On Jumping the Shark and other things
Jun. 10th, 2008 11:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficOver the weekend I watched season 3 of Moonlighting. This does not take long, as there were only 16 episodes, one of which is a clip show and another of which centers around Miss Dipesto. I'm not ashamed to say I skipped that one.
Moonlighting is the classic example of a show that jumped the shark because the leads consummated their relationship. But watching this season—that was not the issue. This show was going sailing over the shark at the end of this season no matter what the writers did—not that the writers did a good job. They didn't.
- Reason number one why the show was destined to failure: both the leads were divas. In the extras, they dance around this, particularly with Cybill Shepherd, but if you read between the lines, it's pretty clear. They talk about how it's hard for someone who is already a star to work this hard, how they placed incredible demands on her. But they also talk about how sometimes she just wouldn't come out of her trailer. Or in one episode she refused to continue filming until the costume itched less—I get it. She was asked to do incredibly physically difficult things. But that's the job. Do you know how much it costs a TV production to have to stop filming while a wardrobe person sews a lining into all of Shepherd's costumes? Yeah.
Bruce Willis is not all that much better. They talk about how, when they first started, he was young and eager and just grateful for the work. But by the time season three rolled around, he realized he was a rising star and he didn't have to put up with this shit. Then came Die Hard and he really didn't want to have to continue doing television. I can't blame him—he is one of my favorite movie stars. He was right to abandon ship.
- At the end of season three, Cybill Shepherd got pregnant and Bruce Willis broke his collar bone skiing. In early seasons, the two leads were in almost every scene of every episode. Because of the pregnancy, in season four, there were an increasing number of episodes that they weren't in and I'm sorry, I just don't care about the secondary characters. Because of that, Willis took the Die Hard film and the rest, as they say, is history.
There's an extra on the DVD where Willis, Shepherd, and the showrunner are back together for the first time since Moonlighting ended, and the tension is still thick enough to cut with a knife. Whew! You can see them dancing around Cybill Shepherd, and then Shepherd gets prickly and defensive, then Willis thanks her for getting pregnant because that led him to the Die Hard films and, implied, gain more fame and fortune than Shepherd ever got. Yeah. Wow. Guess those legendary fights weren't just rumors.
- Lest we lay all the blame on the stars, a good deal lies with the showrunners. Why? Well, Glenn Gordon Caron, who I think was the head writer (but can't confirm that) was the kind of guy, one of his colleagues says, who never studied for exams in college until the night before. He was a master procrastinator. Which meant that, as other writers said, if they got ahead of schedule, they'd take a long lunch. They didn't use that time.
As a result, not a single season of Moonlighting had 22 episodes. Not one. Why'd this season have only 16? Because they blew their air dates almost every week. It got to the point where in the second half of the season they had ha-ha self-referential jokes about how long it was since the last episode at the beginning of every episode. This is funny once. Even to an audience member, though, after a while, it's just—why can't you people figure out how to make your freaking show on time? Every other show manages it. For cryin' out loud, people.
- Now let's talk about the actual story of season three of the show. The problem is not that Maddie and David got together. The problem is that, by the time they did, that was literally the only thing going on on the show. Detective show? Pfffft.
In a sixteen episode season, maybe six episodes even have detective plots. And in only four (four!) is it the primary plot. Even in those, it's just fodder for an argument. My favorite is the episode where a man murders his wife in a fit of rage and confesses to Maddie and David. Somehow this gets turned into an argument about the virtues of spontaneity and eventually Maddie agrees with David that spontaneity is a good thing. Like the guy spontaneously killing his wife. WHAT??? Guy! Just murdered his wife! And told you about it! And your reaction is not horror, not revulsion, not going to the cops, but to turn to each other and say, "See, that's what I've been talking about."
In two of the episodes, the story is just about David's history—one with a seven minute long ballet in the middle. Then you get "Atomic Shakespeare," with a version of "Taming of the Shrew." And "It's a Wonderful Job," which is—well, you can guess. They got sixteen Emmy nominations for season two, in part for their black and white, film noir, dream sequence episode. The writers confess to feeling incredible pressure to be even more innovative in season three. While I appreciate this—"Atomic Shakespeare" is a great, and groundbreaking, episode—they completely lost sight of the ball. This is a detective show. If all you're trying to do is push the limits of television, you lose what made this particular show work in the first place, and let's face it: Moonlighting, as it started, was not an innovative premise. It was a completely standard boy-girl detective show, like so many on the air at the time.
