawing attention to the kind of person Sarah was when she met Kyle and acted as his voice of reason, and how much she's changed (though once again we got this point ten or fifteen episodes ago and it is seriously time to move on to new things).
  
  On the other hand, I'm not sure how I feel about the episode's deliberate (and rather ham-fisted, since Sarah's never called either Kyle or Derek 'Reese') attempts to merge Kyle and Derek into a single person.  If the point was to get to the final scene where the doctor spills the beans about Kyle being John's father, then it was sadly misjudged, since Derek's known about John for months and we've known that he knows since the end of the first season (in fact until this week I had assumed that Sarah knew that he knew).  What I'm really afraid of, though, is that Derek is being groomed to take Kyle's place emotionally and perhaps even romantically, especially once Jesse is out of the way as she surely will be by the end of the season.  One of the things I've most liked about his character is that there's been zero romantic tension between him and Sarah, and I would hate for that to change.


• Dollhouse, "Ghost": As Niall points out, what's most notable about this episode is its tone, and that tone's departure from the more punchy, more funny kind of writing we've been used to seeing from Joss Whedon.  Unlike Niall, though, I find the tone less successful.  Though "Ghost" is effectively creepy in certain scenes, most of the time it just feels slack.  None of Whedon's series have had especially good pilots, but all of them have been more distinctive than this episode.  I'm hoping that we're seeing another "Train Job" scenario, where a more interesting, better written pilot episode was yanked in exchange for something the network felt would have a better chance of pulling in viewers.  If that's the case then it was, once again, a really stupid move, and also highlights what seems to me like Dollhouse's core conceptual problem (besides, as Niall says, having a main character with no consistent personality).
  
  "Ghost" is a pilot episode for an adventure of the week series about a person who becomes something new and exciting every week, but the creepiness of its premise demands that there be more to the series than that, and I don't doubt that the story Whedon is interested in is more complicated.  The question is, which show will dominate--is Dollhouse a formula series with an overarching mystery storyline, in which case I probably won't bother watching (for one thing, because it'll mean that for all the blatant negative commentary about what's going on in the dollhouse, the chief appeal of the series will be the very thing it sanctimoniously shakes its head at), or is it a creepy, novelistic mystery/thriller that rewards audience loyalty and patience, in which case it'll quickly shed just those viewers this pilot was trying to capture and die a quick death?  Either way, it's frankly a relief to get past the hysteria that's surrounded this series since its announcement--it's misogynistic!  It's being screwed over by Fox!  Let's start a letter-writing campaign before the pilot's even aired!--and talk about the actual series, for however long it lasts.

Let's Hear It For the Girls? Sarah Connor Thoughts

A few weeks ago, Micole wrote a short piece about the qualities that make The Sarah Connor Chronicles unique in the television landscape.

I want to say something passionate and convincing about Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, something that will convince you all that this is the BEST SHOW ON TELEVISION, that will make you watch it, that will reprieve it from the imminent danger of cancelation, something about the prominence of women and women relating to women and women not talking about men and about the uncharacteristic depictions of men too

You can find my reaction at the time in the comments, concentrating mostly on the show's failings in the realm of plot while acknowledging its (sadly unusual) strengths as a depiction of women in positions of power and responsibility--strengths which are the main reason I continue to watch the show despite finding it disappointing, to the point of being almost completely unengaging, as a piece of storytelling. I've been thinking about The Sarah Connor Chronicles a bit more recently, though, and writing about it for another venue, and I've started to wonder whether even on this level the show might not leave much to be desired.

Sarah Connor's chief virtue as a depiction of women is that its female characters are the instigators, motivators, and chief actors in its story. It is, happily, no longer uncommon to encounter stories in which women are central, powerful beings, but it's still unusual, even in television series with a female main character, for that character to be the source of the show's story, the person who makes that story happen. Women can be strong, smart, commanding, and in control, but they are rarely the authors of their own life. Instead we get Dana Scully, whip-smart and capable of reducing grown men to jelly with the flick of an eyebrow, but constantly beaten and buffeted by the actions of the shadowy, male, members of the conspiracy, and--more importantly--constantly reacting to the actions of her male partner, tailoring her behavior, choices, and lifestyle to suit his desires and safeguard the things he cares about. Or we get characters like Buffy in that show's early seasons, or Sydney Bristow throughout Alias's run--brilliant tacticians who are frequently in control of the immediate choices in their lives, but who are either unaware of or powerless to affect the big picture, and therefore end up the puppets of men. Even Aeryn Sun, to my mind still the gold standard for depictions of strong women on TV, wasn't the chief mover and shaker on Farscape, and her actions were frequently determined by Crichton's choices or by her desire to ensure his safety.

