pop between realities

We could be watchable (Just for one season)

At the other end of Series Two we discussed The Sci-Fi Channel’s Battlestar Galactica, Doctor Who’s initial stablemate in US television. Then we discussed the way in which the cult model of television that dominated science fiction television throughout the wilderness years was in full retreat. From the perspective of this blog, of course, this is obvious – we’ve been tracking the inadequacies of cult television since cult television was invented, and have explicitly positioned Doctor Who as a show that moves beyond the limited scope of the cult ghetto. But it would be a mistake to suggest that the transformation of genre television was exclusively a UK phenomenon.

This is also, I suppose, obvious – after all, ground zero for the new genre television was Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 1997 – an American show. Doctor Who follows in its footsteps and dutifully paid its debts to Buffy in School Reunion, and the influence will continue in Torchwood, particularly in its second season, which opens with the most mind-wrenching piece of fanservice ever filmed. But that describes only a particular type of genre television – generally fantasy/horror based, often with younger leads. There’s a second type of conventional genre television worth talking about. This second type of television actually got its start in 2004 with the debut of ABC’s Lost, but for a variety of reasons we’re going to postpone discussion of that particular series for a few months.

Broadly speaking, however, this second type of series is characterized by “five minutes in the future”-style sci-fi settings, large ensemble casts, and a focus on slowly unraveling mysteries. While Lost is certainly the template for the subgenre, for our purposes what’s most interesting at the moment is Heroes, a 2006-debuting NBC series about people developing superpowers. Tremendously popular in its first season (it competed for the Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form Hugo award in 2008, but lost to the film version of Neil Gaiman’s Stardust), Heroes declined rapidly over subsequent seasons, slouching to cancellation in its fourth season.

Dissecting what went wrong is not actually hard. The end of the fourth season – seventy-seven episodes in (which is to say, the equivalent of The Curse of the Black Spot for the new series) it still hadn’t gotten around to making the existence of superheroes public knowledge within its world, setting that up for its intended but never realized sixth chapter (a concept distinct from a season within Heroes). Given that its premise was in practice just a retread of things like J. Michael Straczynski’s comic series Rising Stars and Warren Ellis’s newUniversal, themselves just updating of Alan Moore’s seminal Marvelman run in the 1980s, it is difficult to come up with a good explanation for this. “What if superheroes existed in the real world” was not, in 2006, a new premise in any sense other than it not having been done on television, or, at least, not in a form anyone remembered.

Given this, the basic narrative conservatism of Heroes was a flaw.…

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This will be review for some people, but the blog’s picked up a fair number of new readers since hitting the new series, and some recap is thus in order. But let’s talk about orthodox Doctor Who fandom, shall we?

T-Zero in Doctor Who fandom is May of 1976, which is when the BBC officially recognized the Doctor Who Appreciation Society (DWAS) as the official fan group, succeeding the Doctor Who Fan Club, which had been around since the 1960s. From DWAS came the first wave of pro-fans: David J. Howe, Jeremy Bentham, and John Peel are the most recognizable names. And many of them became instrumental in the meticulous documentation of Doctor Who. Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke turned to them for The Making of Doctor Who, and most of the early reference books to the series came out of their work.

The thing is, their tastes in Doctor Who were… idiosyncratic. DWAS president Jan Vincent-Rudzki wrote one of the most legendary reviews of a Doctor Who story ever as he tore into The Deadly Assassin for its numerous supposed violations of past continuity. The irony, in hindsight, being that The Deadly Assassin was sufficiently good that it obliterated most of the faltering prior continuity about the Time Lords and became the standard piece of continuity, making Rudzki’s tone of outrage more than slightly farcical. Later highlights included John Peel declaring in all seriousness that City of Death, one of the most beloved Doctor Who stories ever, with a script largely by Douglas Adams, was “pure farce” with characters “so stupid as to be unbelievable,” and described it as “continual buffoonery.” Fandom was particularly history focused (it’s notable that Peel ended his review with “Come back, Pat Troughton, all is forgiven…”), and viewed the present day of the series as a falling off from some great ideal in the past.

