De-Revolution

It was a simple concept for a show.  What if it all went away:  Internet, television, radio, central air, electricity?   What if something happened and all society returned to the age before Tesla and Edison?  What if societal breakdown led to the United States being splintered into militias, no more centralized Government, no more regulation?  If you want something in this life, you take by force or other means.   Pretty interesting premise for a show, right?  The world goes away and we are left to watch it feast upon itself. 

That was Revolution, the latest in a long line of shows trying to take the place of the vacancy left by LOST years ago.   When appointment TV shows like LOST end its run, everyone tried to capitalize on some kind of event that led to isolation or reversal in social norms.  Shows like The Event and Flash Forward couldn’t replicate the logic bending appeal involved in a simple premise.     The Walking Dead survived and thrived, but it already had a built up fan base in its comic book (Graphic Novel if you prefer) run.   

Another show attempted to do what Revolution suggests, Jericho.   Though a different catalyst than Revolution, Jericho, like its 80s Cold War telefilm counterpart, The Day After, focuses on a nuclear missile attack.  It had a cult following and was revived before being finally cancelled after its second season. 

But Revolution should have been simple.   Turn out the lights.   Cause panic.   Destroy society.   Establish your heroes and villains.  Introduce your arcs, whether they be, “Why did the lights go out?”, “Who turned them out?”, and “How do we turn them back on?” and go with it.  But within the first few episodes, Revolution went for broke.  The power isn’t gone.  It’s just being suppressed.  Then, to make it worse, it’s being suppressed by cancer fighting nanotechnology that the government leveraged to fight terrorism on the other side of the globe. 

The series boasted some great ideas.  Billy Burke as a Han Solo-esque antihero, complete with a saber to take on militia baddies.  What is the nature of patriotism?  How ingrained is technology into our world and how do we react when it gets taken away?  OK, well, that last one sort of got skipped because the pilot skips fifteen years ahead.   Still, the nature of the LOST style of flashback lends itself to being able to bake in that concept into the series mythology as time moves forward.  Except, it never does move forward, it just stays still like the hands on an electric clock. 

Revolution either blew its wad or jumped the shark within the first few episodes and that’s where it struggled to keep my initial attention.  One of The Walking Dead’s major unanswered questions is what caused the virus that has infected the populous.  We just know that everyone is infected, everyone who dies with their brain intact will reanimate.  Whether or not the eventually come to explain the event is up in the air and that’s what keeps the show going.  The zombies are a part of the life, now, but humans are the real monsters.  We see how everyone deals with post-apocalyptic life.  They start a community and shutter the outside world.  They forage.  They mobilize and militarize.   But the problems that exist in a pre-apocalypse world don’t go away.  They just localize and intensify.  Revolution should have focused on that instead of whiz-bang gadgetry and lofty mathematical equations come Oppenheimer weapons of mass destruction.  Deal with a world that is tech addicted. Deal with civilization crumbling without its infrastructure.  Deal with the struggle between the bad guys that have taken over in the absence and the good guys who want to restore the world.  And, while you’re at it, deal with the struggle between wanting to restore the power and knowing how we dealt when it was removed.  That was hinted at, but never really explored in its entirety.

Granted, maybe comparing Walking Dead to Revolution is an apples to oranges argument and I’m favoring one over the other but I learned to accept Revolution and come back to watching it.  But the endgame of the series and its Nano-can’t-decide- if-it’s-the-machine-of-The-Matrix-or-I, Robot personality just went a little sideways. 

How would I have fixed it?

Drop the nano but keep the philosophy. 

If you are going to start 15 years after the blackout, introduce something that sparks the debate on whether or not the blackout was an act of terrorism or government screw up.  Maybe delve into an inside plot to disrupt the government and return it to the people.   Don’t turn the power back on during the first season.  Hint at it.  Theorize its possibility.  Just don’t even go there until you get to the last moments of the first season and have something small lead you into a cliffhanger.  Second Season, you have the possibility and the threat of electricity on the table and the struggle to take control like Monroe did to establish military supremacy.  Also, delve into the decision of whether or not it would be better to just go without it.  Are we better off with it back?   Are we just going to make the same mistakes all over again with it back?    Beyond evolve the backstory.  Keep the math, but not the science fiction.  If you’re not going to use nanotechnology, have some device in a mountain somewhere that is suppressing electricity.  Or, have the scientists start from scratch and reinvent the light bulb.    Makes you wonder if static electricity was also suppressed by the nano?  What about Faraday coils?   

Adopt a steampunk/Fallout motif somewhere.

Don’t get me wrong.  The one pure stroke of genius this show had, which brought me back was having Brett Michaels play himself.  The acoustic hillbilly rock soundtrack was a nice touch, but why not expand on it?   This is a brave new world.  You have so many survivalists in the real world, why not introduce that into the mix?  Remember LOST’s John Locke?  People who role play, LARP, do reenactments of battles, invent things from junk could be factions, or at least serve as humor.  We have are reduced to simple weaponry and tactics.  They nailed that, but with the nano in play, they handcuff themselves to not moving in other directions.