I like Buffy, Dana Scully, and Aeryn Sun very much (and thought Sydney Bristow had her moments), but it was enormously refreshing to come to The Sarah Connor Chronicles and find an approach to the writing of women that put those characters at the center of the story, as its primary actors. Women, both recurring and regular, drive the show's plots, and men react to their actions and follow their lead. This is more than simply to say that women are important to either the story or the male characters. On The Sarah Connor Chronicles, women call the shots. They are the strategists and often the tacticians as well, and the male characters' choices and actions happen as a result of and a reaction to those made by the female characters. Male characters are driven by their subservience to female characters: John by his obedience to Sarah, fascination with Cameron, and affection towards Riley; Derek by his loyalty to both Sarah and Jesse. Ellison craves Sarah's guidance and leadership, and when she refuses to act towards him in that capacity, he turns to (what he believes is) another woman, Catherine Weaver, for it. Charley is torn between his loyalty to Sarah and Michelle, and though the latter's death as a result of his actions on the former's behalf was greeted with cries of refrigeration, I think it's telling that instead of galvanizing him, Michelle's death destroys Charley and takes him out of the game as Sarah's potential ally.

It's a supremely enjoyable reversal of the more common division of power and influence in television, but something that started to occur to me as one fan after another has praised the series for it is that there's an insidious flipside to Sarah Connor's constant harping on the theme of reactive men circling around far-sighted women. It buys into the fallacy that a woman's strength, perhaps even her worth, is measured by the amount of power and influence she wields over men, and that relationships between women are not important, and certainly not where one would expect to find games of power and dominance. And then I realized that there are almost no relationships between women on The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Sarah, Cameron, Jesse and Riley are, all of them, focused on John, with Jesse sparing some thought for Derek. Depictions of women whose primary emotional investment is in other women are rare on the show, and mostly relegated to guest characters (Lauren Fields and her sister in "Alpine Fields"). When Riley takes Jesse's kindness towards her in the future and immediately after their arrival in the present as an indication that they share a bond, and attempts to strengthen it, she is brutally rebuffed--to Jesse, Riley is nothing but a tool, an instrument with which she hopes to affect John.

The absence of relationships between women is a problem, but it's also such a common staple of television writing that it's hard to condemn The Sarah Connor Chronicles too harshly for it--how many other series feature women who react primarily to men, sometimes because they're the only woman in their social or professional circle, and how many of those series can boast of Sarah Connor's achievements when it comes to female characterization? I was inclined, in other words, to think of Sarah Connor as flawed but still ahead of the pack, but recently I've come to realize that I don't care about the show's female characters as much as I do the male ones, that I'm less invested in them and less interested when they're on screen.

A big part of the problem is Jesse, who embodies so many of the clichés about kickass women that the show has been so good about avoiding when it comes to Sarah and Cameron. I greatly admired Stephanie Jacobsen's performance in Battlestar Galactica: Razor, but it would seem that what I took for a deliberate choice to convey her character's crushing feelings of guilt through blankness and flat affect was actually an expression of Jacobsen's limited range, as she has consistently failed to make Jesse a person rather than a performance. She struts and pouts and heaves her bosom (and while I realize that Jacobsen is the only woman on the Sarah Connor cast to actually possess a bosom, that doesn't mean it should be on display quite so often, nor that she should be constantly lathered with makeup and hair-product), but it's very rare for her to seem like an actual human being (the exception are the flash-forward scenes in "Alpine Fields," in which Jesse's overpowering sense of her own coolness is dampened somewhat, and also slightly more justified). We're meant to believe that Jesse is a complicated person, whose manipulative plans for John are somewhat counteracted by her love for and loyalty to Derek, but she comes across as an uneasy cross between the stereotype of the kooky girl who gets away with bad behavior because she's hot and mysterious (the risible conversation about inventing new words for sex soon after her introduction) and a total psycho. Since Jesse is the prime mover and shaker in the season's most important character arc, and since she will almost certainly end up as an antagonist to Sarah, her flatness is a serious problem.

