Tag Archives: television

Herding the Nerds

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This cheerful fellow is Chuck Bartowski (Zachary Levi), the lead character on NBC’s new series Chuck. Notable not just for its privileged placement as the lead-in to Heroes on Monday nights, Chuck stands out to me as a particularly significant shift in how primetime network TV audiences are conceptualized and spoken to — or to use a fancy but endlessly useful term from Louis Althusser’s work, interpellated. Like Heroes, Chuck offers viewers a user-friendly form of complex, mildly fantastical narrative: call it science-fiction lite, albeit several shades “liter” than Heroes‘s chase-structured saga of anxious, insecure superheroes or Lost‘s island of brooding mindgamers. In fact, as I think back over the family tree from which Chuck seems to have sprouted, I detect a steady march toward the innocuous: consider the progression from Twin Peaks to The X-Files to Buffy: The Vampire Slayer to Lost and its current offspring. Dark stuff, yes, but delivered in ever more buoyantly funny and sexy packages. (Only Battlestar Galactica seems determined to honor its essentially traumatic and decentering premise.)

But maybe I’m putting Chuck in the wrong box. The show is a cross between Alias and Ed, with a little sprinkle of Moonlighting and a generous glaze of rapid, self-conscious dialogue in the style of Gilmore Girls and Grey’s Anatomy. The main character works at a big electronics chain (think The 40-Year-Old Virgin, though here the brand milieu has not even been disguised to the degree it was in that movie — Chuck is a member of the “Nerd Herd,” a smug shoutout to the corporately-manufactured tech cred of Best Buy’s Geek Squad). The conceit on which the show gambles the audience’s disbelief is that Chuck has acquired a vast trove of classified “intel” through exposure to an image-filled email (think the cursed videotape of The Ring crossed with the brainwashing montage of The Parallax View) and now finds himself at the intersecting foci of several large, conspiratorial, deadly government organizations. Not a setup that necessarily oozes laughs and romance. But laughs and romance is what, in this case, we get. Like Levi’s unassuming good looks, Chuck‘s puppydog appeal seems destined to win over audiences — though handicapping shows this early is a fool’s game.

Monday’s pilot episode efficiently established that Chuck will be aided in his navigation of the dangers ahead not just by a beautiful female secret agent (Yvonne Strahovski), but his nebbishly sidekick at “Buy More.” In case we were skeptical of Chuck’s pedigree as a leading man, that is, the scenario helpfully supplies a socially-stunted homunculus in the form of his buddy Morgan Grimes (Joshua Gomez), shifting the burden of comic relief from Chuck and thereby moving him a crucial rung up the status ladder. While Chuck responds to his sudden aquisition of epistemological ordnance with deer-in-the-headlights cluelessness, Morgan takes to the larger game right away, advising Chuck on sexual tactics and the correct way to defeat a ninja with a sureness of touch derived equally, one presumes, from excessive masturbation and too many hours playing Splinter Cell and Metal Gear Solid.

What impresses me is that Chuck not only gives us a scenario geared toward geek fetishes, but embeds within itself a passel of geeks as decoding agents and centers of action. In this regard, it’s something like a virtual-reality program running on Star Trek‘s holodeck: a choose-your-own-adventure game whose ideological lure consists of nakedly mirroring its player/viewer in the form of a central character who is not, at least at first glance, a fantasy ideal, a performative mask, a second skin. It impresses me, but also alarms me. It is a storytelling tactic that all too serendipitously echoes the larger strategies of that most expert and ephemeral of modern commodities, the TV serial, which seeks to win from us one simple thing: our ongoing commitment. Chuck acknowledges that its audience is made up of prefab fans, eager for new affiliations, no matter how machine-lathed and focus-group-tested those engines of imaginary engagement may be. (In fact, it congratulates the audience for “getting” its nested inside jokes, chief among which is the fact of their own commodification; the ideal viewer of Chuck is precisely the illegal torrenter of media that NBC hopes to convert with its downloadable content.) Plotwise, with what I’m confident will be a spiraling shell-game of reveals and cliffhangers building toward some season-ending epiphany, Chuck will surely feed the jouissance of genre-based prediction and diegetic decryption that Tim Burke has labelled “nerd hermeneutics.”

I may or may not watch Chuck, depending on my taste for my own taste for cotton candy. By comparison, Heroes, which opened its second season on Monday night, was reassuringly byzantine and willing to frustrate. Perhaps that’s the value of new TV shows, which seem so offputtingly transparent in the way they play on our pleasures — revealing to us how easily we are taken in (and taken aboard), again and again. New shows come along and retroactively establish the authenticity of their predecessors, just as Chuck, measured against next year’s new offerings, will surely ripen from empty copy to cherished original.

