Looking for a dare-to-be-great situation (original) (raw)

Alyssa Rosenberg's blog is fantastic. She's got a critical, almost outsider-ish perspective that comes from being severely limited in her pop culture options as a child and a teen. It's interesting, and fun, and smart. I love reading it, even when I don't particularly care about the topic at hand.

Her post on Bones pretty much sums up the things I like and dislike about the show, although Rosenberg seems to be a bit more forgiving of some of the wackier relationship plotlines than I am.

Money quote is here:

But much more importantly, Bones needs to restore its credibility. The show pushes its fans, and that's a good thing. But it shows no respect for your fans to feed them something poorly written and to call it a gift to them, and it shows no respect for your characters to leave them with a lot of raveled threads, and to abruptly make them behave in ways that have little to do with the personas you've established for them. The show has had an unpleasant history of odd inconsistencies, whether making Booth and Bones smooch only to never mention it again; dropping a gripping story about a serial kidnapper for a season and a half only to pick it up again and subvert it to a dopey plot device; implying that a character convicted of a heinous crime is innocent and inexplicably failing to follow up on it. Doing this once or twice might be all right, but as a repeat problem, it feels like sloppiness. I'd hate to think the show is irretrievably broken.

Me too. I'll probably watch the premier this weekend, on DVR, because I'm interested to see if the show can recover. If it's better than the second half of the last season (which is such a low bar to clear, I'm not sure I should even bother setting it), I'll continue to watch on a trial basis. I am highly doubtful it will improve, as from interviews it sounds like Hart Hanson has no idea what's wrong. And that's sad, because the show has done such really interesting things over the past four seasons. It's not your average procedural, and there's nothing else on TV quite like it - the balance of personal and workplace stories, the dynamics between the characters, and the seriously goopy corpses all created something unique and special. I wish like hell it doesn't keep falling apart.