Still, Jesse is only one character, and her problematic writing and acting aren't the only reason that I'm so much more interested in what happens to John and Derek (albeit, in the latter case, for a value of interested that equals hoping desperately that he goes back to interacting with the Connors rather than Jesse, because yet another point against that character is how she flattens Derek when he's near her) than I am in the show's female characters. What I've come to realize is that, reactive and occasionally passive as they are, Derek and John are at least changing. They have character arcs. These arcs aren't particularly interesting--John enacting just about every cliché of the rebellious, angst-ridden teen--or comprehensive--Derek doesn't have an actual story, and his arc mostly consists of him rediscovering his humanity after a lifetime of sublimating it--but they exist. The characters are not in stasis, which makes them interesting.

The same can't be said of Sarah, who is still the same person she was at the end of Terminator 2--angry about the life she was deprived of but determined to do her part for humanity's survival, capable of terrible violence but saddened by that capacity. Sarah doesn't change. She doesn't grow. In fact, as the series has progressed she's receded, become a blanker and less noticeable person. She's the window through which we see the other regular and guest characters (so many of the series's stories revolve around her meeting a new person, mirroring them for our benefit), and in playing that part she's become transparent. We know what Sarah boils down to--that tension between wanting a real life and accepting the warrior's life that has been thrust upon her--and we know that she's never going to be anything more than that, so we stop noticing her there.

(An obvious counter-argument to this is to point out that Cameron has been doing nothing but changing and growing since the series, and especially the second season, started, but frankly I have trouble thinking of Cameron as a female character. She, and Catherine Weaver as well, aren't women, but robots who looks like women. It seems strange to attach a gender to a creature who isn't properly a person yet, and though clearly I can't ignore the fact that the show's writers were making a statement when they chose to portray Cameron and Weaver using female actors, part of that statement are images like this, this, and this.)

What I've come to realize is that the stasis in which Sarah is locked is baked right into the show's self-definition. The Sarah Connor Chronicles isn't a series about a human resistance against an upcoming machine takeover and nuclear apocalypse. It's a show about people who are trapped, desiring a normal life but knowing that normality is a sham, that they have a job to do that is more important that their desires or moral qualms. If that's the story you choose to tell, character stasis is an inevitable result (as, I believe, is the slackness of the show's plotting and pacing--for the show's overarching plot to move anywhere would be in direct contravention of its mandate as a story about people who are caught on the precipice of disaster). Ironically, it is precisely because they are of secondary importance to the show's plot, and to the point the writers are trying to make through it, that John and Derek are allowed to grow and change (though of course John's growth is also foreordained in the Terminator mythology). Sarah, meanwhile, has to embody the show's spirit. For her to change--to accept the burden laid on her shoulders, or cast it off completely--would be to gut the show's message.

There's something almost perverse about taking The Sarah Connor Chronicles to task for not being feminist enough. Micole is absolutely right to say that it is Buffy's heir in many respects, and most especially the seriousness with which it regards its female characters and the roles it gives them. But the same flaws that make Sarah Connor an unsuccessful story are also starting to gnaw away at its feminism. At its core, The Sarah Connor Chronicles isn't a story, something with a beginning, a middle, or an end, but an exercise in replicating a single emotional note--the sensation of being trapped, of losing one's grip on normalcy, of losing control of one's life. Too many episodes do nothing more than to regurgitate the same story told about different people, who are thrust into the glare of oncoming apocalypse and have to choose whether to cling to their old life or survive by losing who they are. Just as the show as a whole is damaged by this unwillingness to take the story forward, the characters--the female ones, who most embody this dilemma, in particular--are flattened by it. Almost every episode of Sarah Connor tells a feminist story, about a woman who is the leader of the perhaps doomed fight to save the world. When that story is repeated again and again, however, until that woman ceases to be a person and becomes a meme, never changing, never getting any closer to or farther away from her goal, it also ceases to be feminist. I used to think that my desire for better plotting on The Sarah Connor Chronicles despite its unique treatment of gender was motivated by nothing more than my love of story, and that an improvement on that front would be nothing more than icing on an already satisfying cake (albeit an icing that, when all's said and done, I prefer to that cake). Now I think the two are inextricably linked--if Sarah Connor doesn't become a better story, it'll lose both.

