Dollhouse and Flashforward fail to ignite, The Office (US) misses its chance and Stargate: Universe impresses

These last few weeks, a host of shows have returned.  First off, let’s consider Dollhouse, the Joss Whedon’s offering that takes a lump of  Baudrillardian ponderings, digests it along with his usual cast of hip, All American actors (with a glossy edition of OK! magazine on the side) and shits it out.  The resulting dump is a thing of two sides.  On one hand, the concept of reprogrammable avatars (the dolls) living inside a brothel and used by its clientèle for things as varied as romantic engagements to bank heists to rewaking the dead to solve their own murders is rich with potential.  On the other hand, each episode feels plucked from the air with little interest in maintaining a strong narrative arc and impetus in being watchable.

Instead, episodes usually revolve around Echo – a doll who, as her name suggests, finds echoes of her past and the echoes of the personalities which inhabit her over the course of the series – on a mission, with Eliza Dushku playing a variety of characters to various levels of success.  The thing is, every single week there seems to be a hiccup during the process of acting out these missions, so we follow the same procedure of the Dollhouse’s “handlers” – those who look after the dolls while on these missions – as they try and sort out the mess caused.  One wonders how the Dollhouse can be a successful business enterprise and what its customer approval rating is.  Ultimately, the shows first season felt like a very long, extended pilot, whereby only the final reels indicate that the show is going anywhere.

Season Two, starting again after the mysterious 13th episode “Epitaph One” was placed on the first seasons DVD, dawdles about in the same manner as half the first seasons episodes, which is again a shame, because “Epitaph One,” set in an apocalyptic future where the technology programming dolls has run out of control, should have galvanised the shows creative energies.  One can despair already that Dollhouse has been a bit of a spoil sport for ideas, rendering the chance of a similar premised show, executed better in the near future unlikely.

Flashforward unlike Dollhouse has a very clear premise, and one in which the whole show is built around.  The thing is, as I have noted before, everyone is so bloody boring in it.  There may well be genial orchestration in the construction of its overall narrative and mythology – although that has yet to be seen; I’m just saying – but the show insists on only dripping tidbits of information regarding the mysterious flashforwards, and in the mean time documents the ongoing crisis these many characters are dealing with.  That, in itself, is not a bad thing and is a proven formula for success, and indeed that loathed beast Lost does it well with its compulsory flashbacks, but it requires the characters to be more than cardboard cut outs.  Characterisation requires more than everyone having their own dark secret – as contrived as Fienne’s Mark Benford having a drink problem – their one fatal flaw which apparently gives them a depth and  humanity lacking in the perfectly ordinary, average human beings such as ourselves.  Domestic American life has been proved a tale of status, depression and discontentment so many times before that its starting to become incredibly dull, especially when you have to sit there and wait it out to catch a glimpse of the greater narrative arc.  However, Jack Davenport is nice to see onscreen as always, and here brings a standard (for him) knowing performance to the table of absurdity that is Flashforward, a table that no one else seems to cotton on exists.

Jim and Pam finally got married in The Office (US).  Their romance has gone on for a while now and the writers have built upon expectation after expectation that this would be something like the icing on the cake for a very good show.   They seem to forget that the icing on the cake needs a chef to expertly lattice that fluffy pink drizzle over the rest of the cake.  The episode had a feeling of self-gratuitous contentment which just came across lazy; let’s put all these characters which have slowly developed to varying levels of success over five seasons and put them in a hotel near Niagara falls.  Let’s see what happens then.

And it happens pretty much as you would expect it to, in a way one could probably suggest it would after seeing merely the first season.  Michael will embarrass everyone with a speech.  Dwight will have to interact with other people.  Pam and Jim will through off convention with a secret wedding.  There seemed to be little effort or interest in writing a comedic show to it, and as Krasinski and  Fischer’s onscreen chemistry arguably rivals or even betters that of Tim and Dawn’s (which is definitely one of the most underplayed yet wonderful romances of recent memory) to have such a predictable effort for what should be a landmark moment in the shows chronology is a waste.

