Well better late than never….
I hear that BBC is going to start showing The Wire soon. It’s seven years since the first one but like any classic it doesn't date and I only started watching a couple of months ago. It’ll be interesting to see if they leave the swearing in. The violence is sparse but as I said before, shocking.
The recent showing of Red Riding on Channel 4 brought into sharp relief for me the difference in quality of TV writing between here and the USA. I stuck with all six hours of that badly written over-stylised piece of crap in the hope that something would happen, it would all come together and everything would be explained. Now I don’t think I’m particularly thick, but the one rule about a whodunit is that you should care who in fact done it. The other rule about drama writing is that if you do leave gaps in the dialogue, you should at least show some visual information. Nothing of the kind was offered here. You felt from the start that you’d come in half way.
You didn’t care about any of the characters (unlike The Wire where everyone was interesting and you wanted to know more). These people were one-dimensional, nasty pieces of work. What a dark view this man has of the world! I regard myself as somewhat of a cynic, but this guy needs therapy.
The dénouement of Red Riding was embarrassingly bad. It was a shame to see the best young actors in the country reduced to appearing in what turned out to be someone’s attempt at A-level fiction. We were informed before every show that the series was based on “the best-selling cult novels” and I wonder just how the author must have felt to see his work reduced to such gimmicky MTV (without the music) trash. TV shows are made by 20 year-olds for middle-aged folk and the sooner they realise that our attention span is somewhat longer than a gnat, the better.
I hear that BBC is going to start showing The Wire soon. It’s seven years since the first one but like any classic it doesn't date and I only started watching a couple of months ago. It’ll be interesting to see if they leave the swearing in. The violence is sparse but as I said before, shocking.
The recent showing of Red Riding on Channel 4 brought into sharp relief for me the difference in quality of TV writing between here and the USA. I stuck with all six hours of that badly written over-stylised piece of crap in the hope that something would happen, it would all come together and everything would be explained. Now I don’t think I’m particularly thick, but the one rule about a whodunit is that you should care who in fact done it. The other rule about drama writing is that if you do leave gaps in the dialogue, you should at least show some visual information. Nothing of the kind was offered here. You felt from the start that you’d come in half way.
You didn’t care about any of the characters (unlike The Wire where everyone was interesting and you wanted to know more). These people were one-dimensional, nasty pieces of work. What a dark view this man has of the world! I regard myself as somewhat of a cynic, but this guy needs therapy.
The dénouement of Red Riding was embarrassingly bad. It was a shame to see the best young actors in the country reduced to appearing in what turned out to be someone’s attempt at A-level fiction. We were informed before every show that the series was based on “the best-selling cult novels” and I wonder just how the author must have felt to see his work reduced to such gimmicky MTV (without the music) trash. TV shows are made by 20 year-olds for middle-aged folk and the sooner they realise that our attention span is somewhat longer than a gnat, the better.
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