Good News on a Saturday

The Sarah Connor Chronicles has been picked up for a full second season.

Of course, this would be even better news if the show gave any signs of improving, but five episodes into the second season, the flaws that marred it in its first are still going strong: great acting, great character work, great individual scenes, but the plotting, in both individual episodes and the overarching save the world arc, is nonsensical.  The next to last episode aired, "Alison from Palmdale," is a perfect example.  Summer Glau is incredible as three different people in the same body who combine into whatever the hell Cameron is right now, but the notion that Cameron has enough empathy to become Alison--who understands and feels emotions, like fear, grief, and anger, which in the past have left Cameron baffled--is too much to swallow.  We've already got one show about a genocidal war between dirty, sweaty humans and immaculate machines confused by these things we call 'feelings' in which the actual nature and capabilities of those machines have been kept too fuzzy for too long.  We don't need another.  Sarah Connor is still the most interesting and complex SF on TV right now, but that's mostly because of its parts, not its whole.

Yippee

The Sarah Connor Chronicles is now is now officially coming back for a second season.

Between this, Joss Whedon's Dollhouse (now with 100% more Amy Acker), and the new Ron Moore show, next fall looks to be chock-full of SFnal goodness. And all of it on Fox. Go figure.

(Link via)

At Season's End

Strictly speaking, the concept of a television season is obsolete. Between US- and UK-based content producers, cable and network channels, and the belated realization of network executives that the two weeks on/four weeks off model that worked so well for formula television is the kiss of death for serialized shows like Lost and 24, it's possible to find first-air scripted television pretty much year round. But concentrating strictly on US-based shows (and ignoring Scrubs, which presumably is coming back one of these months, and which I was more or less ready to bid farewell to anyway), right now might be a good time to reflect on the three shows I accumulated this year--Pushing Daisies, Chuck, and The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Looking back, it strikes me that all three shows have similar strengths and weaknesses--most blatantly, on the latter count, a tendency to sacrifice plot for the sake of character and atmosphere.

A few weeks ago, Niall Harrison suggested that The Sarah Connor Chronicles was the 'best new show of the 07/08 tv season.' I disagreed then and still do, not only because Sarah Connor is not without its problems but because that title so obviously belongs to Pushing Daisies, and all the more so for that accomplishment's being so improbable. When the Pushing Daisies pilot was leaked online last summer, I shared in what was very nearly a uniform reaction: how beautiful, how funny, how refreshing--and how unsustainable. It seemed impossible for the show not to be overwhelmed by and ultimately buried under its stylized sensibility, for its writers not to lose themselves and their characters under an avalanche of cuteness. Every time I sat down to watch a new episode, I told myself that now, finally, I would see the show lose the thread, and every time the credits rolled I discovered not only that the show's heart was still beating but that Pushing Daisies had wormed its way even further into mine.

The secret to this success is both simple and rare--Pushing Daisies is smart. Smart enough to develop its supporting characters--Olive and Emerson, as well as Chuck's aunts Lily and Vivian--into fully fledged people who interact with one another away from the two leads, and with whom Ned and Chuck can have fully realized relationships, thus preventing the show from becoming a romantic melodrama entirely focused on the impossible romance between the two. Smart enough to realize, as Chuck so beautifully puts it early in the season, that not being able to touch each other is only one of her and Ned's problems as they try to make their relationship work, and to explore those mundane challenges to it. Smart enough to sustain the delicate tightrope walk that is maintaining balance between the show's comedic tone and its macabre and often tragic subject matter, as well as a corresponding balance between stylized decor and screwball comedy-tinged dialogue and the characters' humanity.

