Gravitas and Space Fables

One of my early criticisms about Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip has been that you can't compare the importance of television and national security, at least not without it becoming a soap opera. Watching Josh Liman (Bradley Whitford) on the West Wing deal with the post-traumatic stress disorder after being shot is incredibly compelling television. Was it dramatic that someone got shot in a show about politics? Yes. Was it melodramatic? No. Would it be melodramatic in a show about television writers and producers? Probably. Ultimately what I believed it boiled down to was that lives weren't at stake in a show about TV and if that were the case then it's hard to build up the kind of drama that West Wing had.

Reading Tim Goodman last week, he addressed this very point: "I've read the comments about how it seems 'Studio 60' doesn't work as well as 'West Wing' because the latter had gravitas and the former is merely about the TV industry… why shouldn't [Aaron Sorkin] be allowed to take entertainment and the business of entertainment seriously? I mean, it's only the most powerful medium on the planet, the drug of the nation, why does he have to treat it like it's drastically less important than it really is?" And he's right. In terms of power the two are near equals in terms of influencing the behavior of people. I think the difference is in what kind of power they wield. People find knowing what's going on a governmental level intriguing because they're forced to obey the government, unless they move to Canada, but then they'd have to learn French. Ultimately government wields a hard power, backed by the police and the Army, by force.

On the other hand, people don't have to watch TV; they choose to. Smokers don't want to know what goes into cigarettes and television viewers don't want to know what goes on on TV. If politicians treat us like sheep because they want our vote, well, we have to put up with it, there's no other choice. But if we let television producers do it, then who do we have to blame but ourselves. Perhaps the lack of appeal behind Studio 60 is that we're less excited to see the man behind the curtain than we led Aaron to believe by wolfing down eight seasons of West Wing.

Reading Tim this week also alerted me to the Battlestar Galactica premier on Friday night which was INCREDIBLE. Everything about that show was well done. The pilot was riveting, the plot was incredible, believable, timely. In discussing it with some friends the wife said she just couldn't get behind science fiction and when she said "science fiction" you could tell she meant Star Trek, but calling Battlestar Galactica science fiction is like confusing Animal Farm with Aesop's Fables.

Sure there are robots, spaceships and evil clones, but that's all window dressing on what is the compelling story of a community struggling to save itself in both flesh and idea. It is the story of a people in a time of war trying to decide what's important, what's right and what's necessary when none of those options is the same one. It is the story of individuals becoming a People, and the way that story is told seems without flaw. It is emotional without being mawkish; intense without being melodramatic; and political without being facile or obvious.

And that is the true value of science fiction: to be able to tell a contemporary story in a safer, sanitized context, where the audience, in suspending their disbelief, is willing to be led to conclusions that in the real world might be otherwise abhorrent to them. Science fiction's ability to recontextualize complex moral and ethical considerations in worlds similar, but not quite equal to, ours is a huge advantage over other forms of persuasion, such as satire. Sure, a lot of science fiction is just robots and spaceships, but the best kind, the kind that Battlestar Galactica embodies, can move hearts, and where the heart goes the mind often follows.