It's a fascinating historical fact that a span of 41 years separates the first tentative wood-cut and metal plate engravings and Albrecht Duerer's majestic series of prints of the Apocalypse of St. John. Between 1470 and 1511, printmaking developed from crude images on playing cards and souvenirs from pilgrimage sites, essentially primitive cartoons. to the fantastically complex and inspiring graphics made by the German Master. It doesn't take long for a new art form to evolve from raw experiments with innovative technology into sophisticated, fully realized, and emotionally compelling masterpieces. It took less than 20 years for the cinema to develop from short peep-show imagery of hootchy-cooch dancers and bandits pointing their six-guns at the camera to Griffith's epics Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, more than three-hour long films that exploit almost all the resources visible in Hollywood movies of today. Where there is money in large quantities driving production and fierce competition for that money, art evolves rapidly -- it may take less than a generation for new approaches to narrative and the technology of representation to reach astonishing heights. I think a similar process has been at work in the genre of long form TV mini-series -- that is, TV programs, primarily made for Cable services, that focus for six hour-long episodes for more on an ensemble of characters involved in some sort of adventure with a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end. The first famous example of this kind of mini-series was Roots aired in January 1977. Commercial forces and audience enthusiasm have driven the product of six to eight hour shows, produced to be shown without commercial interruption. In the last 45 years, TV dramatic mini-series have evolved into a genre that is sophisticated and artistically ambitious, a kind of television that attracts important directors and film stars. Indeed, the prevalence of the six-hour plus mini-series has had an effect on the cinema -- Martin Scorsese, justifying the more than three-hour run-time of his Killers of the Flower Moon remarked that Tv audiences routinely commit to watching programs that may be eight or ten or even thirteen hours long; therefore, he argues, there's no reason for a prestige Hollywood production to not require more than three hours for its narrative. Two shows on Netflix currently illustrate the efflorescence of the made-for-TV mini-series -- the crime show Bodkin and the paranormal thriller Evil.
Bodkin is a good example of very well-made and fully evolved made-for-Cable mini-series. In fact, the show exemplifies best practices, as it were, in the production of these sorts of narratives. The series is far-fetched and, despite some flowery writing, more or less simple-minded. But the team responsible for making the seven-hour series have devised a plot that regenerates every few episodes in a convincing manner and that compels audience attention equal to the demands of the lengthy and intricate plot. (Many examples of the mini-series genre suffer from longueurs and padding, superfluous narrative that is often poorly paced used to fill out the time purchased by the producers of the show -- it seems that these mini-series are pre-conceived in blocks of time and the plot has to be constructed to fill the number of episodes slated for broadcast; this practice results in many shows of this sort being mercilessly extended into ten episodes, for example, when the story could be efficiently dramatized in five shows, Most mini-series start strong with a couple of excellent and exciting episodes, then, lapse into repetition and digression for four or five installments, before returning to form for the penultimate show and the finale -- True Detective's Night Country was an example of a show that devolved into a labyrinth of implausible and arbitrary complications to fill its allotted time; Baby Reindeer tacked on an entire parallel plot involving the hero's sexual abuse to expand the show to twice the number of episodes required to present the rather thin and listless story. Bodkin has some vestiges of this defect, but the show's Gothic plot and complicated narrative is enlivened by an excellent cast and an interesting setting for the events depicted in the show. I thought that Bodkin, which was seven hour-long episodes, was about an hour too long -- the sixth episode dragged and featured some drug-induced hallucinations (a plot point also deployed in the The Tourist) to bulk up the narrative; when people in a mini-series start hallucinating or having showy, symbolic dreams, it's usually a sign that the imagination of the producers have flagged and that the program is just marking time until it can shift into high-gear to close-out the story in the penultimate and last episodes. (During its long run The Sopranos, for instance, put its lead character into a coma for about four shows, apparently, set, according to one of the characters, in "purgatory." -- this sort of stuff, generally, doesn't succeed and simply demonstrates that the writers