December daily: Custom canon

[resonant]

james prompts: if you could design your own television series, what would it be like? Premise, actors, story arcs, etc!

This is an amazing prompt, and I'm so tired that I'm probably not going to do it justice. In fact, I find the metaphorical blank white sheet of paper kind of intimidating. So I'm going to build a series out of pieces of other series, how's that?

Ingredient 1. "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer."

From Buffy, I'm going to keep:

- The mix of humor and drama
- The wealth of complex and interesting female characters
- The way it has an ensemble cast and it knows how to use it. The secondary characters are never inert; even when you have an episode heavily focused on one character or pair, the others are all alive, and you couldn't take anyone away without making the episode weaker.

There were a few problems with Buffy, though, for my purposes. First, honestly those fight scenes were boring; I'd say to the kidlet, "Oh, have we reached the smack-smack-grunt portion of the episode? I'm going to go get a snack."

You know what I'd like to have instead of fight scenes? Dancing. Or possibly singing, but then you'd get into my taste in music and how I kind of hate the stuff other people like. So:

Ingredient 2: "Mary Poppins."

Give me at least one song per episode. A good song. And some various kinds of ensemble dancing.

And, hey, it's my canon, so I'm going to demand that they film the dancing the way they used to -- letting you see people's whole bodies, watch their feet, get a sense of their movement, instead of doing this contemporary thing where they cut every ten seconds.

Now, my next problem with Buffy was that for my purposes it was too well done. Joss is always in control of his subtext. You don't ship anybody he doesn't mean for you to ship, and if people are signalling attraction, it's because he intends for them to signal attraction. There's no accidental gay in a Joss show; if there's gay, he put it there on purpose.

So for my next ingredient, let's choose something that will fix that.

Ingredient 3: "Star Trek: Voyager."

Trek is never in control of its subtext, and Voyager had near-universal shippability. Het, slash, femslash -- every possible pairing had some bit of intensity that slipped out of the hands of the creators and into the hands of the fanfiction writers.

(My second choice would be "Harry Potter," but it works better for me if most of the significant characters aren't underage.)

Finally, you can see that the problem with all these canons is that they're awfully white, so:

Ingredient 4: "The Losers"

I don't want the body count; I don't want the cynicism; but I do want a cast diverse enough that if you say, "The black guy," somebody can say, "Which one?" (Also: Oscar Jaenada.)

Finally, separate from all that, I need to put my order in for:

- at least one male character who is smart, highly verbal, desperately lonesome, and mostly emotionally unavailable (ideally brown of hair and eye), and
- at least one female character who is seriously alien to the point that she'll do things like demand an explanation for cheese (ideally not too skinny).

So there you have it. Buffy + Mary Poppins + Star Trek: Voyager + The Losers. Boldly go and dance, Scoobies.

Comments

[muccamukk]

That sounds like an excellent show that I would watch every week. I especially like the randomly generated subtext angle.

I would say that Voy was the most diverse Star Trek (I remember annoying people making fun of it for being "politically correct" at the time, because they had four PoC on cast of nine), but you can always have more diverse!

[resonant]

It's true about Voyager, and I'll never forget the thrill of hearing a Trek character say, "She's the captain!"

[muccamukk]

Janeway was so good for me when I was 11. Nenya has an tumblr tag that says "Captain Janeway made me gay." Which might not be far off the case for me as well.

[liviapenn]

I feel like I have told this story before, but my crazy conservative aunt (who is totally a Trekkie and has other strong fangirl tendencies) was VERY miffed at Voyager because the only white male in their cast (not counting holograms and white guys in face-covering alien makeup) was "a jailbird" (ie Tom Paris.) POLITICAL CORRECTNESS RUN AMUCK!

Even at the time I remember thinking "but he's the young hot white guy... of course he's going to be the Kirk & Riker type action hero and get all the good adventure-lead stories."

[muccamukk]

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS RUN AMOK!

I remember reading a newspaper review that called it... damn, something like "Seasame-Street PC Casting" or whatever, and feeling so sad because all I wanted was for Chakotay to love me.

Aaaaand he did, well not all of them, and I liked Paris, but compare his episodes to Chakotay's or Kim's...

[liviapenn]

Yeah. Plus, I mean, look at Kim's backstory vs Paris, as far as it's set up in the pilot:

Harry Kim: nice guy, totally a model Starfleet officer (like, literally NICKNAMED "Starfleet," that's how Starfleet he is) no flaws besides being a little nervous and dorky.

Tom Paris: edgier than most Starfleet officers, is the snarky guy who gets to make all the sarcastic remarks, has a tragedy in his past, currently nobody on EITHER side of the Maquis/Starfleet divide trusts him, he has major daddy/authority issues, & is obviously being set up from the pilot to redeem & prove himself through struggle and perseverance.