It’s not all doom and gloom, disappointment and disinterest though.  The Sci-Fi Channel (now regressed to the oh so postmodern moniker of Sy-Fy) has reinvigorated the Stargate franchise, a franchise which I must admit to have never cared for much to the extent of never watching more than a handful of episodes of SG-1 and completely avoiding Stargate Atlantis.  Why I began watching Stargate Universe is not something I can really answer considering my record with its precedents, but the casting of Robert Carlyle probably had something to do with it.   That’s right, taking up the mantle of the game-changing Battlestar Galactica, respected thespians are flocking to Science Fiction television regardless of the baggage of their original hammy incarnations.

Time seems to have moved on in the Stargate mythos – although only a few years to be fair – and us humans have spaceships and shit, with offworld military installations, and all this still unknown to the world at large, and yet we still have no solution to the increasing gut of Richard Dean Anderson.  Carlyle plays a Scientist figuring out what some 9th chevron on the Stargates does, which is something they obviously haven’t achieved yet.  What follows is that some kind of alien force attacks Icarus, the base that Carlyle works on this mysterious Stargate at, and events are pulled into motion that elicit the survivors of the attack to jump into the Stargate and thus into the unknown.  They end up on an old, old ship drifting through space with no way home.  Indeed, we soon learn through a modestly awe-inspiring slideshow that the ship is no longer even in the Milky Way, the zoom of the images drifting outwards until dozens of galaxies fill the screen.  I’m a sucker for stuff like that.

Carlyle, as a source of knowledge among a rag tag bunch of bureaucrats and grunts, occupies a situation similar to Gaius Baltar in BSG, although instead of James Callis’ effete manner, Carlyle rockets around the ship with the kind of fury a bookworm Begby might radiate.  It’s quite hard to stop with the BSG comparisons, and the look of Ron Moore’s remake is obviously a starting point for Stargate Universe, with the Destiny (the name of the ship they are stranded on) replicating not only the interior look of the Nostromo but that of the good old Galactica too, and any comparisons are only likely to do Universe favours considering the acclaim BSG commanded.  The situation too, gives a similar potential for collisons of morality and politik among the crew.

Where it falls short of Battlestar Galactica for this viewer is that while Robert Carlyle is a great actor to watch week in week out, none of those around him carry the same kind of gravitas as Mary McDonnell, Edward James Olmos or Michael Hogan.  Perhaps an arbitrary or ungrateful criticism, but it means that those opposing Carlyle and his brusque manner are unknowable and somewhat tame actors, without the bite of Edward James Olmos glaring and snarling at you, or Michael Hogan giving his excellent pirate impression.  They are certainly capable actors, but they don’t have the extra edge that the aforementioned BSG aluminaries give, and you get the feeling you could pick up remarkably similar performances from any line of queuing Hollywood actors, and a line that will not include revelatory talents like Katee Sackhoff, Tricia Helfer and Jamie Bamber.

What it does provide however, and very well, is the sense of wonder and awe that Battlestar Galactica, in its metaphysical, philosophical mutterings, ignored.  Not having been a fan of Star Trek in any sense until the new film (which borrows heavily from Star Wars, so criticise me for that) I’m loathe to reference a major part of that franchise, but the wonder of visiting these new, strange worlds and being alone in a very alien universe is a major part of what made me connect with Stargate Universe.  It’s a very strong start, and one that I will be following.

A Universal Workplace?

Recently the original British sitcom The Office received a retrospective courtesy of the  BBC, a documentary with interviews from media types from the inside and outside of its production and if anything, seeing it on UK screens proved how missed such a show was.  Seen it its full a few years after the dust is settled, the Office still retains its delicate characterisation, its immaculately forged scalpel like wit, and its probing ability to overload our finely tuned senses with its asinine performances and scenarios.  But most importantly, watching the Office again restates its permanence as a ground breaking show, a milestone for television.

So perhaps it is worth noting that the American adaptation of the show – we’ll call it The Office US – has begun its sixth, yes sixth, season on American network NBC.  Most of us are used to hearing of successful British shows being unsuccessfully adapted to American television – Peep Show, Spaced, Coupling, Men Behaving Badly and Gavin & Stacey have all had their clones – but The Office US is a golden exception.  While us British would like to think our original produce too clever, too, well, British, for reproduction, we can’t deceive ourselves forever that we alone on this Earth are the chief proprietors of sharp wit and heavy irony.  And let’s not forget, the office is not an environment confined to Albion.  There are German iterations of the Office, a French Office, a French-Canadian Office, even a Brazilian Office.  I’ve not seen them though, so I’ll shut up about that.

