Thursday 11 December 2008

A Bit on the Slow Side

Contains spoilers for Survivors

I was going to wibble on about Survivors for a bit, but Rob Stickler has beaten me to it here (and in typically erudite fashion as well – I quote: “The apocalypse has been a slight inconvenience mainly manifesting in an inability to text.” Arf!).

Even so, there were a few things that bothered me, not least the issue of what appeared to be a weird structural decision on behalf of the programme makers. Survivors is of course a TV show, which means it should have different structural concerns than film. Arguably, TV should provide a broader canvas, which means that everything has more space to breathe, for characters to develop, for themes to expand; after all, a ninety minute opening episode is a lot of televisual space to fill up.

So, how did Survivors choose to do it?

Mostly by elongating twenty minutes worth of story into ninety minutes.

If Survivors was forced at gunpoint to shrink its six and half hour running time into a ninety page screenplay, then no doubt the first episode would be concluded well inside the twenty page mark. And if it was, would you have lost any significant scenes from the remaining seventy pages?

I don’t think you would.

It’s not that Survivors was particularly slow as such; it just took its own sweet time in getting to the point – probably a consequence of the realisation that there was ninety minutes to fill (I haven’t seen the original series, so I have no idea how the respective first episodes stack up against each other). A case in point was when Abby awoke after being in a coma to find her husband dead in the front room. If this scene had been designed for film and not TV, it probably wouldn’t have been longer than a page. Such as it was, we saw Abby do a huge variety of things before discovering her husband’s body, none of them particularly interesting or essential to the narrative. But then, don’t forget: there’s a lot of time to fill here. And if you’re not going to fill it up with honest to goodness story, you’ve got to fill it up somehow: watching characters eat, take showers and wander around deserted suburban streets is probably as good a waste of time as any.

The other strange phenomenon that came to mind watching Survivors was the fact that it’s essentially a re-make (yeah, OK, so the BBC describe it as a ‘re-imagining’, but that still makes it a re-make in my book). Add to this news that Day of the Triffids is to get a makeover next year, and you have to start to wonder what’s going on in TeeVee land at the moment (even Wallander was in effect a remake – BBC4 handily showed the original Swedish series for comparison the other night).

I’ve always (probably naively) assumed that the BBC doesn’t have to chase ratings in the same way that their commercial rivals do, which surely means the Beeb is able to indulge in a certain amount of risk taking. What you seem to have is the opposite: remakes aplenty (wasn’t there a rumour recently about a Reginald Perrin remake? Yikes!), Andrew Davies writing every costume drama in christendom and ‘single drama’ relegated to the seldom watched margins of BBC2. In comparison, ITV looks like a veritable hotbed of originality. And that’s a scary thought.

10 comments:

Dave said...

Hi Chip.

Adrian Hodges said that this re-imagining was going to have a bit more pace than the original. As far as I can see there wasn’t too much re-imagining going on. Vast chunks of the new series having been ripped almost word for word from the original. And as for being faster paced, the remake takes about 15 minutes longer than the original to get to the point where Abby finds her husband dead.

To see how the original version compares to the remake the whole episode has been posted on youtube in the usual 10 minute chunks. The first part is here. In all its 1970s, studio based, splendour.

PS. I too am going to wibble on about Survivors when the series finishes.

Chip Smith said...

Dave - thanks for the link, I'll check it out in all its YouTube glory a bit later.

The major problem I have with Survivors (apart from the fact that it's a remake - I mean, why bother?!) is that it didn't really demand 90 minutes of primetime TV. 60 minutes perhaps, but no more. As Rob Stickler says over at his place, the end of the world looks a little bit too pedestrian for my liking...

Dave said...

The original series is far from perfect and probably is deserving of the Cosy Catastrophe label too. Although the first few episodes were filmed in the winter, which gives it a much bleaker feel than the remake. And if Terry Nation was forced to at gunpoint I’m sure he could have cut the first episode to about 30mins without loosing too much of the story.

This is why I was expecting much more from a 90min (faster paced) opening episode. They seem to have filled all the extra time in introducing a lot more characters. But not telling any more story.

I would have preferred it had they decided to take the original premise to tell an all new selection of stories.

John Soanes said...

You're right about the Perrin remake - got an invitation from SRO (or similar) to attend a filming in the next month or so. It's written by Simon Nye, which makes me less immediately hostile, but the fact rather remains that it really doesn't need to be remade...
J

Chip Smith said...

Can't remember where I heard it, but I seem to recall that the only thing the new Perrin is going to take from the original is the title! No doubt it's another 're-imagining', which still begs the question: why bother? Even drama appears to be completely brand obsessed these days...

Janice Okoh said...

I thought the first half hour of survivors was pacy! My heart was beating. Am I the only one?

Janice Okoh said...

My heart was beating faster with antipication and excitement, I mean...

Chip Smith said...

I agree (I think!). It's just that the rest of the ninety minutes kinda tailed off into not very much - to me, the first episode felt like the first twenty minute act of a movie, which inevitably led to a slower pace. That said, the first twenty minutes did seem a bit snappier...

I also hear that Survivors has just been commissioned for another series after the viewing figures held steady (the final episode got 5 million apparently). Can't decide whether this is good news or not. At least Bonekickers won't be coming back for a second go!

Janice Okoh said...

I missed the last episode but I must admit, it got a bit the samey and I knew they would keep surviving. I got excited when one of them got shot. It was a bit like heroes - going around in circles. To tell you the truth, I'm not too excited about the next series.

Chip Smith said...

I think Charlie Brooker summed up Survivors pretty well in his Screenwipe Review of the Year - half bleak apocalpytic drama, half cosy Oxo family (he didn't like like Julie Graham much either). If you're going to do bleak, then don't hold back was the general consensus (and Brooker knows what he's talking about - have you seen Dead Set? Wow).