PPPs – Part 3 – Comic book adaptations

I’m going to talk about two Paranormal Police Procedurals that I watch that are adaptations from comics, iZombie and Lucifer. While I enjoy both of them, I worry about this adaptation trend. This isn’t a bad way to adapt comics but is in some ways lazy. Rather than dealing with the complexity inherent in the stories of the source material TV adaptors just take a known structure and add the comic characters. This isn’t always the case with comic adaptations, such as The Walking Dead, but with two series using this same formula within two television seasons it’s starting to become suspicious.

Beyond that structure, they are interesting shows in their own right but, like Sleepy Hollow, it is their likely paranormal premises that will determine the endurance of their shows. Like Sleepy Hollow, which shares the same network, Lucifer draws from Judeo-Christian roots for their paranormal world. iZombie, the show, draws from Zombie lore, exclusively. This comes in contrast to the comic, which combines zombies, were-beings, ghosts, and vampires into one “undead” group depending on how the two souls of a human leave the body. The show has yet to, and may never, explore this aspect of the comic.

iZombie is my current favorite of the two. iZombie has it’s problems, some of which I touched on in a previous blog, but it’s paranormal premise allows for a very long run of the show. If there are infinite murders, there are infinite possible personalities that Liv can take on and we can have a show that every week is fresh and different as long as the writers continue to write interesting people that get murdered. This pattern can get boring, as there’s no reason to keep watching if it’s always different, but the writers have created 3-4 subplots that allow the series to fit this system without going out of style. Those are:

1) Zombie-ism is related to a drug

2) That drug is big business

3) Zombie-ism is big business

4) There is a big corporation trying to do something with zombie-ism and energy drinks

5) Zombie-ism is virus based so a cure is possible.

While this seems complex and perhaps too many plots for one show, it allows links between episodes that vary depending on the amounts of each subplot and moves both over-arching and within episode plots. Once these are resolved it’s not improbable that the Zombie stories start to reach outside Seattle, for individuals and issues farther afield, but at its present pace it seems unlikely that they’ll resolve all these plotlines soon.

Now onto Lucifer. Lucifer is good, well he’s actually bad, well actually he’s sort of himself and really putting a value on what he is or is not doing really isn’t valuable. Anyways, the show is funny and Lucifer is charming although it occasionally falls back on tropes. These tropes and it’s use of a Judeo-Christian paranormal premise, like Sleepy Hollow, make me question how long the show will hang around. While there are police sub-plots developing in Lucifer, these are not unique to the PPP genre and don’t really utilize what makes PPPs interesting. From that, the biggest problem I foresee with Lucifer is what the actual paranormal sub-plot is and how long can this actually go on for. Lucifer’s only sub-plot, that connects each week, is the will-he-or-won’t-he go back into the Hell business. This is probably related to the sub-plot of why-the-hell-pun-intended-is-officer-Decker-not-subject-to-Lucifer’s-powers but at this point we don’t know. The problem with this is that, even though beings from heaven have as long as they’d like to wax poetic and be will-the-or-won’t-they about God, it can only go on for so long before audiences are bored.

Therefore, if he goes back the show ends or he does some sort of weird and probably not satisfying part-time thing and if he doesn’t go back then we keep playing this game, no reason why God should stop pestering him, and my assumption would be that Lucifer loses his powers. Which may begin a cycle of, “Oh no I’d like those back please” that reignites the previous yes/no on Hell discussion. There are more possibilities than what I’ve outlined but based on the current sub-plots I’m not sure where they’re going. Thankfully, the premise is more open-ended than for Sleepy Hollow and there is the possibility of an infinite yes/no to Hell. Also because most of the murders are not directly tied to the supernatural element it’s likely that it could go on indefinitely and the problem is how long can they keep Lucifer, person and show, entertaining without commitment.

Both have potential to be long running series but the way that they develop their supernatural elements will eventually make or break each one. Shows similar to Lucifer, such as Sleepy Hollow and NBC’s Constantine, have had trouble keeping their Judeo-Christian lore straight and making the world development steady enough to sustain a long-running series. While there isn’t a show similar to iZombie in relation to its supernatural element, it has the potential like other shows that work on the girl with many faces premise, Dollhouse and Orphan Black, to get boring if the character of the protagonist doesn’t solidify. Essentially, while linked by the overarching plots, iZombie may fall into “theme” episodes with changes to the protagonist’s identity masquerading as character development. I hope both continue for a long time, or at least as long as Grimm has, but like all good stories careful planning is what will allow each to tell important meaningful stories rather than fizzle out.

PPPs: Paranormal Police Procedurals – Part I

As I’ve said before, I watch a lot of TV and most it is sci-fi or fantasy oriented in some way. Why? Because if I want something realistic I live in a city where a colleague had two of her students witness gun violence over the weekend. I don’t need to pretend stuff like that happens when it actually does. Anyway, I had noticed a few years back, about when Castle began, that there was a new formula for “hit-show”. Police officer + some atypical profession that helps solve crimes. I see this as starting with Bones in 2005 and continuing into the present.

However, it wasn’t until last year when my friend mentioned how she had a hard time watching police procedurals that it hit me, a new version of that formula had come into being. The Paranormal Police Procedural (PPP). The formula now being police officer + person with magical/special ability. Like regular police procedurals there is a certain amount of boredom that comes from their formula. To combat this though, unlike regular police procedurals that often have to fall back on romance (or lawyering) to fill in the gaps, paranormal police procedurals can fill in those gaps by providing background on the paranormal half of their show. There of course are romances anyways but they don’t have to share the weight of the story in the same way.