The end of season three is a monstrous five episode long soap opera, where David only realizes he wants Maddie when she says she's going to sleep with someone else, then out of nowhere an old friend shows up and two episodes later pops the question. Yes, Moonlighting turned into a romance novel. A bad romance novel. The kind that requires both of the characters to have emotional IQ's of zero so that the contrived plot twists can happen. The kind where everyone is suddenly a yenta for this relationship—even the cops that arrest David for murder, and the actual murderer who framed him in the first place. Yes, when she realizes David's pure love for Maddie, she confesses to her crime so he can go tell her. Now, if this was fanfic, this is about where I'd be crying Mary Sue.
This is the also the kind of romance novel where the two guys duke it out with each other and the women stands by as damsel-in-distress/prize. I mean really, since when has Maddie ever let somebody else determine her fate? It's the kind where Maddie is suddenly completely oblivious as to the motivations of other people and her own wishes, where she takes giant leaps backward in characterization to allow for this forced love triangle to happen. It is ludicrous. The whole thing. So by the time they've completely forgotten about what the show is supposed to be about and broken the characterizations of both the leads, what is left, really, but to wait for them to get it on?
When I was catching this on Bravo, the first time I saw Moonlighting, I was enthralled by this arc. I actually didn't catch all of it, which is why I had to rent the DVDs. But the only reason I kept watching was anticipation. That was it. So as soon as they resolve it, there's no reason to come back. It's not even all that fun to rewatch the same episodes.
The show also fell into the trap of stalling the audience. Giving us kisses, but only in dream sequences, fantasy settings, daydreams. Coming up with more and more forced reasons why they don't get together. You know what this feels like to the audience? Stalling. Cause that's what it is. And it gets old really quickly. For some reason, though, show runners never seem to get this and keep pulling the same tricks as if the audience has never seen them before. In Moonlighting's case—and I say this with complete sincerity—Lois and Clark handled this situation better. You heard me.
I also have a problem, by season three, with the pairing of David and Maddie. Do they have a deeply repressed love for each other? Duh. They're completely crazy about each other. But I still don't think it'll work. (Yes, I say this with the full knowledge that probably the only people who would read this far are David/Maddie shippers. I understand that other people love these characters and this show to death. This is just my problem with it.)
I think this is mostly the writers' fault, for trying to amp up the angst, but we get a pretty clear picture by season three of David's coping skills. He has none. Any time he gets thrown for a loop, emotionally, he completely withdraws and goes on a bender. He's completely self-destructive.
Then there's Maddie. Who has a temper. That's not the problem, though. The problem is that every time she and David argue, it escalates and escalates. Say she's chewing him out for something he did wrong. He'll usually change the topic, or reframe the argument, or make it about her flaws, or some greater irrelevant issue—and she always goes right along with it. He'll turn it around on her and she'll just jump on the new issue. When somebody's arguing like that with you, you need to shut them down when they try to do that. In essence, the way David and Maddie fight, if it was on the internet, it would always always turn into a flamewar. They argue wrong.
That, also, is not necessarily a problem. If both of them are doing it as a kind of foreplay, continuing to argue because deep down they enjoy it, then there's no problem. Except, that when David and Maddie fight, they get really personal. Both of them will say deeply hurtful things to each other in the heat of the moment. This is, I think, the writers just hitting the angst button as often as they can. But this means that the way I see this relationship playing out is that they'll argue, they'll hurt each other, then David will go and be self-destructive. And someday Maddie will say something really hurtful to David and he'll go get falling-down drunk and hook up with somebody else, to punish himself, and to punish her. It's just going to end in tears.
From the way they're written in season three—their consistent inability to communicate on any level and their lack of emotional coping skills—I can't see it working. They're a classic example of a couple who love each other, but love just isn't enough.
You've also gotta love the eighties fashion and the dentist's office chic of their sets.
