WHY ISN'T 'DOCTOR WHO' AS GOOD AS 'BREAKING BAD'?
A trawl through festive television, namely Doctor Who, Still Open All Hours and Sherlock, plus Breaking Bad, highlights some interesting points about modern TV.
The rich cast of characters - in more ways than one - from Breaking Bad. (Image: AMC) |
I didn’t watch much Christmas television. As far as I was concerned there was nothing on. Well, of course there was stuff on, as TV is a 24/7 affair these days, but there wasn't much I wanted to watch. The trouble with TV being a hungry 24-hour medium now is that the same stuff gets recycled again and again (and again and again…). It says a lot that the only thing that all of my family sat down to watch together were the Christmas repeats of Morecambe and Wise. They may be forty-odd years old, but the duo’s anarchic take on vaudeville, already out of date by the 1970s, has stood the test of time and is still laugh-out-loud hilarious.
The Edited Highlights of the Doctor
One of the
dramas I made a point of watching was ‘The Time of the Doctor’, Matt Smith’s
last bow in the title role of Doctor Who. As regular readers of this
blog will know, I’ve been a fan of the series all my life, so as we'd
been told the Doctor was at the end of his life – for good, this time – in the
best traditions of regeneration stories, I was looking forward to something
truly apocalyptic. What we got looked like the edited highlights of an epic,
series-length story with the emotive scenes again given most of the
screen time (a common feature of Doctor Who’s 21st century reboot). If
long-term Doctor fans out there can imagine the ten part ‘The War Games’
cut down to an hour and the Doctor’s concluding trial by the Time Lords given
five minutes at the end, that was pretty much what we got in ‘The Time of the
Doctor’.
Mr Smith's festive farewell. (Image: BBC) |
‘The Time of the
Doctor’ did wrap up all the enigmatic storylines of the Smith era, but, again,
there was a nagging feeling of disappointment as the various narrative threads
were explained away in a few lines of dialogue that had no dramatic
consequences. Couldn’t they have all led up to something truly climactic,
particularly as some of the storylines had been ongoing since Smith’s first
episode?
For me, the best
moment was the touchingly written and performed regeneration scene. It made
emotional and dramatic sense that the Doctor’s guilt over Amy Pond (Karen
Gillan), the first person he met in this body, would be dispelled in his final
moments by a spectral visitation from her. And the Doctor removing his signature
bow tie, just before he changed, was a lovely piece of melancholy
symbolism.
The Adventures of the Indulgent Authors
I was looking
forward to the return of Sherlock
– like most of the nation, I suspect – but on the evidence of the two new
stories screened so far, something seems to have gone awry: in short, the show
is now in love with its own cult. The telling in-joke of a Sherlock fan club
aside, ‘The Empty Hearse’ spent a lot of its time teasing the audience about
how Sherlock Holmes survived the fall from Bart’s Hospital, and by the end you still
weren’t entirely sure if you’d been given a genuine explanation. Add to that
the protracted resumption of the friendship between Holmes (Benedict
Cumberbatch) and Watson (Martin Freeman) – a lot of which was very funny,
admittedly – and the actual plot of foiling a terrorist attack on London felt
tacked on and insubstantial, a feeling compounded by having Sherlock simply
throw the off-switch on the bomb. After the tight, immaculately plotted stories
of Series Two, ‘The Empty Hearse’ came across as slack and disjointed.
Watson and Holmes are distracted from their usual business of crime solving. (Image: BBC) |
Frustratingly, though,
the villain had little dialogue and hardly any personality. Watching it, I got
the feeling that the writers – all of whom work on Doctor Who, funnily
enough – and leading men Cumberbatch and Freeman were more interested in
enjoying the comedy that resulted from the wedding and stag night than
developing the mystery (which is a shame, as the original Conan Doyle story is
one of his best). I can understand the production team wanting to show
different aspects to the characters as the series progresses, but they shouldn’t
lose sight of what made Sherlock popular in the first place: stylish,
original and off-beat crime thrillers. And as much as I like Cumberbatch, he
came dangerously close to a camp send-up of his Holmes character in ‘The Sign
of Three’. Hopefully normal service will be resumed next week.
Better call Saul
As I was
underwhelmed with the festive schedules, once I was back in London I gave the
box set of the first three series of Breaking Bad a go. Every so often a
programme comes along that everyone I know, as well as the media, raves about,
and over the last year that’s certainly been the case with this US import.