So yeah, I did not get the complaint about him "being a jailbird," because that was so obviously just the setup for "let's tell a TON of stories about Tom Paris redeeming himself to be a hero and a great guy!" and it was super clear even from the first couple of episodes which character was supposed to be more interesting and cool.

[resonant]

When you put it like this, I'm kind of retroactively pissed at them for not giving Harry more to work with.

[liviapenn]

See, I think if they had stuck more strongly to the "half of us are Starfleet, half of us are Maquis" idea... then there would have been a lot more interesting stuff to do with Harry just because he would have been so far over on one end of the bell curve. (And I sort of wonder if that's where they meant to go with him, the guy who is super starry eyed about the Federation and not okay with compromise or cutting corners, vs Chakotay or B'Elanna who would understand better how to survive in tough conditions.)

But by the end of the first season you really couldn't tell just by watching an episode who was Starfleet all along and who used to be Maquis. It just barely ever came up and was kind of pointless. So... yeah.

[resonant]

They really could never hold onto a conflict -- any character tension would last half a season and then dissolve into "we're all respected colleagues." That drove me nuts.

[grammarwoman]

This may sound really weird, but I think you'd like the Disney Channel's animated "Phineas and Ferb". Two step-brothers make the most out of their summer vacation by building a zany invention every day with the help of their friends, completely innocent of the fact that what they're doing is dangerous, while their older sister tries to bust them to their mother. Meanwhile, their pet platypus has a double life as a secret agent with a mad scientist for a nemesis. Every episode has at least a song or two, in a dazzling array of musical genres. There's continuity out the wazoo, tons of interesting secondary characters, women with their own storylines, and a zesty appetite for affectionately sending up tons of fictional tropes. The characters are mostly tweens, but there's lots of (gentle) romance and flirting and pining. Even their diversity is fairly well done for a cartoon on Disney.

[resonant]

I love Phineas & Ferb! -- but I've only seen an episode or two in hotels, since we never had cable, so I didn't realize there was continuity. I love the meta -- "Moooom! Phineas & Ferb are making a title sequence!"

[grammarwoman]

You should totally *ahem* more episodes. :)

[sara]

*cough* I will just point out that once upon a time I had an extremely human Chinese exchange student who didn't understand cheese at all (and when we explained it, he was politely horrified.) Cheese is not a human universal!

[resonant]

I didn't mean alien as in nonhuman (though I wouldn't mind that if the special effects were good) -- I just meant in the sense of "my ways are strange to her." And if a non-cheese-eater looked in my fridge, she'd find my ways very strange.

The kidlet (she's 14 and a native speaker but is now speaking a dialect you might call Internetglish) said, "We have so many cheese."

[sara]

Oh, I had my little moment of Realization of Total Ignorance About The Universality Of Cheese when, on the exchange student's first night in our household, I thought, "I will fix something comforting!" and made mac and cheese.

This was about as welcome to the poor guy as any number of dishes he would find comforting would be to me.

The next day we drove over to the Asian grocery and decided that what's actually culturally universal is dumplings.

[fleurrochard]

It would have been pretty much as comforting to me as to him, without me coming from a non-cheese eating culture. ;) (Ok, a bit more comforting, since I would have kinda understood where you're coming from. *g*)

[out_there]

letting you see people's whole bodies, watch their feet, get a sense of their movement, instead of doing this contemporary thing where they cut every ten seconds.

Oh, man, I would be so behind that. Close-up shots and multiple cuts always feel like it's covering for a bad dancer...

[resonant]

I know! I hate it. I love watching people dance, and I keep following links to current dance videos and clicking out of them in disgust because the camera bounces around so much -- these people have put all this work into working out a group activity meant to be viewed at full length; don't show me close-ups of their faces!

[majoline]

Oh, sign me up for this canon too. ♥

[resonant]

Who can we hire for this?

[mergatrude]

I think we need "Boldy Go And Dance, Scoobies!" on a t-shirt!

[resonant]

Boy, would that take a lot of explaining.

[ellen_fremedon]

I would watch the heck out of that show.

[resonant]

I do wish it existed.

[giglet]

Yes please! This show is relevant to my interests!

[resonant]

I can't decide whether I want the dancing to be part of the premise, or just to be a thing that happens without explanation the way it does in musicals.

[james]

This sounds like an awesome show!

[resonant]

If I'd had more time, I could have done the casting, too.

[sanj]

Feel free to take a moment at any time. I would watch the living heck out of this show. :)

[resonant]

I was thinking more about it last night, and I think maybe the ideal premise for me would be for an acoustic string band to get caught up in some accidental time travel and flung aboard a dysfunctional spaceship.

[superborb]

Trek is never in control of its subtext

LOLOLOL So true

[resonant]

I've spent some very happy hours with Next Generation and Voyager, though.

[liviapenn]

Also, I kept meaning to comment that at least some of your ingredients are fulfilled by The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers!

[resonant]

Wow -- I was not familiar with that at all!