Moonlighting is the classic example of a show that jumped the shark because the leads consummated their relationship. But watching this season—that was not the issue. This show was going sailing over the shark at the end of this season no matter what the writers did—not that the writers did a good job. They didn't.
- Reason number one why the show was destined to failure: both the leads were divas. In the extras, they dance around this, particularly with Cybill Shepherd, but if you read between the lines, it's pretty clear. They talk about how it's hard for someone who is already a star to work this hard, how they placed incredible demands on her. But they also talk about how sometimes she just wouldn't come out of her trailer. Or in one episode she refused to continue filming until the costume itched less—I get it. She was asked to do incredibly physically difficult things. But that's the job. Do you know how much it costs a TV production to have to stop filming while a wardrobe person sews a lining into all of Shepherd's costumes? Yeah.
Bruce Willis is not all that much better. They talk about how, when they first started, he was young and eager and just grateful for the work. But by the time season three rolled around, he realized he was a rising star and he didn't have to put up with this shit. Then came Die Hard and he really didn't want to have to continue doing television. I can't blame him—he is one of my favorite movie stars. He was right to abandon ship.
- At the end of season three, Cybill Shepherd got pregnant and Bruce Willis broke his collar bone skiing. In early seasons, the two leads were in almost every scene of every episode. Because of the pregnancy, in season four, there were an increasing number of episodes that they weren't in and I'm sorry, I just don't care about the secondary characters. Because of that, Willis took the Die Hard film and the rest, as they say, is history.
There's an extra on the DVD where Willis, Shepherd, and the showrunner are back together for the first time since Moonlighting ended, and the tension is still thick enough to cut with a knife. Whew! You can see them dancing around Cybill Shepherd, and then Shepherd gets prickly and defensive, then Willis thanks her for getting pregnant because that led him to the Die Hard films and, implied, gain more fame and fortune than Shepherd ever got. Yeah. Wow. Guess those legendary fights weren't just rumors.
- Lest we lay all the blame on the stars, a good deal lies with the showrunners. Why? Well, Glenn Gordon Caron, who I think was the head writer (but can't confirm that) was the kind of guy, one of his colleagues says, who never studied for exams in college until the night before. He was a master procrastinator. Which meant that, as other writers said, if they got ahead of schedule, they'd take a long lunch. They didn't use that time.
As a result, not a single season of Moonlighting had 22 episodes. Not one. Why'd this season have only 16? Because they blew their air dates almost every week. It got to the point where in the second half of the season they had ha-ha self-referential jokes about how long it was since the last episode at the beginning of every episode. This is funny once. Even to an audience member, though, after a while, it's just—why can't you people figure out how to make your freaking show on time? Every other show manages it. For cryin' out loud, people.
- Now let's talk about the actual story of season three of the show. The problem is not that Maddie and David got together. The problem is that, by the time they did, that was literally the only thing going on on the show. Detective show? Pfffft.
In a sixteen episode season, maybe six episodes even have detective plots. And in only four (four!) is it the primary plot. Even in those, it's just fodder for an argument. My favorite is the episode where a man murders his wife in a fit of rage and confesses to Maddie and David. Somehow this gets turned into an argument about the virtues of spontaneity and eventually Maddie agrees with David that spontaneity is a good thing. Like the guy spontaneously killing his wife. WHAT??? Guy! Just murdered his wife! And told you about it! And your reaction is not horror, not revulsion, not going to the cops, but to turn to each other and say, "See, that's what I've been talking about."
In two of the episodes, the story is just about David's history—one with a seven minute long ballet in the middle. Then you get "Atomic Shakespeare," with a version of "Taming of the Shrew." And "It's a Wonderful Job," which is—well, you can guess. They got sixteen Emmy nominations for season two, in part for their black and white, film noir, dream sequence episode. The writers confess to feeling incredible pressure to be even more innovative in season three. While I appreciate this—"Atomic Shakespeare" is a great, and groundbreaking, episode—they completely lost sight of the ball. This is a detective show. If all you're trying to do is push the limits of television, you lose what made this particular show work in the first place, and let's face it: Moonlighting, as it started, was not an innovative premise. It was a completely standard boy-girl detective show, like so many on the air at the time.
