Great is the enemy of good.
I just finished watching the first season of Boardwalk Empire. So much of it was extremely impressive: the sets and costumes, the direction of the pilot by Scorsese, the… um… the… er…
I’m not for a minute saying that BE is crap – far from it – but it’s not great either: the characters are a bit vague and not particularly exciting; there’s no real thrill when supervillain Ace Rothstein appears, or indeed when the bloke who played Omar in The Wire shows up; the plotting is fine, but not that compelling; situations (the gunman with half a face) deliver far less than they promise; the dynamics tend to go round in pointless circles (the Al Capone plotline, for example); and worst of all, Steve Buscemi is miscast as Nucky. He’s not intimidating or at all credible as the person who runs bootleg-era Atlantic City in the face of gangsters and the law. Oh, and Kelly MacDonald is a bloody awful actor, and her plotline is pretty boring.
Oh, I think I just made it sound crap. I really don’t mean that, I just mean that it’s not good enough to be considered great. We’ve been very fortunate in the last ten years to have been fed a mouthwatering diet of televisual perfection in shows like The Wire, The Sopranos and Game of Thrones. That means that anything that falls short of that standard does so under the glaring spotlight of what is now possible in the medium of the TV serial, especially when it comes laden with the hype, budget, cast and ambition of Boardwalk Empire.
We now expect plotlines to intertwine with graceful, invisible ease. We want all characters to be complex, well-rounded and brilliantly portrayed. We notice when ten or twenty hours of drama is not conveyed with absolute consistency. In short, we have our antennae set for great and when anything falls short, it’s a disappointment, even if it’s actually pretty good.
That might be unfair, but it’s only a version of what happens in many areas of life. In the 70s, British people were happy with the prawn cocktail, steak and chips and black forest gateau of a Bernie Inn. Now if your soup hasn’t been passed through fractional distillation then the chef isn’t really trying. The standard is high and those who only meet the greatness of a couple of decades ago are dismissed as not up to scratch. In the 80s newspapers were grim, black-and-white affairs with a couple of pages of sport and maybe 25 pages overall. Nowadays they’re all-singing, all-dancing colourful daily digests of absolutely everything of note that has happened in the world, complete with online and ipad versions that link to clips and appear by magic on your at your bedside during the night. Animation used to be super impressive if it featured any degree of 3-D (remember the delight at this shot from 1992?). Now if you can’t see every hair on a dog move in a gust of wind or each glint of light catching on a dandelion spore you’re a halfwitted hack who needs to go back to marker pen school.
So does quality only exist in the context of other things or is there an ultimate standard of anything that we can look to? If there had been no Dickens, Shakespeare or anyone good, would we revere the work of Jeffrey Archer? Would the absence of The Beatles elevate Steps? Would my son’s finger paintings look better without the context of Michelangelo?
That’s it, isn’t it? Really bloody great stuff just ruins it for the merely good. No matter how fantastic you are, if there’s someone a bit better you’re suddenly worse, without your work changing at all.
I guess we’ll all just have to be brilliant. But, unfortunately, when everyone’s brilliant, no one is.
Damn.
After the first episode I thought what you thought.
Life’s too short, man. BTW Mad Men and The West Wing can be added to that list of quality sceptic drama.
Wasn’t “Ace Rothstein” also De Niro’s character in Casino? Is that some strange homage from Scorsese?
HBO really has raised the bar over the years. Part of the problem for me with BE is I have no real idea where it’s supposed to be. Atlantic City, though I’ve been there, doesn’t exist in my mind the way NYC and Chicago always did.
The second and third series are much better; more pace, more surprise.
Did Breaking Bad ever make it to the UK?
That was another real bar raiser and it’s not even HBO.
Have you watched Treme, Ben? Absolutely amazing. What’s really interesting to me is that David Simon has produced something truly great (The Wire) and then he’s managed to (in my opinion) better it.
In the context of your post, I wonder if doing something great makes life even tougher. Then, you’re not just competing with everyone else’s great stuff, but also with yourself. Follow excellence with something merely ‘good’ and it really suffers by comparison.
Not seen Treme. I’ve heard pretty mixed things about it, but I’ll give it a go.
Breaking Bad is excellent.
Is it worth carrying on with Game of Thrones then? I saw the first two episodes and thought, yawn.
The light at the end of this tunnel is that we are all different and what is great for one person isn’t necessarily great for another. I didn’t really like The Wire, but a lot of people (whose opinions i thoroughly respect) did. With this in mind, we should never run out of great stuff to watch. PS, The Shield and Freaks and Geeks are up there (but that’s just my opinion).
Meanwhile advertising is about turning C’s into B’s.
Isn’t it about making C’s look like B’s?
@Steve
Happily the world of adverts has none of this subjectivity. In the world of ads you often hear a Creadiv Director/Planner/Account Man/Client say something is not “right.”
And we have the luxury of research to tell us exactly what and what is not “good.”
Perhaps the writers of these shows should show their stuff to 12 complete cunts from Reading to find out, with 100% accuracy and obectivity whether their scripts are, or are not, good.
And then some other cunt with a degree in Marketing from Bellend College, Fuckfaceville can tell him where they’re going wrong and what the “need” to do to fix it.
I confirm I am not a spammer. I also confirm I shall one day slam a client’s head onto the fucking boardroom table.
Agree – it’s such a pity that the truly great somehow ruin the merely good – restaurants and hotels I used to like have been really spoiled for me because I’ve visited more expensive versions. There’s no objective good or great, just a comparison with what has gone before.
But when it comes to art and advertising maybe good shouldn’t ever be good enough. Because we’re not starting from scratch each time. We can learn from the great stuff which has already been done so then our efforts should be about taking the next step forward.
BTW, I cannot believe you put Game of Thrones in the same sentence as The Wire and The Sopranos! Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen every episode of GOT and it was very enjoyable but it’s at best a gratuitous soap opera written for teenage boys! Agree with John Woods on Mad Men and West Wing, excellent writing.
Boardwalk has no likeable characters. Everyones a chunt. Apart from Kelly Macdonald and her terrible irish accent.
GOT is poor because its cheesy AND very complicated.
Plimp R Bandy, are you hiring?
Am a box set fan, but Boardwalk has never appealed. Am just starting Sons of Anarchy.
And, BTW, the prawn cocktail is back.
I really like GOT. But then, I liked Lord of the Rings too.
Breaking Bad is excellent (though Season 3 flagged halfway through before finding its way at the end). On Season 4 now. Mind you, I was a bit disappointed to read that there is a Season 5 too. I have no idea how shark jumping is to be avoided with such a tight storyline.
Mad Men was good, though a little boring at times. That’s why you need swords and dragons and shit.
If you ducked out after season one then you’ve missed a treat.
The characters remain vague but only because they’re not consistent; people who are bad do good things and good people turn bad, they’re not fixed.
I’d say Nucky is perfectly cast. He’s a charming villain who would much rather use guile and politics than violence to achieve his aims (although he comes to realise that maybe everyone’s been taking advantage of him).
Boardwalk did not hit the ground running, but it developed into nuanced, complicated, amoral, vicious, unpredictable and, at times great, series.
maybe give it another go?
Hi Ben. If you liked The Wire idea of getting under the skin of a city by looking at it from different characters’ perspectives, you’ll really like Treme. Like its predecessor it has brilliant writing, acting and characters you care about. And what it lacks in drugs and guns it makes up for with hands-down the best music featured on a TV series, ever. Give it a go. (I feel like the last person on earth who hasn’t seen Breaking Bad so I’ll definitely give that a go.)