Why books are better than TV, Part II

I copy-edited a review this week of a new television show about killers whose work "is frequently horrific beyond anything any normal TV writer would ever think up."

"Thankfully," the reviewer wrote, "we don’t see [the murderer] killing the tykes, just their remains, unearthed along with the poor dead kids’ dollies. We do get to spend quality time, however, with the lunatic, as he torments some of his still-living 8-year-old victims."

"Disgusting," he concludes, and I'm apt to agree. But that's not the point. Rather, the point is that his review sounds like a rerun of the torture-porn debate that has cropped up in discussions of crime fiction for a few years now. Once again, television follows where crime fiction has already trod.

Where else has it done so? Think of The Wire. What inevitably capped the litanies of praise for that much-praised show, with its large cast and season-long story arcs? "It's just like a novel!"

Why is fiction the standard by which dramatic television is judged? Does TV inevitably follow trends rather than set them? If so, why? Has any critic ever said that a novel is "just like television!"? Was this meant as praise?

***

My paper's critic also wrote that the show's investigator-protagonists "will pursue the evildoers, constantly explaining to each other, and to an audience that apparently abhors ambiguity, exactly what they are doing and why they are doing it."

Here's part of what I wrote two years ago in my original "Why books are better than television" post:

"That shortcoming is especially noticeable in shows about forensic investigation, where characters will recite aloud to one another lines like "In some respects, he meets the typical profile: White male, 30 to 35 years old, lives alone, good job, some graduate school. You know, I bet he tends not to have many friends and has trouble forming relationships with women." Real investigators would know this stuff and would not need to spout it to each other. The actors' delivery is invariably wooden, and the scenes destroy the suspension of disbelief that is necessary for drama or fiction to work. In fiction, this sort of thing is called an information dump. In television, it's called Law & Order: Special Victims Unit."

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

"We'll be back on the air when we know anything," Part II

Some quotations from CNN.com's coverage of Barack Obama's inauguration:

"[Ted Kennedy] has been brought to a hospital at this point."

"Of course, we've got dire straits at this point."

"I've been thinking a lot of this, and if you think about it, this whole weekend is about change. There was the concert ... He was careful not to overemphasize it."

"I thought his daughters were charming."

"It's very, very cold out there."

===================================

And all this over video from crappy camera placements that yielded nothing but long, static shots of a limousine proceeding slowly down a Washington street. Was Obama inside? Who knows?

"At this point"? Portentous, time-filling blather.

"I thought his daughters were charming"? Agreed. And I don't need a TV announcer to tell me that.

"It's very, very cold out there"? Thanks for the insight.

The concert as an example of change? As my old colleague Dave Knadler wrote: "Let me just say this: Stevie Wonder is fat. Bruce Springsteen is not a working man. Samuel Jackson is wearing the same Kangol hat he was born in."

All in all, the most fatuous, vacuous stretch of political television since Chapter I of "We'll be back on the air when we know anything."

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Noir at the Bar II: Counteracting the C.S.I. effect

Back in January, I wrote about the excruciating experience of being trapped in front of a big screen showing Law & Order: Special Victims Unit at a pizzeria, and the ordeal had nothing to do with the pizza, which was fine. Rather, my agita was induced by the show's massive information dumps, the scenes in which crime-scene investigators spout facts rather than talk like real people.

That's why I was pleased to host Jonathan McGoran at this evening's Noir at the Bar reading in Philadelphia. Under the pen name D.H. Dublin, McGoran writes carefully researched forensic thrillers, but he never forgets that his job is to tell a story, and that stories are about people.

His series about Philadelphia forensic investigator Madison Cross, now up to three books, adopts the clever strategy of following Cross from the beginning of her police career. This, McGoran says, lets the reader learn along with her. In practical terms, it means there is little need for the globby blocks of story-stopping information that make forensic TV shows hard to watch.

