Amateur Megalomania

I seem to be a sucker for cancelled television shows.

I don’t watch a lot of television in real time. Before the DVR, I rarely committed myself to a show. Seriously, who can ever make the time to be at the assigned channel, at the assigned time, and be sure to avoid any interruptions? I don’t need that kind of pressure. The only reason I could follow Babylon 5 was thanks to the ridiculous 1 AM airings on Friday nights. If they ran more shows then, those of us without lives would be able to keep up.

Then God invented DVD. And He saw it was good. But we needed an easier way to get these wonderful disks, so He followed that up with Netflix.

And we all see how good that is.

While I don’t watch a lot of television, I use my television a great deal. I watch DVDs. Whenever I have some spare time to descend to the ‘veg’ state, I’d much rather pop in a disk and have some control over my experience. Netflix works well for me.

I’m not a big screen snob. I don’t agree that all meaningful viewing must take place in the long film format. Episodic television is a great medium for story telling that simply can’t be rivaled in the film world.

In episodic television, characters evolve, stories unfold slowly, and you get so much nuance in acting once you’ve spent twenty or thirty hours with a collection of characters. Done well, the episodic format beats the crap out of film.

Yet these very traits sometimes results in the cancellation of a series. I know I’m a rarity in the viewing community. It seems the vast majority want easily followed stories, stock characters, and the ability to miss a few episodes without being punished. This is not what I would describe as ‘done well’.

So when a TV series flames out young, yet sells well in DVD format, I notice. There has to be a reason for this dichotomy.

Enter Boomtown.

As a subset of episodic television, the cop show has a lot going for it. You explore the darker side of humanity through the perspective of generally good people trying to keep evil at bay, while suffering the corrosive proximity to what they fight against. A good cop show is a microcosm of the human struggle to be better than our instincts, to rise to a level of civilization higher than the brutish and short lives described by Hobbes. This genre includes gems such as The Shield, and Homicide.

I’m a sucker for a cop show.

Boomtown ran one season, plus six episodes in Season Two (these don’t count, because they had re-tooled the show completely into something else). What caught my attention was Neal McDonough. I like this guy: he has the looks and the demeanor to play some fascinating characters. He is the template for my main character in The Wrecks of Time (if I ever finish it). So when I see him in the series, it goes in the Netflix queue.

The Boomtown in question is LA, which is an interesting way of looking at it considering the size of the city. However, if you look at the short history of the city, growing from nothing to a major metropolis in an eye blink compared to most human settlements, the title works. Notable stars, other than McDonough, include Donnie Wahlberg, and Mykelti Williamson (pronounced Michael-T, who was Bubba of Forest Gump). The show centers on six or seven characters; two detectives, two uniform cops, a paramedic, the assistant DA, and the reporter he’s sleeping with.

The show has been described as Rashomon, and I think that is partially correct. We follow the events of one crime through the eyes of each character, and as a result, we have some point of view overlaps. You might see the DA pull up to a crime scene and talk to the uniforms about what is going on, only to then jump backwards a few minutes to when the uniforms arrived on scene. So you end up witnessing something just discussed with the DA out of sequence with the usual linear presentation in a standard show.

I really like that style, but the cancellation immediately makes sense when you realize how much work it takes to keep focused on the various story threads coming at you out of order. It isn’t Memento, but that are a few echos of that experience in watching Boomtown.

Then you have the character flaws. I love shows that don’t hold your hand. Over the course of the only season, we puzzle together that Wahlberg’s character lost his baby, and his wife tried to kill herself. The strain has shown as he finds himself flirting with the paramedic while trying to be a dutiful husband to a severely troubled wife. One of the uniformed characters has some past Internal Affairs scandal haunting him, yet we never get those details pieced together before it all ends. McDonough’s character is a raging alcoholic and adulterer, disgusted with himself while trying to climb the highly public career ladder to the DA’s office. Like all good cop shows, the cast is really screwed up.

Boomtown was a lot of fun, and I was sorry to see the episodes go by so quickly. They had a good thing here, but it couldn’t last given the average viewer. At least we have it on DVD.

Filed under: Reviews (Books and Movies)