NBC’s Heroic Measures

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Though I’m sure spoilerrific information is out there — perhaps in the fall previewing going on at The Extratextuals, which I look forward to reading starting tomorrow — I’m as pure as the driven snow when it comes to tonight’s season premiere of Heroes. I’m something of a late adopter of this show, having dived into the series a third of a way through its first season. (I still remember the blissful November weekend I spent binging on the first six episodes.) Now, like much of the country, I’m feeling the crazy wound-up energy of settling in for a great roller coaster ride. I love being in the midst of an ongoing, expertly told story which is also a game of expectations: the audience saying Yeah, but can you top yourself? and the show saying (literally) Just watch me.

So I’m glad I know nothing of what’s going to happen on a narrative level. On the industrial side, I’m equally unsure. NBC’s decision to yank its programming from iTunes struck me as remarkably stupid, especially as I imagine that the Heroes audience trends toward (A) those who will happily pay $1.99 to download episodes and (B) those who will equally happily acquire the content through torrents, peer-to-peer, or other means if the first source dries up. (Acting out the teleplays with hand-puppets, perhaps?) But at the same time, I work on a daily basis with a very devoted sector of the Heroes demographic — college students — who, I learned while teaching a course on television and new media last spring, don’t particularly mind watching their TV on network websites like NBC’s. They even stick around for the embedded advertising, which is what drives me away from such options. Maybe these young men and women lack the grouchy hacker-derived ethic which still grumbles in my guts that Information should be free … of excessive branding. Whatever the reason for these students’ easy acceptance of NBC’s proprietary flow, I applaud them for it. Whatever gets you the TV you want to see.

So NBC’s gamble of offering episodes as free downloads with a one-week expiration date may work out after all. Me, I’ll be watching tonight’s Heroes the old-fashioned way: on tape, timeshifted by an hour so my wife can catch the premiere of The Bachelor.

On Fanification

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A recent conversation on gender and fandom hosted at Henry Jenkins’s blog prompted me to hold forth on the “fanification” of current media — that is, my perception that mainstream television and movies are displaying ever more cultlike and niche-y tendencies even as they remain giant corporate juggernauts. Nothing particularly earthshaking in this claim; after all, the bifurcation and multiplication of TV channels in search of ever more specialized audiences is something that’ s been with us since the hydra of cable lifted its many heads from the sea to do battle with the Big Three networks.

My point is that, after thirty-odd years of this endless subdivision and ramification, texts themselves are evolving to meet and fulfill the kinds of investments and proficiencies that — once upon a time — only the obsessive devotees of Star Trek and soap operas possessed. The robustness and internal density of serialized texts, whether in small-screen installments of Lost or big-screen chapters of Pirates of the Caribbean, anticipates the kind of scrutiny, dissection, and alternate-path-exploring appropriate to what Lizbeth Goodman has called “replay culture.” More troublingly, these textual attributes hide the mass-produced and -marketed commodity behind the artificially-generated underdog status of the cult object: in a kind of adaptive mimicry, the center pretends that it is the fringe. And audiences, without knowing they are doing so, complete the ideological circuit by acting as fans, even though the very notion of “fan” becomes insupportable once it achieves mainstream status. (In other words, to quote The Incredibles, if everyone’s a fan, then no one is.)

As evidence of the fanification of mainstream media, one need look no further than Alessandra Stanley’s piece in this Sunday’s New York Times. In her lead essay for a special section previewing the upcoming fall TV season, Stanley writes of numerous ways in which today’s TV viewer behaves, for all intents and purposes, like the renegade fans of yore — mapping, again, a minority onto a majority. Here are a few quotes:

… Viewers have become proprietary about their choices. Alliances are formed, and so are antipathies. Snobbery takes root. Preferences turn totemic. The mass audience splintered long ago; now viewers are divided into tribes with their own rituals and rites of passage.

A favorite show is a tip-off to personality, taste and sophistication the way music was before it became virtually free and consumed as much by individual song as artist. Dramas have become more complicated; many of the best are serialized and require time and sequential viewing. If anything, television has become closer to literature, inspiring something similar to those fellowships that form over which authors people say they would take to the proverbial desert island.

In this Balkanized media landscape, viewers seek and jealously guard their discoveries wherever they can find them.

Before the Internet, iPhones and flash drives, people jousted over who was into the Pixies when they were still a garage band or who could most lengthily argue the merits of Oasis versus Blur. Now, for all but hardcore rock aficionados, one-upmanship is more likely to center around a television series.

Stanley concludes her essay by suggesting that to not be a fan is to risk social censure — a striking inversion of the cultural coordinates by which geekiness was once measured (and, according to the values of the time, censured). “People who ignore [TV’s] pools and eddies of excellence do so at their own peril,” Stanley writes. “They are missing out on the main topic of conversation at their own table.” Her points are valid. I just wish they came with a little more sense of irony and even alarm. For me, fandom has always been about finding something authentic and wonderful amid the dross. Fandom is, among other things, a kind of reducing valve, a filter for what’s personal and exciting and offbeat. If mass media succeeds in de-massing itself, what alternative — what outside — is left?

