Tag Archives: bbc

Why the BBC is so much of a better news source than CNN

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Why the BBC is so much of a better news source than CNN

The recent Charlottesville riot (get together/protest) is a really good example of why the BBC is so much more superior to crappy CNN. When watching the feed on the BBC story, it has absolutely no voice over and shows the actual protest going on. When you watch CNN’s coverage, it’s a voice over, explaining the situation, and then immediately after two talking heads starts bantering back and forth.

http://www.cnn.com/…/charlottesville-white-natio…/index.html

And I don’t think people ever even realize how significantly different the coverage is over one particular story. The alt-right will often equate BBC with CNN, calling both “liberal journalism” or, my favorite, “fake media.” What has basically happened is that the whole talking heads phenomenon that CNN projects into its coverage is bringing down other news agencies that are actually pretty damn good at being completely a reported story rather than a participant observer to a story (like CNN).

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40909547

I really wish more people would see this and that news agencies would try to be BBC rather than CNN because nothing is more frustrating than having a news agency dictate the news to you rather than report it to you.

(Unfortunately, Facebook sucks for embedding stories, as it only wants to show the first one, and not the second one, if you’re trying to make a comparison. Follow the links rather than rely on Facebook, which gets no kudos for being a lousy service for reporting the news)

The Struggles of Science Fiction on Modern Day Television

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I was watching another one of those obscure BBC television shows this last weekend called Outcasts. It’s a science fiction 8 part series that takes place in the future when a series of catastrophic events force colonists from Earth to take up residence on some far-away planet. Immediately, they run into political problems amongst the survivors, and then they start to discover really odd things, like the possibility that humans may have colonized this planet a long time ago (which makes absolutely no sense to anyone). It’s an interesting story arc, and as I was watching it, I immediately started thinking, “I’ll bet they didn’t renew this show, which means I’m probably watching the first season of yet another science fiction television show that didn’t make it past its freshman year.” And it turns out, I was right. The first season ends on a cliffhanger, and the viewers are left hanging yet again.

Maybe it’s me, but why don’t television networks understand that science fiction takes time to grab ahold of its audience? I don’t think there’s a science fiction show out there that didn’t take a number of seasons of trodding through really difficult character building before it finally got the to meat of its show. Look at the recent success of Battlestar Galactica. It started off a bit stale, and then it built into a brilliant final couple of seasons. Look at practically every Star Trek that came out after the original series. The Next Generation took a few seasons to catch on, people constantly comparing Picard to Kirk before realizing they weren’t the same person, but different, and that wasn’t so bad a thing. Deep Space Nine took about three or four seasons to kick off before it became possibly the most beloved of all of the Star Trek universe offerings. Voyager, well, I argue it was a lot better four seasons in and to the end, although there are some who can’t stand it at all, but it still made that same arc I’m talking about. And Enterprise was a pretty decent last season show that took a lot of “hey, we’re exploring space for the first time” episodes to get to its point.

I look at some of the greatest science fiction around, and it took a long time to get around to being great. The 4400 was a great show once you finally got beyond the beginning parts of what it was trying to do. The X-Files took some time to find its footing, as well as Fringe took about two seasons to finally reveal that it wasn’t a rip-off of the X-Files, but great science fiction all on its own. It’s still going strong.

The thing is: Science fiction takes time to tell its story. It’s not like a cop show where you throw a bunch of people into a scene after a murder, have the star do his quirky mannerisms and then jump to a chase scene/shoot out, and then cue the last insider joke before going to commercial. Some of these shows are dealing with some pretty heavy subjects, and it takes time to get an audience to buy into the characters, and sometimes even the universe we’re talking about. Stargate was an interesting piece of science fiction in that it started off strong, and then became even stronger once it played out its initial arc and had to reinvent exactly what it was doing to come to a whole new kind of show. Stargate Atlantis did practically the same thing, once its writers realized they weren’t just recreating Stargate SG1, but had a brand new animal on their hands. Stargate Universe could have evolved into something great as it was starting to get better in the second season, but like most executive decisions it never had enough time to build its audience and appeal to do what it needed to do. It was cut off way too early to finish its growth.