McGoran, while acknowledging that his novels are in essence police procedurals, said he hates the word procedural because it reminds him too much of manual, "something I'd get with my microwave." That's another indicator of the human touch he brings to his work and another indicator that forensic, scientific crime fiction can have heart, and not just severed body parts.

Why not make this a question to readers? What writers manage to make difficult, highly technical, potentially dry material interesting? How do they do this?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008
Technorati tags:
Jonathan McGoran
D.H. Dublin

"We'll be back on the air when we know anything," or why books are better than television

I don't spend much time around the flashy new medium of television, but when I do, the viewing seems disproportionately often to be Law and Order or one of its numerous offshoots. Tonight the tedium was relieved only by something even worse: an American network's election-night coverage. But more on that, as a portentous anchorperson might say, later.

My beefs with Law and Order are the (faux?) handheld camerawork and the humorless deadpan batting back and forth of sound bites about Important Issues. The former may have been edgy in the late 1960s and seemed edgy in early music videos, but now it's an annoying cliché. The latter is an unsuccessful attempt to get around something that books can do better than television: convey factual information.

That shortcoming is especially noticeable in shows about forensic investigation, where characters will recite aloud to one another lines like "In some respects, he meets the typical profile: White male, 30 to 35 years old, lives alone, good job, some graduate school. You know, I bet he tends not to have many friends and has trouble forming relationships with women." Real investigators would know this stuff and would not need to spout it to each other. The actors' delivery is invariably wooden, and the scenes destroy the suspension of disbelief that is necessary for drama or fiction to work. In fiction, this sort of thing is called an information dump. In television, it's called Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

I watched part of an episode tonight over pizza, interrupted occasionally by NBC's cut-ins about the New Hampshire presidential primaries. These are terrible, because even a short cut-in tries to stretch about four seconds of information ("With 57 percent of the vote counted, Hillary Clinton leads Barack Obama, 36 percent to 32 percent.") over several minutes of air time. So you get television "journalists" who try to make the obvious sound profound ("Jim, I think what we'll see here is that if he gets just 3 percent of the vote in this critical early state, you may see him change his strategy."), and you get panicked commentators who fill dead air with annoying verbal tics, like the guy tonight who said "if you will" four times.

But the evening was not a total waste. NBC's Brian Williams, no doubt wanting to convey the immediacy of the occasion, implied more than he intended when he told viewers as he signed off that "We'll be back on the air when we know anything."

And now, readers, over to you. In what other ways do books tell stories better than television? What advantages does television have as a medium for telling stories?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

A shite television interview with a fine writer (Craig Ferguson interviews Ken Bruen)

Once or twice during Craig Ferguson's interview with Ken Bruen on today's (OK, last night's) Late, Late Show, Ferguson stopped babbling and clowning long enough to let Bruen make an interesting observation. Ordinary people in Ireland love Jack Taylor, Bruen said, and they ask, in the wake of Taylor's having given up alcohol after sloshing his way through several novels: "Why won't you let the bastard drink?"

He also told Ferguson that Irish tourist officials "say I am singlehandedly destroying the Irish tourist industry." Kevin Burton Smith made a similar remark about Declan Hughes' fiction in his recent interview with Hughes, and the two quips point up the tendency of recent Irish crime fiction to look critically at Irish society. (Declan Burke speculated in a recent post on his Crime Always Pays blog that this new attitude may be a reaction to the 1996 murder of reporter Veronica Guerin.)

But that was about it. There was no mention of any Bruen novel other than Priest, a copy of which Ferguson held up to the camera. There was no discussion of Bruen's hellish spell in a Brazilian jail, and no mention of the Brant and Roberts novels or Bruen's collaborations with Jason Starr. Bruen came across as amiable, if slightly uncomfortable with Ferguson's antics, and if the interview introduces readers to his work, that's all for the good. But for anyone who knows Bruen's writing, there was no reason to stay up late.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Ken Bruen
Irish crime fiction