have run out of good ideas and are treading water until the narrative can be revived to bring the series to an end. Bodkin, by and large, avoids this trap. The show is set in a remote village in western Ireland -- that is, somewhere near Cork. This exotic location provides the show's makers an opportunity to load up the program with colorful and eccentric minor characters and the lush green landscapes with rocky harbors and ancient cottages give the entire enterprise something of the flavor of Bill Forsythe's Local Hero -- a movie in which an aggressive businessman from Houston finds himself marooned in a remote corner of Scotland and there achieves something like serenity. In Bodkin (the name of Cork County village where the story is set), here are endearing nuns (who turn out to be sinister as well), lots of pub scenes, and a full panoply of Irish types of the sort you might find in a John Ford movie -- spirited colleens, barroom brawlers, and, even, an Irish tenor who gets to sing a couple of songs at key points in the movie. The plot is pretty much nonsense involving people who are secretly related to one another and an ancient feud (the Irish seem to hold grudges for thirty years or more) as well as various criminal enterprises, most notably eel smuggling -- yes, you read that right) The scaffolding for the story is a celebration of the pagan harvest festival Samhain (pronounced ":sam-wan") financed by a quirky, arrogant tech mogul who has made a fortune in Silicon Valley and, then, returned to his hometown to reinvent the ancient village of Bodkin as "Bodkin 2.0). Twenty-five years earlier, on the night of a Samhain festival, three prominent local people disappeared. An American podcaster is the show's protagonist; the man, Gilbert (played effectively by Will Forte) is a perky optimist who has been highly successful with an earlier podcast narrating his wife's personal problems -- Gilbert has misappropriated her story, an offense that results in his divorce. (The show uses an ancient and misleading plot device -- that is, "papers' that have to be signed so as to magically implement the dissolution of marriage when the fatal document is executed; this is narrative short-hand, a plot convenience that I find lazy and completely false -- but, of course, I'm a lawyer.) Dove is an Irish immigrant to New York, a well-known investigative journalist, who is complicit in the suicide of a government whistle-blower; as the show progresses, she is indicted for espionage for disclosing U.S. secrets. Her publisher has sent her to Ireland to lay low until the controversy in the States subsides. She is openly contemptuous of Gilbert and derides his podcast as frivolous and not really "journalism". The third member of the trio is a young woman, Sizergh, who idolizes Dove and wants to be a hardnosed investigative reporter like her. This woman appears to be Middle-Eastern in ethnicity although I don't recall her background ever being clearly established. The podcast team encounter various local people who either assist them or obstruct their investigation. The disappearance of the three people at midnight on Samhain around 2000 expands into larger issues and conflicts -- the story explores the lingering effects of the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland, international smuggling, and the influence of the Catholic Church on the characters (Dove, for instance, was raised by Irish nuns in an orphanage). Around the middle of the show, a car is pulled out of a bog containing two bodies that appear to be related to the mystery, but there are red herrings and misdirection and, at last, the show climaxes with spectacular imagery of the Samhain festival involving fireworks, parades with mummers some of them wearing enormous masks. (A six-foot head representing Gilbert is part of the action.) There are explosions and fights; one "traveler", that is, a kind of gypsy, has hundred euro notes stapled to his body and forehead by a former IRA terrorist who admits that he has "anger management problems". The best and most inventive episode is the fifth instalment which uses a sinuous and persuasive flashback structure featuring someone inexplicably falling out of a tree to move the narrative forward. The characters evolve to some extent; the puppyish Sizergh becomes more aggressive and self-assured under Dove's tutelage; Dove's demeanor as a hard-bitten cynical reporter threatens to crack just a little and she hallucinates -- a big, long-legged wolf phantasm seems to stalking her. Gilbert, first shown as a naive, cheerful fellow, is increasingly eroded by the action and ends up looking grizzled, old, and haggard. The plot is very complex and there is no way that I could successfully summarize the twists and turns in the narrative -- as with Howard Hawk's The Big Sleep, I have the sense that there are murders in the story that are never explicated. But in the short term, the action and characters always make sense and the motion of the story from point to point is clear enough in detail (although obscure when viewed in larger dimensions.)