Keep people on one side. 
The constant flip flopping of allegiances and morality just annoys us.  Yes, there can be qualms, gray area, justifiable acts, but even Game of Thrones doesn’t have this many changes in colors.   The characters don’t change their values, the situations dictate their approach.  As much as I love Giancarlo Esposito, I just can’t figure out what the hell is motivation is.

Two Phone Lines to Take Care of One Cable Bill

Back in January, Comcast was nice enough to fry my DVR with their updates.  Then, they sent the tech out to the wrong house, leaving me without cable for a week.  That wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t have a five year old that can’t understand the concept of “Shit happens in services”.

And the wonderful guy on the phone assured me they would credit my account for the loss of service.   So, each month I waited to see my bill reflect said savings.

This month, I saw a change to the usual $178 for Regular cable plus three Encore channels with LOTR on 24/7, Internet that sometimes works, and phone.    There was a $30 difference.   Except, it was in the wrong direction.

My new bill reflects improvements and expansions to the services I have, to the tune of $10 a month, with tons of extra movies OnDemand.  None of which anyone wants to watch.   Oh, look Beauty and the Beast…  Yeah, it’s a knock off cartoon that’s like 45 minutes.  Same with Aladdin, and The Little Mermaid.     And they’ve added $1.99 for each of the little crap boxes we were forced to use if we wanted to watch TV after everything went digital.    So, now my bill is $210.

So, I spent an hour on the phone with Customer service.    And I couldn’t even get them to reduce my bill.  That was just to explain my bill.  You see, in their Xfinite wisdom, Comcast decided that it would be better to have one line handle bill questions and one…. Totally different 800 number to reduce your bill.   Lein… yes that was his name… and he was American from what I could tell, told me that “With all the calls they received, they had to use a separate number.”    In other words, all of the angry customers that can’t stand this ComCrap they get for a ton of money,.

Look, I know NBC sucks.  Hell, even the guy they screwed everybody over for to keep on The Tonight Show hates them, now.  He can’t wait to be replaced.   But, does that really mean we all have to pay more for your crap?   I wish I could go to FIOS, even if it sucks just as much, if just to bargain for a lower bill… but guess what?   My borough or township won’t get it in anytime soon.   I wish I could go to something like DirectTv, once again it may be crap, too, but guess what?  I can’t put a dish on my house because of line of sight.     So, I can’t even choose which crap I want to watch, I am stuck with one version of crap. 

But when you have to have a separate phone line just for people who are fed up with the costs, what does that tell you?   It tells you, your business sucks and you are just making money hand over fist so, why should you change it?  Exactly.  If I could have a business and charge people an exorbitant amount of money for basic stuff and raise it continually over the years without really having to give them anything better than they already have and no one would leave because of the lack of choices,  it might be tempting.   Then again, I don’t have a business degree which tells me all I need to know about people in big business.   Satisfy the shareholders, screw the customers,  and dine on the souls of innocent children and lambs with gold plated utensils with a fat profit.  

Well, done.

Finally, a Zombie Television Series: The Walking Dead Adapted On AMC

I think I may have mentioned once or twice, perhaps five times that I think a television series based around a zombie apocalypse would be a fantastic idea. Maybe it was a hundred times. Anyway, it appears that my geek fan boy fantasy has finally become a reality. The hit comic book Walking Dead will be made into a television show with

AMC, which has fast emerged as a top notch channel for dramas like Mad Men and Breaking Bad, plans to air the show in 2010, according to IMDB. Now, I have never read the comic but just what I've picked up from the site and other areas online it follows my thoughts about how to portray a zombie outbreak over a period of time. Instead of just Normal Life / Outbreak / Death / Struggle / Death / Credits the series will follow the complete breakdown of society and the struggles of the characters to gather together and survive the aftermath and how that affects certain people's moral compass.

More interesting is that Frank Darabont is involved. He has a storied career including The Shawshank Redemption as well as some horror roots in Nightmare on Elm Street 3 and The Blob remake.

I haven't been a big fan of AMC in the past, mainly because of the diluted offerings of movies they carry while still maintaining the name American Movie Classics. As an additional pet peeve, I really get miffed that they don't close caption a lot of their content which any father can tell you is essential when you are trying to watch a show and you have little ones are sleeping or napping, nearby. I spend about 85% of my television viewing time reading captions because I have to keep the volume low.

Still, I am voraciously looking forward to seeing them pull this off on the small screen and will have my strained DVR ready to record for Live+7 viewing. I am also glad that the show was picked up by a cable network instead of the Big three or Medium 4, if you choose to include Fox. I'm sure Fox already passed on this show because they didn't have any other available time slots on Fridays to dump it like every other good show. From what I gather from an interview with the author, NBC almost had it and we've seen what happened to another "comic book" style show after its first season. We've also seen what they've done to their schedule. Having this show on television and on a major network would be a slow and painful death as it would have to be aired at ten o'clock which runs into Leno's show. I'm seeing a pattern of death here. Not to mention a show of this nature would be extremely sanitized of all content necessary for a gritty, post apocalyptic show about flesh eating living dead attackers.

So, kudos to cable for being a creative safe haven for great shows. Boo to the big networks for bowing to the sponsors and giving the audience a big old middle finger to bite off and chew. I may have to start reading the comic as research. That will be the official reason for me to be reading a comic book I'll have you know.