Posted in: Comics, Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh | Tagged: bbc

Look! It Moves by Adi Tantimedh #87: The Problem With Dull Science Fiction

I was watching the first two hours of OUTCASTS, the BBC's latest attept at primetime Science Fiction, and ended up wondering again why the mainstream is so embarrassed by Science Fiction.

First, let's get this out of the way: OUTCASTS sucked. It was like some BBC snobs looked at the rebooted BATTLESTAR GALACTICA and decided to make a show that got rid of all the good parts – ACTION! SPACE BATTLES! EXCITEMENT! – and kept all the bad parts: crying! Shouting! Hand-wringing! Moralistic speeches!

If you squint, OUTCASTS was almost like a sequel to Ron Moore's BATTLESTAR GALACTICA with the serial numbers shaved off. Hell, it even had Apollo (Jamie Bamber) in it. The problem with the show is its utter joylessness as it hammers away at the theme of Original Sin, how we're always going to be dicks and kill each other, with a cast of good actors left without much to do but be terribly earnest (SPOILER: Apollo gets killed off by the end of the first episode).

The other thing that irks me about OUTCASTS is how derivative it is. I got the feeling the makers decided to produce it only after looking at what US SF shows have been popular lately rather than come up with something genuinely thoughtful and original on their own rather than follow in Hollywood's footsteps again. In fact, back in the 1990s, US network TV already attempted the exact same show. Produced by Steven Spielberg's company, it was called EARTH-2, and it didn't last more than one season. I don't remember any of the plotlines, and the most memorable thing about it was that show's entire wardrobe department seemed to be sponsored by Gap clothing. And way back in the 1970s, there was a botched Gene Roddenberry pilot (one of many) called PLANET EARTH which starred John Saxon and not even savage California babes in leather bikinis saved that one from oblivion. And this May, Steven Spielberg's company is going to do the same show yet again, only this time it's called TERRA NOVA.

Now, apart from it now looking like a provable scientific theorem that a show about future humans trying to colonise a new planet to live on will suck and get cancelled, the big issue for me here is why movie and TV producers keep choosing the most boring, generic SF ideas to make shows and movies out of. It's like producers and executives in both Hollywood and Britain are still embarrassed by Science Fiction, choosing only to do the most crass and obvious reactionary scare stories since they're easiest to understand. Of course, the easiest drama is always about people fucking up. That's the stuff of drama itself. SF TV and movies is almost always about people fucking up with Science. Science Fiction as a literary genre really originated in Britain with Mary Shelly and later with HG Wells, who used it to question and attack notions of Imperialism, Nationalism and British Empire exceptionalism idea at the time, so it's kind of a British SF tradition to tell stories about what happens when things go wrong with Science. The optimistic future worlds and space operas side of the genre are more of an American 20th Century SF tradition when technocrats like Asimov, Clarke, Bova and their like took the notion that Science is a good thing that will improve our lives, even if the world of the future won't be any easier to keep alive.

From my experience in the British film and TV industry, producers and executives seem to think SF works best when it's about "XXXX is BAD for you!" That's a reactionary view at best, and seemingly the only one they understand about SF. It's like being British, their reflex is to deal with how miserable everything and everyone is. I like my dark, downbeat SF, I'm a fan of the original QUATERMASS and 1970s dystopian British SF like DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS, but those were written by writers who had something they wanted to say rather than created by a committee trying to copy American TV ratings successes. The best SF on British TV now is mostly on DOCTOR WHO and that's because the show has been in the hands of Russell T. Davies, Steven Moffat and writers like Paul Cornell, who are all very familiar and comfortable with SF. They understand that SF is more than the knee-jerk pessimism that producers and executives immediately assume, that there's an inherent optimism in SF stories that take place in the future: the fact that humanity has survived into the future with major technological and scientific breakthroughs to take them to the stars without having wiped themselves out is a very optimistic idea, but then the higher-ups ted to poo-poo DOCTOR WHO as a children's show, and so that's another ghetto that they can dump SF into. For them to then devote an entire adult series into then show how people are still dicks and killing each other into the future and asking "If we continue to be dicks, are we worth saving?" is just creatively lazy. If future people are as miserable and boring as the ones on shows like OUTCASTS, then the stacked answer can only be a resounding "FUCK, NO." And was it really necessary to remake SURVIVORS rather than think of something new?

Britain, being an island, may have, percentage-wise, the highest concentration of respected Science Fiction novelists of any country right now, and many of them hang out together in London often a few blocks, even a few feet away from the same places that TV and movie producers drink at, yet they're never invited to pitch for them, even though I know the majority of UK SF writers would love to write a smart SF script with new ideas instead of the same old ones that TV producers keep regurgitating. But then I should get used to the way the British film and TV industry tends to let untapped resources and potential lie fallow by now.

Playing spaceships at lookitmoves@gmail.com

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Look! It Moves! © Adisakdi Tantimedh

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