Bodkin illustrates several principles about the mini-series format. First, movies featuring investigations typically utilized a mismatched "odd couple" of cops. This is the so-called "buddy cop" trope. A longer form show requires more complexity in interactions so three protagonists are deployed not two -- all three of the protagonists must be distinctly delineated and have conflicting personality traits. Second, an intricate plot requires a "ticking clock" aspect -- that is, some kind of scheduled progress that moves to discrete destination in time. In Bodkin, the plot is measured by the number of days until the climactic Samhain celebration. Third, just as a six to eight hour show is best managed with three protagonists so similarly the plot may be augmented by several different antagonists or villains. In Bodkin, the three podcast investigators are threatened and opposed by not merely the perpetrators of the disappearance years before, but, also, a mob of vicious Irish gangsters and, further, the forces of Interpol investigating the eel smuggling industry and, later, enlisted to arrest Dove when she is to be extradited to the U. S. on espionage charges. Lastly, a show of this sort requires an exotic setting so that there is ample "local color" to fill out that story -- in this case, the nuns, the Samhain celebration, pub and tavern culture, and even an Irish tenor to name some of the atmospheric features in the show. Bodkin is smart, mostly funny, shallow and implausible and a good diversion if you like complicated crime shows.
Evil is a TV show involving paranormal investigators, obviously modeled on The X Files. The shows were broadcast on CBS, that is, network TV, in 2019 and 2020 before being dropped in 2021. Cable TV bought the show and invested in new programs and there are, apparently, two more seasons of Evil available although they stream on Paramount, a cable network that I don't have. (The new episodes of Evil are highly regarded and have garnered excellent reviews). These programs are each about 45 minutes long with blackouts at twelve to fifteen minute intervals for the insertion of commercials. (I assume the shows produced by Paramount for Cable follow the same general format but aren't structured into four parts as required for advertising on Network TV.) Classic TV. the shows that I watched in the sixties and seventies, was largely didactic and moralizing; although hyper-cynical and paranoid, Evil has some of this same quality -- it's on the right side of all hot-button issues and individual episodes focus on such topics as sexual abuse, the Catholic church's foibles, body image issues fomented by social media, reproductive rights, and racism among other subjects. The show's format, as with Bodkin, involves not two but three characters who work together but have conflicting opinions about the paranormal investigations that they pursue: Kristin Bouchard is a forensic psychologist, agnostic but tolerant in her religious beliefs; she has four daughters and, at home, the soundtrack is often chaotic with the little girls (they range from five to about 12) all talking at the same time. She is unhappily married to a mountain climber who conveniently spends long periods of time away from home leading treks and expeditions while Kristin is left to manage the family. Ben is a lapsed Muslim, an avowed atheist, who is nonetheless troubled by his absence of faith. He is a scientist, expert with technology, and provides the sophisticated forensic science featured in many episodes. The third member of the trio is David Acosta, an African-American seminarian and a devout Catholic. In the X-Files, Gillian Anderson as Dana Scully played the cool, scientific rationalist interacting, professionally and romantically, with Fox Mulder, a true believer in aliens and other paranormal activities. This format is mirrored in Evil, a show in which two skeptical ghost-busters are allied with a faithful Catholic willing to credit supernatural events. As with the X-Files, episodes are discrete, involving a "monster-of-the-week" investigation of various allegedly supernatural phenomena -- in Evil, this involves reports of angels, demonic infestations, exorcisms, incorruptible corpses and all manner of other miracles. As with the X-files, the trio of investigators has a "dispatcher" (Skinner of the old TV show) who gives them assignments -- this role is played by a Catholic priest who introduces the protagonists to the miracles they are supposed to explicate. (As with Skinner in the X-Files, there are intimations that the motives for assigning some of these "assessments" as they are called in Evil may be