It's that last one that is, I think, at the root of Pushing Daisies's success. Its characters never stop being human, and they feel the blows the show's writers rain on them--Ned's loneliness, Chuck's twin desires for home and escape, Olive's unrequited love for Ned, the aunts' grief--keenly. The show's comedic tone, however, prevents it from sinking into non-stop angst and despair, and miraculously, it does so without undercutting the very real pain the characters are feeling. With bleakness off the menu, the show's writers are free to explore the ways in which people live after suffering terrible misfortunes--Lily and Vivian going back and forth between listless grief and a new lease on life; Chuck and Olive tentatively coming to accept and respect each others' feelings for Ned, and Chuck making peace with Ned's responsibility for her father's death. If the show's pilot suggested that Pushing Daisies would sweep all unpleasantness under the rug, its subsequent episodes have repeatedly examined that unpleasantness with the same unflinching, and even affectionate, attitude with which Ned gazes at mauled corpses, and, again and again, revealed it to be something with which its characters can cope.

As one might expect from a show with such a heavy emphasis on the development of its main characters and their relationships, Pushing Daisies is not a series to be watched for its episodic plots. Though I've been pleasantly surprised by how well the show's procedural aspect hangs together--the mysteries which drive individual episodes are neither obvious, nor are they so tinged with the show's zaniness that they become completely irrational--it's quite clear that plotting is nothing but the framework on which character development and atmosphere can be mounted. This is very much in keeping with the show's mandate and focus, however, and therefore not a fatal flaw. For a series like Chuck, however, the laziness and occasional senselessness of its plots very often threatens to capsize the entire enterprise.

Chuck is the new series I'm least invested in. It can be entertaining and charming, but only when breakneck pacing or a particular hefty helping of character interaction manage to conceal the fact that its plots consistently rely on characters--protagonists and antagonists--being painfully stupid and ignorant of every spy movie or television series ever made. There's the potential for Chuck to be wry parody of the spy genre, and on occasions, when Chuck himself is allowed to be a spy and not just a source of information, it does seem that this is the tone the writers want to strike. Unfortunately, Chuck seems too infatuated with its premise, and repeatedly makes the fatal mistake of taking itself too seriously. Again and again it falls into the trap of telling us that Chuck, Sarah and Casey are saving the world, when what's really showing up on screen is a bunch of silly, ridiculously pretty people enacting every spy cliché in the book and frequently failing to use even half their brains. A show like Alias, which Chuck is very obviously emulating, could get away with this contradiction through a combination of melodrama and sheer chutzpah, but Chuck's writers haven't achieved anything near that show's heady, near-surrealist plotting.

Which is a shame, because I'm quite fond of nearly all of Chuck's characters, and of the show's benevolent treatment of them. I like Chuck's strong bond with his sister, and her loving relationship with her boyfriend--who started out literally a one-note joke and has grown into a compelling, yet no less funny, character--and I've enjoyed the continuing exploration of Chuck's life prior to his absorbing a boatload of super-secret knowledge. Chuck's premise was that the title character had no life, was stuck in a rut with little hope of escape until a freak accident granted him special powers, and with them responsibilities and access to a secret underworld populated by only a privileged few. In the episodes following the pilot, however, we've seen that instead of Sarah and Casey pulling Chuck into their world, Chuck absorbs them into his, in the process shining a light on the very real and very meaningful relationships and rituals that make it so much fuller and more worthwhile than theirs.

The first season has shown us Chuck's friendship with Morgan and their shared history and customs, the relationships and foibles of his coworkers, and mostly his exuberant affection for the geeky lifestyle that, according to the pilot, was a trap holding him in place, and in the show itself has been treated with a wry affection. Chuck shines not when it delivers spy antics and choreographed fight scenes, but when the title character is interacting with his friends and family, and as he slowly draws his two handlers into it (with differing degrees of success--Adam Baldwin's Casey has quickly become one of the show's biggest draws, but until the show's writers start treating Sarah with the same humor that has made Casey so appealing, not to mention stop having her parade around in her underwear, she will continue to be the show's weakest link).