Nevertheless, for a variety of reasons, the BBC took fandom seriously. The changing nature of television in the late 70s/early 80s meant that Doctor Who’s family-friendly Saturday teatime slot was dying, and it got moved to a schedule befitting a soap opera in an attempt to create a male version of a soap targeted to its existing obsessive fans. John Nathan-Turner made the savvy in theory if misguided in practice decision to actively court fandom, revamping the Doctor Who Weekly comic magazine into a professional quality version of DWAS fanzines TARDIS and The Celestial Toyroom. Results were mixed – audience research techniques were too primitive in the late 70s/early 80s to realize that fandom was not in fact coextensive with “people who watched Doctor Who,” and despite basically having the right idea Nathan-Turner and his production team proved inadequate to the task of creating what was, for the early 80s, essentially an entirely new model of television.

The thing is, fandom wasn’t representative of the whole audience, nor even of the whole audience of dedicated fans. Gareth Roberts has written of his profound alienation from DWAS upon getting his first issues of their newsletter, which savaged the series as it existed in the late 70s because, as he puts it, “they believed that Doctor Who should be more like something called ‘the Barry Letts era’, whatever that was.…

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Call it a hunch – the sense that maybe having an essay like this written will eventually make sense in the same way covering Dark Season and Press Gang did.

Even without that hunch, though, its relevance would be easy to argue for. Though it might require some consideration of a general theory of how television shows relate that extends beyond the limited notion of “other shows by” and spin-offs that provide the limited but canonical list of shows “related” to Doctor Who. In practice the process is trickier. Life on Mars, for instance, predated Doctor Who in its conception, but aired in its wake, out of BBC Wales, and with at least one documentable inspiration from Doctor Who. It’s not a spin-off so much as it’s an allied program.

But what do we make of No Angels? Like Life on Mars, two of its writers got poached for Doctor Who-related work in this period. Unlike Life on Mars, it’s not even remotely a genre program, wasn’t for the BBC, and predated Doctor Who (The last episode of its third and final season aired four days before New Earth). It would be going too far to suggest that it’s an influence on Doctor Who – it’s clearly a show from a younger generation of writers than Davies belonged to, and Davies’s style for Doctor Who can be entirely accounted for within his other work without need for looking at No Angels.

Instead what we have is an instance of Doctor Who reaching three channels down the digital programming guide (ah for the days of more romantic television metaphors) and plucking up a modestly successful comedy-drama about nurses and saying, “this is the sort of show we’re like.” It’s not a case akin to Bad Wolf in which Doctor Who literally absorbed Big Brother into its narrative. Rather it’s a strange note of respect. There’s the sense, in hiring both Whithouse and MacRae (both of whom turned out to be phenomenal choices, even if MacRae took a bit longer to ripen fully) that Doctor Who is giving a stamp of approval to another show, or, at least, that Russell T Davies is.

Nevertheless, there’s something more than a bit odd about it, perhaps that a comedy-drama about nurses does not seem like an obvious choice for something that Doctor Who should be loudly endorsing. I actually don’t want to make this next bit into a debate about the critic in question, so I’m going to go ahead and offer a quote without naming the critic. Google it if you must – it won’t surprise anyone, but it’s really not relevant. In any case, one famous-in-fandom critic proclaimed, “a quick look at the credentials of Toby Whitehouse [sic] will tell you that this is a man with a background in demographically-engineered, easy-sell television. This is the man who created Channel 4’s nurses-are-gagging-for-it series No Angels, the only redeeming feature of which was the opportunity to see Lynda Moss having oral sex performed on her while wearing a nurse’s outfit.…

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Part of its success, of course, meant that Doctor Who by 2006 had acquired stablemates at the BBC. This is a prime example. One of the first acquisitions Julie Gardner made upon becoming Head of Drama for BBC Wales, featuring two writers who would be poached by Russell T Davies over the next two years, and, of course, featuring future Master John Simm playing Sam Tyler, the surname apparently picked by Matthew Graham’s Doctor Who fan of a daughter, Life on Mars is impossible to discuss Doctor Who without mentioning. Especially because it’s ostensibly a sci-fi show.