Outcasts is an interesting example for me because I’ve been reading the message boards concerning this show since it was shut down after its first season. People are really upset because a show they really started to get into was cut off way too early to allow itself a chance to breathe. And I don’t blame them. For all of the crappy shows that are out there, it is rare to find a show that really tries to take chances and pushes itself as it does it. It was fascinating that they were doing what they were doing with the cast they had, considering I don’t think I’ve ever really seen any of the actors before, aside from a cameo in the very first episode by Jamie Bamber, better known for playing Captain Apollo on the remake of Battlestar Galactica (I kept looking at him, thinking, “is that who I think it is?”).

Sadly, one of the few places where science fiction is welcome doesn’t seem to have a lot of science fiction anymore. I’m talking about the SyFy Channel, which used to be the SciFi Channel. Nowadays, the channel is known more for WWF wresting and ridiculous movies of the week about killer land sharks and other nutso ideas. They have a bad habit of killing any strong science fiction shows, including the cancellation of Caprica, Stargate Universe and the recent announcement of the discontinuation of Eureka. Checking through the TV Guide, I don’t find too many original programs showing up on the SyFy Channel any longer, which means my original necessity of always making sure my cable company had that channel is no longer a given.

Part of the problem of this dilemma is probably necessary to address as well, and that’s the fact that because science fiction involves special effects and unique, alien environments, the budgets for these shows can sometimes be astronomical. During the Star Trek run on UPN, there was some serious money being invested per episode to keep the quality up on that show, and every other show was trying to do the same sort of thing. Nowadays, a network isn’t really all that interested in paying that kind of money for entertainment, especially when they can get even higher ratings from crappy reality tv programming that costs a fraction of money to produce.

The other part of the problem is the perception people have for science fiction as well. For some reason, science fiction is seen as “geek” culture, which can often lead to a group of adults shunning someone who watches science fiction, while they may be gluttons of reality television and Gossip Girl-like programming instead, somehow seeing these alternatives as more “acceptable”. Science fiction gets equated with the kind of entertainment that should be enjoyed by little boys and men who never grew up.

But quite often, science fiction practically masters the concepts of the human condition by forcing us to look at social and societal issues that cannot be explored within the confines of our normal, everyday lives. Science fiction can put someone back into the shoes of someone who had to make decisions during the Trials of Nuremburg, or force a discussion on the ramifications of the ethics of genocide that are not just theories but might be happening at a particular time and place. It can allow questions of the nuances of same sex relationships by changing the species as the focus, yet still unravel a group of people on the cusp of making a life-changing decision. While it’s not impossible to do that in other genres, rarely is it done there, which leaves science fiction one of the few places where such ideas and thinkers can completely be at ease with each other.

Unfortunately, I just finished watching a great show that will never see another episode or any of its brilliant ideas examined further by the writers who presented the dilemmas in the first place. Until then, we have to search for another venue, and hopes that someone else manages to fill the void that doesn’t often get filled by those with the vision to ignite the ideas in the mind’s canvas of possibilities.

50’s and 60’s Feminism and Revisionism On Television

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There seems to be an interesting dynamic showing up on television these days. The claim is that it all started with Mad Men, and then led to shows like The Playboy Club and Pan Am. However, I think reviewers are being a bit lazy in their approach, in that this revolution in programming started earlier than that, and we’re only see the second wave of what is most definitely going to be a norm in storytelling.

Some years ago, the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) developed a brilliant show that dealt with storytelling by looking at the “earlier” days through the lens of someone from today. The show was called Life on Mars. It dealt with a police detective of today’s time who is thrown back to 1973, a time where Manchester was just beginning to experience its sexual revolution, where women were still police assistants, and cops beat up suspects to get confessions. Shortly after this, an American series, of the same name, arrived and tried to tell the exact same story but in New York of 1973. Almost identical, the American series dealt with the trammels of unrealized feminism and a new era that was about to emerge in America (or the world).