corrupt or, at least, tendentious -- the mixed motives of Catholic hierarchy are evident in most of the shows.) Finally, there is an overriding arc to the shows -- they involve not only monstrous events unique to each separate episode but an overarching story about the interactions of Kristin with her mother, Sheryl, played by Christine Lahti and a sinister demonic psychologist Dr. Leland Townsend. An interesting element of the show is that the most explicitly sexual encounters involve Christine Lahti's character -- the woman is both a sex-bomb and about sixty years old. Sheryl is romantically involved with the evil Dr. Townsend who is conspiring to destroy Kristin whom he recognizes as a threat to the dark forces that he represents. As with the X-Files, the show is quite creepy and suspenseful but it's possible to read the action in Evil as satire, a spoof on various recent cultural developments (for instance, Donald Trump's allegiance to the Devil is often intimated) and the program is often quite funny. Leland Townsend, in particular (played by Iowa native Mike Emerson) is a figure who looks like a nerdy milquetoast accountant but actually lethal and sadistic -- he makes dismissive quips about the other characters and seems capable of unlimited depravity. He has corrupted Sheryl and pimped her out to another demon who may be a vampire. Sheryl seems to have had her blood drained and replaced with some kind of sludge that looks like transmission fluid. Sheryl is deployed as sexual bait and seems to be having a great time. She lives in carriage house next to Kristin's home in a brownstone under an elevated railroad line -- when the train is overhead it shakes objects in the apartment and animates them. Sheryl has a sinister doll named Eddie to whom she makes sacrifices. Kristin sees a psychologist ala Tony Soprano -- this allows for plot development when she reveals her feelings and motives to her shrink. (Leland Townsend also sees a shrink -- in his case, a giant demonic goat; when the goat assigns him an exercise of securing human blood, Leland slashes off the goat's head, invites Sheryl over to his house and serves goat curry.) The program is very well-written and topical. Every miracle or wonder is assigned a natural explanation although these explanations are often not completely plausible and the show strongly implies that demonic forces are at work in our world -- for instance, cops shooting Black motorists is a phenomenon motivated by demonic possession; that is, the cops hallucinate hand guns held by their suspects as a result of the malign influence of demons. There is plenty of body horror in the show -- stigmata bleed and ooze, bot flies burst out of suppurating wounds, Kristin gives birth to a larval monster a bit like the first instar of the alien in that movie. and a little girl thinks she's ugly in comparison to her internet influencer; when she looks in the mirror, she sees that she has a long, green, and scaly tail. Evil tends toward long-form narratives that require two or three episodes with the plot arc running parallel and intersecting with the "monster-of-the-week" format. All of the characters are indelible and the acting is excellent particularly the work done by the Danish actress, Katja Herbers , alternately voraciously seductive, maternal, as well as a determined advocate for reason and science. Sometimes, she seems realistically plain; at other times, she is one of television's great beauties. Each show is unresolved and I haven't yet determined whether this is a result of sloppy and ill-focused writing or intentional -- certainly, the viewer leaves each episode with more questions than answers; the narrative never explains all of the anomalous events that we see. Evil is eccentrically formatted -- the title sequence is usually interpolated into the episode ten or fifteen minutes after the start of the show; in one case the title sequence is deferred to the very end of the episode. Shows are introduced with disembodied hands opening and paging through a book of pop-up illustrations called The Book of Terrifying Things; each show is given a keynote monster revealed in pop-up book and, then, animated to fly shrieking into the face of the viewer. The writing is very witty, funny, and effective. I enjoyed every episode of Evil and highly recommend the show as trashy fun that doesn't insult the viewer's intelligence. In one show, a TV producer sardonically calls the three protagonists, the "Mod Squad", a funny allusion that I got immediately but will be probably opaque to younger viewers and that. I'm afraid, dates me.
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