Unlike both Chuck and Pushing Daisies, The Sarah Connor Chronicles is very much not a comedy. And yet it wears its grim, high-stakes premise lightly. The godawful and tedious voiceovers notwithstanding, Sarah Connor has turned out to be a thoughtful, at times almost low-key show. Whether or not you agree with Niall that it is the best new show on TV, I don't think there's any denying that it's the best new SF show on the small screen, and one of only a few series that actually try to do SFnal things with an SFnal premise--to wonder about the effects of technology and the meaning of what it is to be human in the face of those effects. The question that drives the series--how to survive, not just physically but emotionally and morally, in the face of an implacable and unspeakable future, and whether there is any point in fighting what's fated--is an inherently SFnal one, and over the course of the show's first season it has been addressed with gravity and grace through the actions and choices of the show's main and supporting cast.

Like Battlestar Galactica, Sarah Connor pits machines, uniform in their attitudes and aims, against a choatic, unruly mass of humans. Unlike Galactica, however, Sarah Connor doesn't revel in the depravity that often comes hand in hand with free will, nor does it resort to depicting humans who oppose Sarah's cause or her leadership. All of the show's characters are against the apocalypse, and most of them recognize that Sarah is in charge of preventing it. And yet they each go their own way. John sneaks out of the house without a fake ID, Charley makes contact with Sarah after being visited by the evil terminator, Cameron keeps a piece of the terminator she killed, Derek openly questions Sarah's choices (and one might argue that his friendly overtures toward John are on some level an attempt to weaken her hold on him by playing the cool uncle). Even Agent Ellison defies his colleagues and superiors by pursuing the Sarah Connor case and the perplexing evidence he finds in her wake. None of them are evil or disloyal (not even, I strongly believe, Cameron)--they're just people, and getting people to fall in line is like herding cats, or some other task that not even Sarah Connor can manage perfectly. It's an observation that has been made before in SF, most recently in both Battlestar Galactica and Firefly, but Sarah Connor's iteration is quieter and more subtle than either one of them.

There's more to enjoy in Sarah Connor than just this interesting exploration of an SFnal question. The characters are proving, one by one, to be a delight. I'm still not 100% sold on Sarah, though she's grown on me with every episode, and I still don't think the show always strikes the right balance between future leader of humanity and whiny teenager when it comes to John, but Cameron gets weirder, cooler, more alien and more fascinating with every passing episode, Ellison is noble and steadfast, and after only a few appearances Derek has quickly become my favorite character, both earnest and manipulative, fiercely loyal to his cause and yet quick to question his alleged leaders, lethal and vulnerable. It's a shame, therefore, that the show's plotting is so very, very bad.

Much like Pushing Daisies, Sarah Connor uses its episodic plots to further the exploration of its characters and its themes. Single episode plots are made to work through the idiocy of the characters (Sarah finds out that a mobster has bought the supercomputer she fears will become Skynet, so she calls him on his cellphone wanting to buy it. Shockingly, this results not in simple business transaction but in the mobster blackmailing Sarah and threatening John's life) or through flat-out contravention of reality (a person with O- blood can't transfuse someone who is AB+; my own personal pet pieve, the insistence that game-playing machines are a stepping stone to human-like machine intelligence). Even worse, the overarching plotline is driven by coincidence (of the half-dozen pictures Sarah finds in the safehouse, Tarissa Dyson can name the programmer who will build Skynet; the terminator Cameron kills just happens to have been orchestrating the creation of another Skynet component) and feels haphazard and disjointed. For a show whose premise is plot-oriented, this is an untenable failure. As interesting as the characters are, if the shows' writers continue to allow them to blithely stumble into the causes of the apocalypse (all of which, conveniently, are located in southern California) they will inevitably come to seem stupid and less human, and the show will falter.