Then came a few other shows, which were rehashes of previous shows from the mid-period of television history, that somehow tried to incorporate this new sense of feminism with modern day thinking, which for some reason has never really worked. I’m talking shows like Charlie’s Angels (movies and then a very recently bad television show), Dukes of Hazard (a movie), Starsky & Hutch (a movie), the various remakes of Star Trek and then the brilliant redesign of Battlestar Galactica (which had its own sense of dealing with feminism in the 1970s).

But Mad Men is obviously the biggest elephant in the room when it comes to discussing reviving history (or rewriting it). The show is sometimes brilliant, and other times it is somewhat annoying. It deals with feminism by showing how badly feminism was actually dealt with, and strangely enough it gives the biggest womanizer Don Draper the venue to somehow be the launching pad for the first woman to be a Manhattan advertising professional. Meanwhile, it sticks us directly in the 1960s and shows us that America had a long way to before it was going to get much better (if it ever did).

Because of the success of Mad Men, it was only a matter of time before the major networks attempted to duplicate it themselves. The first entry into the new era was The Playboy Club, which has essentially been receiving nothing but bad reviews, mainly because it tries way too hard to be both sensational and a platform to reinvent history by making it somehow appear that Playboy was a part of the feminist movement, rather than a direct impediment to it. Playboy ushered in the sexual revolution that would come in the 1970s, but it did very little for women, other than produce a platform for women to be seen as sex objects and a vehicle to produce masturbatory fantasies for young boys for several generations. While history wasn’t being all that helpful for the women’s movement, Playboy didn’t exactly empower anyone either, although people like Hugh Hefner would love nothing more than to leave his mortal coil believing he convinced more than a few peolpe that he was the progenitor of women’s liberation rather than the abuser of it. Coming from a man who spent his entire adult life cultivating young women to be his sexual playthings, I’m sorry but I just don’t see the positive role he wants to inhabit.

Pan Am is the next development in the attempt to detail women moving forward in the 1960s. My first quibble right off the start is with history itself and the television show’s attempt to place itself in it. The story starts off by talking about an event that occurred during the Bay of Pigs, shortly before the events of the first episode. The whole aircraft on the ground scene seemed a bit odd as the events of that day detail something much different occurring than what the authors tried to make happen, that somehow Pan Am pilots were more involved with the evacuation than may have been. But again, it’s fiction, so that shouldn’t be too much of an issue. There’s also another moment where one of the pilots talks about a scientific principle that wasn’t really a part of common vernacular usage in the 1960s (and wouldn’t actually be used until about 2004), but that’s more a complaint about continuity and nitpicking than anything else.

Where I have the biggest problem is with Pan Am’s attempt to reinvent feminism as some very present dynamic during the very early 1960s, when it basically wasn’t. The main character, the purser, seems to be the feminist “rebel” of the group, yet as much as they try to make her out to be that, she most likely would have been unemployed rather than the main player she is going to be written to be. And then there’s this whole espionage thread they have written into the series that seems kind of bizarre, as if the CIA was actively recruiting flight attendants to be their secret agents on flights. Okay, it could have happened, but it just seems a bit bizarre, knowing how the CIA works, or at least how it worked back then.

What concerns me most about this show is it is yet another attempt by Hollywood to rewrite history as being a lot more proactive towards feminism than it really was. As a matter of fact, Hollywood STILL has a long way to go as it would not surprise me if a number of actresses ended up having to sleep with someone to get the jobs they get on some of these shows, because that’s how Hollywood has ALWAYS acted. It would make me wonder how someone might feel pretending to be some enlightened feminist on a television show when she may have had to have done some very unenlightened things to get on the show in the first place. Yeah, there’s no evidence this ACTUALLY happens, but it is so engrained in the morality of Hollywood business that everyone somewhat expects that to happen, so it’s rarely even questioned.

What I would like to see is a show come along, like Life on Mars (the BBC version), that really examines the issues and doesn’t try to make it seem like we were historically more proactive than we really were. We did some crappy things in the past, and if we ignore those things, it only means we learned nothing from the experience, and we’ll probably do crappy things again in the future.