http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/tv/la-et-gore9-2009apr09,0,1714476.story
On 'Harper's Island,' TV gore travels to a whole new place
CBS' blood-spewing series tests the waters as to how much slicing and
slashing viewers can, and will, stand.
By MARY McNAMARA
LA Times Television Critic
April 9, 2009
Sometimes a television show is just a television show, and sometimes it's a
canary. A slashed-open, set-on-fire and hung-upside-down-to-die canary.
The 13-episode "Harper's Island," which premieres on CBS tonight at 10, has
billed itself as a television event. And it is: network television's first
attempt at a by-the-book splatterfest. Agatha Christie, meet
"Saw"(film%20_series) for its final-moments-of-torture-porn screams,
dripping viscera and blade-meets-living-flesh sound effects. Between the
beheadings, bisections, eviscerations, live burnings and hangings, the
traditional gore boundaries of network TV are lost amid the blood trails
and body count. If only they could have figured out how to do it in 3-D.
It may be shocking, but it isn't surprising. The popularity of the "Saw"
franchise spawned the "Hostel" franchise and dragged from the grave slasher
classics including "Friday the 13th," "The Last House on the Left" and
"Halloween." Who wouldn't want a piece of that audience action?
Clearly CBS does. Otherwise why would director-producer Jon Turteltaub send
a group of highly attractive but otherwise disparate group of wedding
guests to a remote and picturesque island where, seven years before, a
series of gruesome murders took place?
The murderer was caught but, wouldn't you know, from the moment the last
passenger steps on the flower-bedecked ferry, the killing starts right up
again: two remarkably graphic and brutal deaths in the pilot with
subsequent episodes proceeding apace as the guest list and cast dwindle to,
presumably, murderer and final victim. But a few episodes in, the natural
question becomes not who's going to get it next, but how.
The question is: How will it all play? The gore seems almost intentionally
gratuitous -- a body cut in half with lingering shots of the victim's
entrails. It doesn't make the show any scarier (everyone knows it's what
you don't see that makes a story truly frightening), just more shocking.
And not because we haven't seen blood and guts before -- one imagines that
the audience for "Harper's Island" has attended its fair share of splatter
pics -- but because we haven't seen this before on network TV.
Certainly TV has been dipping its toe in the ever-widening pool of blood
for years now. Premium cable channels like HBO and Showtime took full
violent advantage of non-censor freedom from the get-go -- nowadays, death
by baseball bat won't make their average viewer blink. HBO's "True Blood"
currently takes vampirism to meat-hook, decapitation extremes and "Dexter,"
one of Showtime's hottest shows, champions a serial killer as he tortures
and slays, albeit in the name of justice; his day job of analyzing
crime-scene splatter patterns seems positively benign in comparison.
It's not as if the networks have an aversion to gut-wrenching fare. "CSI:
Crime Scene Investigation" in all its forms regularly features horrifyingly
defaced corpses, often sexualized (a key element of the slasher ethos) and
the CW's "Supernatural" should simply include Blood and Gore in the cast
list. Lately, however, those arterial sprays have left wider and more vivid
patterns.
Because it follows a forensic anthropologist, Fox's "Bones" gets to play
with corpses that have been eaten by lions, stripped by flesh-eating bugs
and microwaved to death. On NBC's "Heroes," Sylar, who previously had
stolen powers with a single, albeit bloody, slash to the forehead, recently
removed the cheerleader's entire upper skull, exposing her brain, while she
remained conscious.
A murder victim on an early episode of "The Mentalist" was not just a
child, but one whose eyes had been sewn shut (by, it turned out, his own
father.) When John Locke broke his leg on "Lost," we didn't just hear a
snap and him scream, we saw the jagged bone end jutting out of the torn
flesh. Several times.
ABC's "Grey's Anatomy," while recently giving us a lesson in acceptance via
a heart-warming face transplant episode, felt it necessary to not only show
the removal of the donor face, but to lift it up and let it hang there,
backlit, for several long seconds, like the handiwork of Hannibal Lecter.
Even "educational" shows like "Dark Days in Monkey City" or the History's
new "Battles B.C." have adopted the sudden splash of blood on the lens,
spatter made popular by video games and the movie "300."
In that context "Harper's Island," with its straight-ahead slice-and-dice
setups and unapologetic scream-queen moments, was inevitable. For horror
fans, the pilot shows promise, providing the crucial elements of an idyllic
setting (more than reminiscent of "Twilight"); a familiar assortment of
character types, including the ever-popular natives versus interlopers
tension; a few "Blair Witchian" moments ("Oh, look, it's the Hangin'
Tree!") and some eerie mood music.
To heighten the blows, "Harper's Island" is full of all sorts of familiar
characters and plot lines: Here's feisty but damaged Abby Mills (Elaine
Cassidy), who hasn't been back since her mother was killed in the first
spree, and her best friend, Henry (Christopher Gorham), the former deckhand
who is about to wed the daughter of the local, and power-mad, landowner.
Here's Abby's charming old boyfriend Jimmy (C.J. Thomason) (first seen
gutting a fish) and his possibly psycho and certainly violence-prone bud
Shane (Ben Cotton).
Some may argue that these aren't deep enough, that the plot lines are not
sophisticated enough to warrant the graphic violence. That's certainly true
(though Cassidy, Thomason and Gorham put in very good performances
considering the nature of the show), but it's beside the point.
"Harper's Island" is a piece of genre, as instantly recognizable as a Fish
Out of Water scenario or an Odd Couple setup. In horror, even really good
horror, the plot and the characters are there to service the tension and
the splat, not the other way around. Occasionally, you can convince Jack
Nicholson to do Stephen King, but here the goals are quite a bit more modest.
"Harper's Island" does not attempt to rise above the confines of its genre
because it's too busy rolling around in them. It's tense enough, mysterious
enough for those of us who enjoy occasionally watching the screen from
behind our hands. But what's more significant is the fact that it could
have been just as effective, possibly more so, without the grisly details,
without viewers seeing the victims actually meet their very nasty ends.
So as interesting as the idea of a self-contained series that produces a
victim or two a week might be, that's not the purpose of this canary. This
canary is being sent into the darkness to see if splatter can find a home
on network television, to gauge the number and effectiveness of the gasps,
to see if, and when, those gasps stop -- because viewers have either passed
out in happy paroxysms of terror or they've just gotten the heck out of the
coal mine.
=================================================
George Antunes Voice (713) 743-3923
Associate Professor Fax (713) 743-3927
Political Science Internet: antunes at uh dot edu
University of Houston
Houston, TX 77204-3011
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