The word “ostensibly” is such trouble here, though. Life on Mars is in no way aimed straightforwardly at the normative cult audience. Yes, there’s something vaguely resembling a time travel plot. But it’s not a cult sci-fi show, as evidenced by the appalling ending cooked up by the American remake that postulates that the entire series has been a virtual reality simulation for the crew of the first manned mission to Mars. That this ending was so unsatisfying speaks volumes about how little this premise is actually a sci-fi show. Inasmuch as it is, really we’re in textbook Tzvetan Todorov territory where the suspense is whether there’s actually an element of the fantastic here or whether Sam Tyler is simply a cracked actor, if you will.

But even that struggles to quite account for the show. Yes, it has a straightforwardly Todorovian plot to string things together, but the bread and butter of any given episode is doing a cop show set in 1973. Its clever conceit is to do this in 2006 with a main character who is also from 2006, and who can thus provide self-aware meta-commentary on proceedings. But this is still just a light updating of the basic concept of the period piece. The entire Todorovian framework is really just there to jazz up a 1973 period piece with a hint of magical realism. Mind you, this isn’t a terrible idea. Magical realism makes most things better. But still, Life on Mars is a 1973 period piece first and a genre show second.

It’s actually worth remarking on that phrase briefly, as “1973 period piece” is not entirely obvious as a concept. It was, after all, relatively recent. And its existence points towards a larger trend worth pointing out. The first time that Doctor Who did a story that was both set in the past and set during a period where Doctor Who was transmitting was, of course, Mawdryn Undead. Since then it’s done it in Remembrance of the Daleks, Father’s Day, The Impossible Astronaut, Cold War, and Hide. If we want we can add “stories set in the past within living memory of Doctor Who” and scoop up the pair of 1950s stories (Delta and the Bannermen and The Idiot’s Lantern) and the three World War II ones (The Curse of Fenric, The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, and Victory of the Daleks) and hammer the point home more clearly – the range of what can be done in period pieces has expanded to include periods whose iconography has never quite left us.…

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“What about the United States” is, of course, a terribly weird move to make right now. After all, by the time The Christmas Invasion, which we’ll deal with on Monday, aired in the UK, exactly zero episodes of the new series had aired in the United States. Indeed, the airing of Series One in the US coincided with much of the airing of Series Two in the UK. The show’s US popularity lagged the UK by a quite massive margin. So for the most part the question of Doctor Who in America will be tabled until Matt Smith and BBC America, who do, shall we say, rather a better job with the show.

Still, let’s talk about its initial American context on the Sci-Fi Channel. The Sci-Fi Channel is one of the most unfortunate ideas in television history. It was launched as a cable channel in the early 90s, when cable was expanding and everybody thought cult television was actually a way to make money. (A year before The X-Files, then.) Unfortunately this turned out not to be the case. Sci-Fi Channel’s original plan of running old cult series acquired cheap never quite took off, and their forays into original programming were, for the most part, similarly unsuccessful. On the occasions they created good programs – Farscape, for instance, which actually ran after Doctor Who Confidential on BBC Three – they usually ran into the problem that good cult-style science fiction was expensive to create and drew too small an audience to be worth it, which is where most science fiction of this sort falls down. Farscape was good, intelligent, funny, and never attracted ratings high enough for a marginal cable channel like Sci-Fi to produce it.

It’s worth noting that even though science fiction is broadly popular, there’s virtually none of it that’s done in the old cult model anymore. Anyone pitching a high-budget science fiction action-adventure serial aimed squarely at males 18-35 is going to be laughed out of the room. Seriously, is there even a single show that works that way anymore? I’m pretty sure they’ve all adopted some version of the high emotional content/soap opera plotting approach now. (The last arguable survivor I can think of, Warehouse 13, is slated for demolition next year, and is hardly primarily a male audience anyway. Maybe Arrow? I’ve not bothered to watch.) And accordingly, the Sci-Fi Channel, these days rebranded as the non-committal and more trademarkable SyFy, steadily became a shockingly low rent channel known for deliberate pieces of cheese like Sharktopus, more ghost hunting than you can shake a stick at, and a lot of professional wrestling. (A parenthetical on this, as it may well be an entirely US thing – professional wrestling is not actually a sport but a simulated one in which results are pre-determined and stuntmen perform fake wrestling matches according to long-running plotlines. Basically, it’s a gobsmackingly homoerotic soap opera that pretends to be a sports competition. So like the Premier League, only with more match-fixing.)…

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