The end of season three is a monstrous five episode long soap opera, where David only realizes he wants Maddie when she says she's going to sleep with someone else, then out of nowhere an old friend shows up and two episodes later pops the question. Yes, Moonlighting turned into a romance novel. A bad romance novel. The kind that requires both of the characters to have emotional IQ's of zero so that the contrived plot twists can happen. The kind where everyone is suddenly a yenta for this relationship—even the cops that arrest David for murder, and the actual murderer who framed him in the first place. Yes, when she realizes David's pure love for Maddie, she confesses to her crime so he can go tell her. Now, if this was fanfic, this is about where I'd be crying Mary Sue.
This is the also the kind of romance novel where the two guys duke it out with each other and the women stands by as damsel-in-distress/prize. I mean really, since when has Maddie ever let somebody else determine her fate? It's the kind where Maddie is suddenly completely oblivious as to the motivations of other people and her own wishes, where she takes giant leaps backward in characterization to allow for this forced love triangle to happen. It is ludicrous. The whole thing. So by the time they've completely forgotten about what the show is supposed to be about and broken the characterizations of both the leads, what is left, really, but to wait for them to get it on?
When I was catching this on Bravo, the first time I saw Moonlighting, I was enthralled by this arc. I actually didn't catch all of it, which is why I had to rent the DVDs. But the only reason I kept watching was anticipation. That was it. So as soon as they resolve it, there's no reason to come back. It's not even all that fun to rewatch the same episodes.
The show also fell into the trap of stalling the audience. Giving us kisses, but only in dream sequences, fantasy settings, daydreams. Coming up with more and more forced reasons why they don't get together. You know what this feels like to the audience? Stalling. Cause that's what it is. And it gets old really quickly. For some reason, though, show runners never seem to get this and keep pulling the same tricks as if the audience has never seen them before. In Moonlighting's case—and I say this with complete sincerity—Lois and Clark handled this situation better. You heard me.
I also have a problem, by season three, with the pairing of David and Maddie. Do they have a deeply repressed love for each other? Duh. They're completely crazy about each other. But I still don't think it'll work. (Yes, I say this with the full knowledge that probably the only people who would read this far are David/Maddie shippers. I understand that other people love these characters and this show to death. This is just my problem with it.)
I think this is mostly the writers' fault, for trying to amp up the angst, but we get a pretty clear picture by season three of David's coping skills. He has none. Any time he gets thrown for a loop, emotionally, he completely withdraws and goes on a bender. He's completely self-destructive.
Then there's Maddie. Who has a temper. That's not the problem, though. The problem is that every time she and David argue, it escalates and escalates. Say she's chewing him out for something he did wrong. He'll usually change the topic, or reframe the argument, or make it about her flaws, or some greater irrelevant issue—and she always goes right along with it. He'll turn it around on her and she'll just jump on the new issue. When somebody's arguing like that with you, you need to shut them down when they try to do that. In essence, the way David and Maddie fight, if it was on the internet, it would always always turn into a flamewar. They argue wrong.
That, also, is not necessarily a problem. If both of them are doing it as a kind of foreplay, continuing to argue because deep down they enjoy it, then there's no problem. Except, that when David and Maddie fight, they get really personal. Both of them will say deeply hurtful things to each other in the heat of the moment. This is, I think, the writers just hitting the angst button as often as they can. But this means that the way I see this relationship playing out is that they'll argue, they'll hurt each other, then David will go and be self-destructive. And someday Maddie will say something really hurtful to David and he'll go get falling-down drunk and hook up with somebody else, to punish himself, and to punish her. It's just going to end in tears.
From the way they're written in season three—their consistent inability to communicate on any level and their lack of emotional coping skills—I can't see it working. They're a classic example of a couple who love each other, but love just isn't enough.
You've also gotta love the eighties fashion and the dentist's office chic of their sets.
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Date: 2008-06-10 05:02 pm (UTC)But yeah, read about Wesley Snipes being high all the damned time on the Blade: Trinity shoot, fine. Squirm through the commentary with the director, Ryan Reynolds, and Jessica Biel where they almost never even mention him? Erm...