The show is awful, just to clear that out of the air right away. Stilted dialogue, predictable character work, tired clichés, the works. It's like someone crossed Forever Knight with Blade: The Series and then turned the suck way, way up. What's really interesting, though, is how it constantly disavows its own target audience. It seems to happen on a couple of levels.
First we have the disavowal of place and nationality. The show constantly shows us images of Toronto, the CN tower, famous streets like Dundas or neighbourhoods like Spedina. I may have inverted those because I'm a West-Coast boy, but that's the really screwed-up part that we'll get to in a minute. Despite the obvious visual signifiers of Toronto, even the use of Canadian money (it flashes across the screen pretty fast in the pilot) the show refuses to actually say that it's set in Canada. In the Canuck TV business, that's called "approachability," which means that they make the show so that it could, conceivably, be watched by Americans would could, conceivably, fool themselves into thinking it's set in America. Heaven forbid that they actually watch a television show set in another country. I can't decide if I'm more insulting on behalf of Canadians, or on behalf of the worldliness of the Americans that that tactic vastly underestimates, but I digress. There's an implicit hierarchy of the visual versus the lingual, here. It's okay to show us that it's Toronto, but it's not okay to say it. Language is the ultimate signifier, which is ironic given that one of our lead characters creates a comicbook (which they insist on calling "graphic novels," even in casual dialogue... yeesh) because it combines his love of art and literature.
But okay, that's not anything stunningly new. The really weird part is that it's filmed in Vancouver. Yes, that's right, they're using Vancouver as a dummy city for Toronto. Zuh? Americans don't care one way or the other; only hockey fans know Canadian cities, so why bother with the T.O. stock footage? This is double disavowal. They're first disavowing Canadians by chickening out on naming the city the show's set in, and then they're disavowing Vancouver. I realize the show is based on a series of books, and those books are probably set in Toronto, so why not just film in Toronto? And if they have to film in Vancouver for practical reasons but still gloss over the city, why cling to Toronto as the setting? It's a genuinely odd set of choices, considering national and regional identity in this country.
The second layer of disavowal happens on the cultural, and indeed sub-cultural level. The fan-base for a show like this is people who watch sci-fi and fantasy, people who play D&D, people who are (and I say this with great love in my heart) huge nerds. So why in the world would they cast the main villain of the first episode as a pathetic, desperate nerd who's "played a little too much D&D" and decides to call up a demon to get him a girlfriend? What is the point of so directly insulting your target audience? Good sci-fi and fantasy on TV acknowledges that it's audience knows the source material, and it also acknowledges that for all that we might not be the most socially slick folks, us geeks are smart. We read. A lot. It's why we often don't date until we get to university. We can tell when people are making fun of us. We're especially sensitive to it, truth be told, and here's a TV show ostensibly aimed at us, but tossing out every stereotype in the book. We're dangerously obsessive. We're totally incapable of finding love. We can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality. We're ugly. We dress funny. Blah blah blah. Setting aside how insulting it is, it's just plain dumb to do that to precisely the people that they should count on watching the show. Low-budget, occulty little shows like this should be aiming for us as their audience, not insulting us. Strategically, it's really really stupid.
One last note: the nerdlinger villain in the first episode is yet another example of the actually quite dangerous "desperate man turns rapist" narrative. It's metaphorical, but it's there. Rape is not about desperation. It's not about being so horny that men lose control. It's about power and domination and violence. The "desperate man" story is just a few steps away from the "she was asking for it" story, and that's more than just dumb and insulting. That's dangerous. That's a story we need to stop telling.
Posted by orion at June 12, 2007 10:28 PM