On top of a tendency to prioritize character over plot, what all three of these shows have in common is a level of ambivalence towards the kind of story they want to tell. Pushing Daisies uses this uncertainty to great effect. It teases the viewers by building up expectations of one kind of a story--a mannered comedy/procedural--and delivering a powerful character drama. Chuck and The Sarah Connor Chronicles, meanwhile, are hampered by it. The former needs to redefine itself, commit itself to its comedic strengths and stop taking itself so seriously. The latter needs to pump more blood into its storytelling apparatus, and deliver a good plot alongside its excellent character work. Happily, it's already been confirmed that Pushing Daisies and Chuck will be coming back next fall, and strongly rumored that Sarah Connor will be doing the same, so hopefully we'll get a chance to see all three of these promising shows get even better.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles: Brief Thoughts

Taking a brief break from Deep Space Nine, but continuing with this month's TV theme, a few observations about the Terminator spin-off series, The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Two episodes in, I'm cautiously optimistic--not in love yet, but willing to see more. I'm not yet sold on any of the leads, and though I can imagine reasons internal to the story for the slight but noticeable softening of Sarah Connor's personality, I can't help but suspect that the real reason is that a character as scary and uncompromising as Linda Hamilton's Sarah still can't make it onto a TV screen. (Lending credence to this theory is new SF blog io9, which compares Sunday's pilot to the unaired one that made the rounds online several months ago and argues that in the original version Sarah was a great deal more kickass.) There's also no denying that the show is getting an artificial boost both from the absence of other original, scripted television (though next week sees two new Chuck episodes! Hurrah!) and from the requisite comparison to the abysmal failure that was Bionic Woman. Though it hardly blew me away, thus far The Sarah Connor Chronicles has avoided the dreariness, emotional numbness, and backhanded sexism of that series, which is good, but hardly a ringing endorsement. Still and all, there's some promise here, and I'm going to keep watching to see if it's fulfilled. The voiceovers, though, have got to go.

A few more observations:

Right now, the show's greatest impediment seems to be John. This is not a criticism of the actor or even the character as it's been written--John is an impossible character. Make him a hero, and there's no tension. Make him ordinary, and the audience starts to wonder just how this guy becomes a messianic figure. One of Terminator 3's (many) flaws is that it failed to portray John convincingly as either a hero or a person becoming a hero. Terminator 2 got around this problem because, as a child, John's precociousness was allowed to stand as a substitute for any heroic characteristics without making him too perfect (that said, T2 does establish that John isn't an ordinary kid. He bonds with the terminator and helps him discover his humanity, and has a deep respect for human life). Sarah Connor's John falls somewhere in between. By the standards of TV teenagers, he's remarkably non-whiny and well-behaved, but we really ought to be able to say more about the future savior of humanity than that he's a good kid. Clearly, part of the show's mandate is to chart John's growth into his leadership role (and just as clearly, that process is going to involve overcoming Sarah's complete dominance in his life, which is largely responsible for his being such a non-entity), but we've all known kids who were natural leaders and, even at a young age, they possess a certain quality that John doesn't seem to have, and that I, for one, would have found interesting to watch. On the other hand, the show is called The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and its thrust seems to be that Sarah, not John, is going to prevent the apocalypse, so maybe John's blankness is intentional.

Something that screamed out at me in the pilot was that Sarah and John's life in Nebraska was middle-class, and even after running off their clothing and personal grooming indicate a certain level of affluence. The house they settle in in the second episode is empty and clearly abandoned, but it's also spacious and not at all dilapidated, and Sarah stocks the (fully functional) refrigerator with more than just staples and cheap junk food. It's not uncommon for television to depict working class (and even middle class) lifestyles in an unrealistically luxurious and photogenic manner, but it's disappointing to see this attitude from a Terminator spin-off because the films were actually very good about avoiding it. In The Terminator, Sarah was a working class girl. Being forced to flee for her life at the end of that film drove her further downwards into an itinerant lifestyle. In Terminator 2, the people she knows and hangs out with in live in trailer parks, and there's every indication that before her incarceration these were the sorts of places she and John lived in as well. Even John's foster parents were clearly lower-middle class, and almost every item of clothing, possession, home or vehicle we see in that film looks shabby and cheap (with the exception of Miles Dyson's home). I'm disappointed to see that the series has reverted to the television default of unthinking affluence, even if the diamond cache Sarah and John discover in the second episode explains it away.