On Sun, Jul 2, 2017 at 6:26 PM, Tom Wolper <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 2, 2017 at 8:57 PM, PGage <[email protected]> wrote: > >> I went back and re-watched all of the first season of the original >> leading up to the premier of the reboot. Cold War paranoia was built into >> the DNA of the original, so some kind of conspiracy in the reboot was not >> unwarranted, but they made it too personal. I bailed half way through >> season 2. >> > > No, I mean something else by the conspiracy element. While detective > novels could shade the morality of police or detectives, code-era movies, > radio, and TV police and detectives had to be good guys. In this structure > moral authority resided in the state and the heroes enforced it. The > original Hawaii Five-0 was a solid part of this. For a villain there could > be a crooked cop or a psycho serviceman, but the institution's goodness > went unquestioned. > > A change came gradually into the narrative. Cracks appeared all through > the seventies: M*A*S*H (TV) made the army into a comic foil with dissenting > nonconformists holding the high moral ground. All the President's Men > (Watergate in real life isn't a narrative) covered the moral rot that > occupied the White House, Three Days of the Condor was about CIA agents > killing their own to preserve a cover up, etc. I don't know when the > tipping point came, so I will say it was with the X-Files. Two FBI agents > do special agent work and also get involved with a massive government > conspiracy. Over time it becomes unclear just who the good guys are. That's > the kind of conspiracy framing I meant happening with the new Five-0. > > My two favorite cop shows, early NYPD Blue and Homicide, had lots of plots > about moral gray areas. At the core of each were competent detectives who > were doing the best they can to enforce the law. That is the standard I > hold Five-0 to and they failed me. > > I was actually commenting on this indirectly on my Facebook a few days ago. Due to the nature of how we are as a society today, there are no more heroes. No more good guys. Take any human being or even fictional character in the past, and we have to deconstruct him and identity each and every flaw. We cannot accept that anybody is worthy of praise. Back in the day, Superman was a boy scout, and the only people who feared him were bad guys, because they knew he couldn't be corrupted or killed or stopped. Now, people have to fear him because he's an alien, and he has to be a brooding, dark figure because he's so lonely and isolated. Writers like flawed heroes because they can be gritty and "real." The Dean Cain/Teri Hatcher "Lois & Clark" series was not perfect by any stretch, but it had a sense of optimism and positivity that "Smallville" and the recent movies lacked. I don't know why Hawaii 5-0 needs to have morally gray areas, but I'd guess it is because writers genuinely struggle with "good guys." It is easy to write about anti-heroes, because by-and-large, viewers can relate to them. What is difficult is taking someone larger than life and keeping them interesting while keeping them on their pedestal. No more Joe Friday or Perry Mason. -- Kevin M. (RPCV) -- -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