The Office US though, has garnered not just enough ratings to satisfy the need for six seasons, but it has also faired incredibly strongly with the critics.  But the differences of each show soon emerge.  Due to the British style of production – and Gervais and Merchants infamous dedication to detail in its creation – the Office exists merely as 12 half an hour episodes with a Christmas special.   The Office US however has around 100 episodes throughout its duration.  Of course, if one were to compare the series on the base statistics, a 100 episode run seems like the hallmark of a successful show and that of 12 a failure.  But that’s obviously tosh; the British Office was never intended as more than what it was – a taut, meticulously crafted sitcom that gave all it needed.  The Office US is driven by its commercial value for NBC, and so was its creation in the first place, but our stigma with commercial ratings obsessed television should not cloud our thoughts concerning its quality – although I would recommend the uninitiated just “soldier on” with the first couples of episodes as they are pretty much shot for shot reconstructions of the British version.

Soon the US remake began to walk on its own two feet, it became its own entity and became all the better for it.  Instead of remarking on how Steve Carrel as Michael Scott is hardly as foolishly sinister and lonely as David Brent, how John Krasinski and Jenna Fischer as Jim and Pam are more obviously good looking than Martin Freeman and Lucy Davis as Tim and Dawn are, and how much more OTT the compulsory office nutcase (Dwight Schrute/Rainn Wilson) is, you should just accept that it is a very different beast from the original and Michael Scott is a very different boss from David Brent.

Sure, they are both indecisive and irresponsible managers, but whereas David Brent reaks of the nastiness and self-regard we usually find with bastard businessman on the London tube, Michael Scott sits in an envelope of self-contentment, with a brand of naivety and innocence brilliantly played by Carrel.  Unlike Brent, whose private workspace guarantees his status, it is Scott’s relationship with his workers that guarantee his.  And over the course of the six series, Scott really warms to his employees and they (to an extent) to him.  Of course, the general impetus for maintaining the shows many seasons lies with making Scott more redeemable, more likeable, but that only takes you so far.

For there is something useful in comparing the two shows in relation to the idea of the workplace as seen in Britain and in the States.  Why are two shows from either side of the Atlantic, about the same environment, so different?  Is it not strange that countries who share similar business practices and the same language have so different experiences? For example, the Office of Wernham Hog was the portrait of slow death, the continually perpetuating nightmare with a spindly chair.  You saw the grim environment of the industrial estate on the cusp of the Great London Vacuum sucking the lives out of people and it reflected the decaying souls of its workers and employees.  In the Office (US) of Dundler Mifflin, it…well it actually seems like a nice place to work.  Sure, everybody gets at each others throats after a while, stifles the odd cough and watches the more eccentric members of the Office do something outrageous, but compared to the quiet misery of watching David Brent with his po-faced smile, beaming at the lifeless husks working under him after another of his jokes falls flat, its all a bit of fun.

Take the case of Tim and Dawn.  Tim, through the course of the series’ confessionals, intimated that he felt his life should be more than what it was, that an escape from the Office was needed before it was all too late.  Dawn too, needed an escape.  She wanted to be an artist, a children’s illustrator nonetheless, and yet was trapped by the prospect of marrying her fiance, the proto-bastard Lee, also a worker at the warehouse below the Office.  This is mirrored in The Office US – Jim questions his place in life, Pam paints on the side and is engaged to a warehouse proto-bastard – but whereas Tim and Dawn escape the Office together to start afresh, Jim begins rising up the ranks of Dundler Mifflin management and Pam seemingly buries her dream of being an artist after getting a  job as a Dundler Mifflin salesman.

The Office US is an inclusive place.  It releases itself from Gervais and Merchants vision of the Office as a place full of misspent creativity and wasted talent  fairly quickly and replaces it with one where the workplace is one that you can raise a family around (Jim and Pam get engaged, Pam gets pregnant), where the American family unit can proliferate.  The Office at Wernham Hog was simply a coffin buried somewhere, to escape from.  Where does this diametrical difference come from? Are the attitudes to the Office environment really that different across the pond?  I’m not entirely sure, but I can say that while The Office US will never replace the startling brutality of awkwardness that the original unearthed so well or, in simple terms, replace our faith in the originals pedestal, it certainly is very good and well worth the watch.