The Regeneration of the Cool
There was a whole page on Doctor Who in Now magazine last week. There was a competition about Serenity in Heat last year. The boys from Supernatural and Lost are all over various trashy celeb magazines with their tops off.
What’s going on here then? Genres that were previously geek-havens seem to be merging with mainstream pop culture, getting glossier and more tottycentric as they go.
No more wobbly sets and used-for-every-alien-planet quarries. Lost may be a meandering pile of crap, plot-wise, but it’s very slick. Doctor Who was mainstream when it started out, but its reinvention as a pop(bitch) phenomenon is a new one.
I can’t decide whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. I'm hoping it'll mean that lots of money gets pumped into sci fi and fantasy shows in the UK, so we'll get lots more well-written, well-acted, well-etceraed genre telly in the near future.
But maybe we're looking at the O.C.-ification of genre stories? It’s a fine line between emotionally-involving, humane sci fi and soapy tat. Buffy usually managed to stay on the right side of that – humour’s a good antidote to melodrama – but now I think about it, quite a few episodes of Battlestar Galactica could be summed up to sound like an episode of the OC.
“This week on Battlestar Galactica, Sharon finds out she’s pregnant, everyone’s worried about Ty’s drinking and Starbuck punches someone in a broody, sexy blue-collar way."
I think I like a bit of sentimental pap sometimes, and I like a little eye candy, but not to the exclusion of everything else. I hope, if they do make that Spike TV movie, the main plot device isn’t James Marsters taking his trousers off (cf Smallville and Angel…in the former he turns up naked and the latter he gets mystically naked by episode 4).
That makes me think of Decline and Fall: “in the quad…without his trousers…dear me!"
In fact, if you consider Spike’s lewd conduct on Buffy and Angel (plenty of nudity and wanky poky) followed by his rebirth as a college lecturer on Smallville, it fits Paul Pennyfeather’s pattern:
"I'll expect you'll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir. That's what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behaviour."
Decline and Fall (1928)
But that kind of fannish behaviour above – finding ways of linking just about any bit of culture back to the object of your devotion – is the aspect of sci-fi and fantasy that probably won’t catch on with the main Heat demographic. Obsessiveness and "reading too much into things" are probably somewhere below Cheryl Tweedy on the barometer of magazine cool (you know, those "going up/going down" sliding scale thingies).
Drooling over the new Doctor is easy to incorporate into a celeblicking girly-girl worldview.
Discussing way in which Doctor Who and Buffy use alien-ness or undead-ness to explore ambiguous sexuality….not so much. Unless I’m making up a demographic, and actually all Heat readers are secretly part-time armchair-critic, Guardian-reading, Joss Whedon-squeeing ponces.
What’s going on here then? Genres that were previously geek-havens seem to be merging with mainstream pop culture, getting glossier and more tottycentric as they go.
No more wobbly sets and used-for-every-alien-planet quarries. Lost may be a meandering pile of crap, plot-wise, but it’s very slick. Doctor Who was mainstream when it started out, but its reinvention as a pop(bitch) phenomenon is a new one.
I can’t decide whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. I'm hoping it'll mean that lots of money gets pumped into sci fi and fantasy shows in the UK, so we'll get lots more well-written, well-acted, well-etceraed genre telly in the near future.
But maybe we're looking at the O.C.-ification of genre stories? It’s a fine line between emotionally-involving, humane sci fi and soapy tat. Buffy usually managed to stay on the right side of that – humour’s a good antidote to melodrama – but now I think about it, quite a few episodes of Battlestar Galactica could be summed up to sound like an episode of the OC.
“This week on Battlestar Galactica, Sharon finds out she’s pregnant, everyone’s worried about Ty’s drinking and Starbuck punches someone in a broody, sexy blue-collar way."
I think I like a bit of sentimental pap sometimes, and I like a little eye candy, but not to the exclusion of everything else. I hope, if they do make that Spike TV movie, the main plot device isn’t James Marsters taking his trousers off (cf Smallville and Angel…in the former he turns up naked and the latter he gets mystically naked by episode 4).
That makes me think of Decline and Fall: “in the quad…without his trousers…dear me!"
In fact, if you consider Spike’s lewd conduct on Buffy and Angel (plenty of nudity and wanky poky) followed by his rebirth as a college lecturer on Smallville, it fits Paul Pennyfeather’s pattern:
"I'll expect you'll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir. That's what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behaviour."
Decline and Fall (1928)
But that kind of fannish behaviour above – finding ways of linking just about any bit of culture back to the object of your devotion – is the aspect of sci-fi and fantasy that probably won’t catch on with the main Heat demographic. Obsessiveness and "reading too much into things" are probably somewhere below Cheryl Tweedy on the barometer of magazine cool (you know, those "going up/going down" sliding scale thingies).
Drooling over the new Doctor is easy to incorporate into a celeblicking girly-girl worldview.
Discussing way in which Doctor Who and Buffy use alien-ness or undead-ness to explore ambiguous sexuality….not so much. Unless I’m making up a demographic, and actually all Heat readers are secretly part-time armchair-critic, Guardian-reading, Joss Whedon-squeeing ponces.
posted by Scutage at 8:08 AM
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