Intrigued by the premise – a terminally ill chemistry teacher starts making the
illegal drug crystal meth to raise funds for his family – I slid the first disc
into the Fairclough Towers DVD player and curled up on the sofa.
Give or take the
odd food and bathroom break and fitful sleep, I was still there three days
later and had continued into Series Four. Much to my delight, Breaking Bad is
one of the best drama series I’ve ever seen. It was commissioned for the AMC, the production company behind Mad Men, which gives you some idea of its
quality. Although I admire the 1960s-set saga, for me Breaking Bad has
the edge: it’s a parable for these hard economic times, as a dedicated family
man, Walter White (the extraordinary Bryan Cranston) is driven to extreme
measures out of the best of motives. One of the mesmerising things about the show is
watching a decent character drawn further and further into a corrupt world, who
in turn becomes more and more corrupted by it. Cranston’s performance is so
subtly drawn that the change in White is fascinatingly gradual.
Who ya gonna call? (Image: AMC) |
Holding the
whole series together is the love-hate relationship between Walt and Jesse Pinkman
(Aaron Paul), a junkie drop-out White enlists to help him sell the meth. It’s
fascinating watching their relationship change over the series, as the initially
amoral Jesse becomes more humane just as White becomes more ruthless and manipulative.
The comparisons
with Grand Tragedy and Charles D also hold in the way Breaking Bad works. Its narrative is driven by the vintage trio of
power, corruption and lies, together with one’s own kin – “Family is all” a character says
at one point – a common thread from Richard
III to Coriolanus, from David Copperfield to Little Dorrit. You could say the same of
The Sopranos but that went on far too
long, while Breaking Bad runs to a
finely judged five seasons, ensuring its reputation as seminal TV. Being set on
the American/Mexican gives the series a distinctive, exotic tone which is never
overplayed. There’s also a touch of the Coen Brothers’ idiosyncratic take on
crime, evidenced in a trouser-less Walt standing in the road pointing a gun in
the opening episode, via an 11 year-old assassin to the wheelchair-bound gangster
Hector Salamanca (Mark Margolis), who can only communicate by using a bell.
First principles
Still Open All Hours. The way forward? (Image: BBC) |
After watching
something as well constructed as Breaking
Bad, which flows so well and is dramatic, horrific, startling and funny – sometimes
all at the same time – I couldn’t help wondering why the writers of Doctor Who and Sherlock can’t be just as disciplined. With such a fascinating gallery
of characters, you can easily see how the Breaking
Bad writers could have given in to indulgence by doing, say, an outright
comedy episode or one that fast-forwarded through the misadventures of Saul. To
their credit they didn’t and the series was never allowed to become a victim of
its own success or in-jokey. The other striking thing about Breaking Bad is how many long, talky
scenes there are. The audience in trusted to enjoy the quality of the dialogue
and the performances in a manner that’s reminiscent of old-style videotaped
television, which was more like theatre than film. Remarkably, the resurrection
of Open All Hours, the predictably titled
Still Open All Hours, worked in
exactly the same way, albeit with jokes. Apart from the promotion of Granville
(David Jason) to the main role of the tight-fisted shopkeeper and the
introduction of a substitute Granville, Leroy (James Baxter), the pilot shown on
Boxing Day looked like it could have been made in the 1980s. As Still Open All Hours brought in an
audience of ten million, there’s still clearly a liking among the British
viewing public for a series with a slower pace that offers well-crafted
characters driven by witty, clever and thoughtful dialogue.
Which was pretty
much what Doctor Who was like in its
1960s and 1970s heyday. Writers Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss might argue that
they need to keep things moving because of the children watching, but the Harry
Potter films – a good comparison with Matt Smith’s era – don’t suffer from the Attention
Deficit Disorder-editing and it’s-fantasy-so-we-can-do-what we-like-with-the-plot
approach of some recent Doctor Who episodes.
As for the Cult of Sherlock, it’s
highly unlikely that in any other contemporary crime drama you’d have a whole episode
devoted to the comedy potential of one of the main characters getting married. That sort of thing can
test the audience’s patience.
Moffat and co
have more than delivered the goods on Doctor
Who and Sherlock in the past, so
here’s hoping the recent self-indulgence and abbreviated storytelling is a
blip. Doctor Who and Sherlock are still two of my favourite
series, but I reckon they could learn a thing or two from Breaking Bad, the new kid on the block whose storytelling is based
on the oldest, most proven traditions in literature.
“We got nowhere
to go but up.”
No comments:
Post a Comment