I’ve wanted to write about them as a sub-genre for a while but couldn’t figure out a good way to do them. So I’m going to follow up on this blog with a more detailed explorations of some PPPs but here are some preliminary thoughts the genre.

Of the four main PPPs (Sleepy Hollow, Grimm, Lucifer, and iZombie), each of these uses a different paranormal pretense for the show though they can be grouped into a number of tuples such as based on folk tales, based on comics, related to Christian beliefs, normal-turned-not-normal-person etc. The longest running of these has been Grimm (recently aired its 100th episode) and Lucifer just started this last January. So there are plenty more shows that could get on the market and take advantage of this system. But what does it matter? Why the sub-genre?

As I mentioned above I think it is born out of an easy way to get a “hit” show and extend it’s lifetime over multiple season. We haven’t eliminated murder so there are infinite ways for the paranormal sidekick to be useful in that respect but the problem is that, depending on the premise for the paranormal aspect and it’s development and depth, there is only so much paranormal to draw on. The success story being Grimm, which recently aired it’s 100th episode, and, besides shows that get cancelled in infancy, the great start but faltering Sleepy Hollow.

They also draw on rising popularity of science fiction and fantasy in television in general. While these have always been TV accessible genres, the number of these shows increases each year and expands out from network television into Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu productions as well. As technology expands and becomes more complex there are more ways for these to become interesting fiction stories and toe the line between explorations of science and fantastical uses of scientific premises. Essentially, PPPs combine the best of two worlds. The shows draw on two long standing-human fascinations, the obsession and fascination with death and of the inexplicable. Put them together and you generally have a pretty great show, even if it’s nothing like it’s source material.

The following blogs will explore some PPPs in more detail and examine how it is the paranormal premise, and not the police procedural portion, that appears to affect long-term watchability and consistency in a PPP.

The Girl with Many Faces

I really like watching TV. Like a lot. Which means I watch a lot of shows that aren’t very good. *cough* Once Upon a Time *cough*. But that doesn’t mean I’m blind to the ways that these shows are bad *cough* writing and character development *cough*. It just means I accept their flaws and move forward accepting that is how it is going to be. However, a few tropes have started to bother me because they have shown up in multiple shows that are good and that I like. While not necessarily bad tropes, I find the repetition of a plot device between shows rather fascinating. The two main ones that have continued to bother me are a) lesbians who only talk about men b) the girl with many faces. In this post, I’m going to talk about the latter as I need to remember my other example for a) before I write about it.

The girl with many faces is a trope I noticed specifically in iZombie (a show that I adore) and Dollhouse (a show that I liked a lot). It also appears to varying degrees in other shows such as Agent Carter (which I adore) and probably Alias (a show I haven’t seen) but to varying degrees. What is the girl with many faces? Well, she’s essentially whatever you want her to be. In the case, of iZombie and Dollhouse she is the main character but in almost every episode she takes on either all or part of an entirely different persona.

What’s cool about this? Well, audience members of different personality types can identify with the character depending on who they are in the episode. She can be anyone’s Mary Sue or fanfiction character, taking on the traits you want including butt-kicking, seduction, and intelligence. She can be confident or meek having tech skills or be handy with sewing. The world is her personality.

What isn’t so cool? Well, sometimes the development of female character as an individual is lost. This point often becomes part of character building. In iZombie, Liv is constantly battling with who she is on and off particular individual brains. However, characterizing Liv is still sort of difficult and comes into a sort of stark contrast with Gwen, the character in the comic that iZombie is based off of, who gets memory flashbacks but does not take on the personalities of those individuals. In Dollhouse, this comes with Echo’s increasing self-awareness but still Echo is essentially a tabula rasa for whatever the writers decide who she’s going to be. In both cases, there is a need to write at least two parallel personalities and sometimes the life of either the “true” main character or their “personality of the week” falls a bit short.

Beyond how well this is executed, it was an interesting trope to identify because it perpetuates an odd facet of gender in America. To a certain degree, women are taught to be what they are told to be. Meaning women are taught that whatever someone tells you to be you sort of should be. Women’s behaviors and personalities are encouraged to be more adaptable than men’s. This isn’t always true but I don’t think it’s accidental that both Dollhouse and iZombie focus on females who changes personalities as opposed to males. It is true that both do have male characters who take on different personalities but most cases these examples don’t highlight the extreme differences between one personality and the next, with much more detail given to the female personalities than the males. Or there are a larger number of female-centric episodes as opposed to male centric episodes. The one exception that I can recall is in season 1 of iZombie where Lowell mentions he’s on “gay brain.” However, almost every other male zombie appears to be unaffected, or only minimally affected, by the personalities of those they eat. Dollhouse also had Victor, a male doll, but it’s difficult for me to recall more than a few episodes that had his new persona as a main focus.

This isn’t necessarily a bad device. I really like(d) both of these shows. They have (had) good action, story, and writing with awesome female leads (and we need more of them). But why do cool women have to also be something like 30 other women. Yes, as a young girl I wanted to be all things awesome but at the same time it would be nice to have cool female characters that didn’t have to change all the time to fit the situation. And there are good examples of this, but at the same time why does it appear so often? Is it really so difficult to write one, stable although reflective and evolving, female personality?