The One True Enterprise

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Thanks to an incredibly generous gift certificate from some friends, my wife and I spent last weekend at a ritzy hotel in Washington, DC – where the 100-degree temperatures made us quite happy to stay inside, work out in the fitness center, order room service, and watch TV.

But the one time we had to venture outside was to visit the National Air and Space Museum, my favorite spot in Washington and, perhaps, the greatest place in the known universe. Ever since I first visited DC, at nine or ten years old, I have loved the NASM: the satellites suspended from the ceiling, the Imax theater, the giant Robert McCall mural, the silver packets of freeze-dried ice cream, and of course the full-size Skylab sitting on its end like a small cylindrical skyscraper, a constant line of people threading through its begadgeted, submarinelike innards.

I’ve been to the museum several times, so it was a shock to come face-to-face with one of its most famous artifacts, and realize that – somehow – I’d forgotten it was there. It used to hang gloriously over the entrance to some special exhibit (Spaceflight in Science Fiction, maybe?), which has now been replaced by a room devoted to the role of computers in aeronautical design and engineering. As for the marvelous object, it has moved to the lower floor of the gift shop, where it sits toward the back in its own plexiglass box, big enough to hold a Hummer…

Enterprise at NASM - side view

This is the original miniature of the U.S.S. Enterprise, used for optical effects shots in the first series of Star Trek (1966-1969). It’s been part of the Smithsonian collection since 1974, and has undergone several modifications in that time, including a new “mosaic” paint job to simulate square hull plating. (This concept, introduced with the starship’s redesign for Star Trek: The Motion Picture [Robert Wise, 1979], has since become standard for Trek’s vessels, reflected in the numerous sequels and series that constitute the franchise.)

After gazing reverently at the Enterprise for a while, I dragged my wife over to see it. I explained to her – feeling somewhat like a goofball – that this was not just a replica or facsimile, but the actual shooting model that went before the cameras of the Howard Anderson effects company, to which Desilu Studios farmed out its optical work. (Actually, the miniature made the rounds of several FX houses, including Film Effects of Hollywood, the Westheimer Company, and Van Der Veer Photo Effects – Trek demanding a particularly high number of expensive and time-consuming optical effects.) Eleven feet long and weighing 200 pounds, the miniature is made of poplar wood, vacuformed plastic, and sheet metal. It was one of three Enterprises used in shooting (the others included a small balsa-wood version that appeared in the “swish” flybys of the title sequence, and a three-foot version used to show the ship in the far distance). It was designed by Walter “Matt” Jefferies in consultation with series creator Gene Roddenberry, and build by Richard C. Datin, Jr.

Enterprise lofted

Enterprise in studio

The miniature undeniably has a sad aspect to it now. Consigned to what is essentially the museum basement, it sits by a shelf of books about Star Trek and Star Wars like an aging carny hawking its wares. Once lit from within by a complex electrical system of lights and relays, it is now shadowed and gloomy, its sepulchral air made more poignant by the racks of day-glow flags, posters, and coffee mugs that surround it. (In this, the back corner of the gift shop, the air-and-space motif gives way to a randomly-themed grab bag of DC memorabilia: Washington Monument t-shirts, Abraham Lincoln yo-yos.)

Yet despite or perhaps because of the diorama of motley neglect in which I encountered it, the Enterprise miniature possesses an historical solidity, a gravity classifying it as the best kind of museum exhibit: one that belongs simultaneously to past and present, functioning as a material bridge between one moment in time and another. For as I circled the plexiglass case, snapping pictures with my digital camera, I realized that the real magic was not in seeing the Enterprise with my own eyes. It was, instead, in the act of capturing its image — of being physically present at one node of a visual apparatus, framing the model in my viewfinder and recording the light rays reflecting off its surface. In doing so, I fleetingly occupied the position of the original camera operators at Howard Anderson and Van Der Veer in Hollywood in the late 1960s, whose daily job it was to line up and shoot this structure of wood and plastic.

Enterprise at NASM

Enterprise TV capture

 

 

Enterprise at NASM

 

Enterprise TV capture

This, I suggest, is the real experience of the Enterprise. As a viewer growing up, watching the show on TV, I saw the starship only in its final composited form – as an “actual” vessel in space – experiencing a play-along immediacy that is the basic perceptual displacement necessary to the operation of television, movies, and videogames (we can only believe what we are seeing if we disbelieve in the fact of its having-been-made). Photographing the model at the National Air and Space Museum on Saturday, I experienced a flash of disbelief’s opposite, what I can only call mediacy, bringing layers of technology and labor – of historical material practice – back into the picture. It was like going to work and going to church at the same time, like punching a timeclock that is also a reliquary holding the bones of a saint. It was great; I’ll never forget it.

Bob at the NASM