SOLUTION: STOP BELIEVIN': Something has been popping up in the reviews of the finale of The Killing that echoes a complaint that came up in a similar form with the ends of Lost and The Sopranos and in a different form with the long delay between Books 4 and 5 of the Game of Thrones series. The complaint, asserted by tons of people (including some of our friends) is "Show X has broken its contract with viewers by [failing to deliver the promised resolution/leaving mysteries y and z unsolved/failing to deliver what the consumer expected]."
I stopped watching The Killing halfway through the first episode and obviously have no qualms about the complaint that the finale stunk. I disagree with critics of the Sopranos (strongly) and Lost (less strongly) finales, but their opinions are valid too. I cosign the frustration and impatience of Game of Thrones fans.
But nobody's been cheated. It's not just that there's no literal contract between viewers and content creators; there is no figurative contract either. If Veena Sud had tied together The Killing's first-season mystery with a bow, nobody currently talking about the "contract with viewers" would be criticizing the droves of viewers who deserted The Killing midway through the season for breaking their end of the figurative solution-for-viewership bargain.
To me, the people who create content have no obligations. They deliver shows (or books) how they want, when they want. They don't owe the consumers any particular content, and we, as consumers, shouldn't want them thinking they do. The fact is that the best authors/directors/showrunners are much, much better at creating content than consumers (or critics) at large. If they think that the best way to tell the story is to cut to black, or to say it was a dream, or to mock up some sort of pantheistic afterlife waiting room, or to make Sloane flip-flop between good and evil again, or just to say "to be continued," that's their prerogative. You might love it, and if you don't, then that's the price you pay for encouraging others' creativity. If Bob Dylan's early fans had a right to acoustic guitar (and they thought they did), there would be no "Like a Rolling Stone." So shut up, contractualists.
That's not to say that consumers should have no role in shaping a work of fiction. Most obviously, writers and their paymasters want to keep the consumers happy. Some of us really hate the directions that networks steer our favorite shows, but The Killing is a good example of where AMC could have stepped in and said "don't do this -- it doesn't work, and we will lose viewers." The viewers can vote with their feet. Also, critics and consumers alike can say "that sucked." Many good writers pay attention to audience reaction and can take it into account without necessarily being governed by it, and on shows like Community and Cougar Town, that's led to rewarding decisions by the showrunners.
Which, to me, is why all this talk about what viewers were led to believe about the Killing finale seems like just as much a red herring as the ones about which viewers of that show have been complaining for weeks. When an influential critic says "that's not what viewers expected," Veena Sud can be forgiven for responding, "so? It's a thriller, and my job is to surprise you." What really carries weight is when that critic, and the viewers for whom he speaks, says "that stunk, and I'm never watching again." Because no matter what she says, that's what Sud can't ignore. Veena Sud may not care about a contract with viewers, but she presumably wants to keep her job.
I do not watch most of the shows herein referenced, but I was aghast when [SPOILER], at the end of the first Lord of the Rings movie, the protagonists had not succeeded in returning the ring. I had been led to believe (not by the books, which I hadn't read, but by the conventions of narrative storytelling) that if you spend a whole movie talking about how important it is to return a ring, you're going to RETURN THAT RING sometime in the three hours provided.
ReplyDeleteThat may have nothing to do with the point you're making, but I'm still mad.
I remember you being pretty mad when Vlad and Estragon got stood up by Godot, too.
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting how divided some of my favorite professional tv critics have been on this point (re there is no contract v they broke the contract), and it has made me think a lot about why I initially fell down right on the side of the killing broke the contract. And what I discovered when really examining my own reaction is that I feel better blaming Veena Sud and company for breaking their faith with me than believing I kept watching that terrible show for the whole freaking season when I knew many episodes ago that it was bad. I kept watching because I felt I already invested this much I at least want to find out who did it. That clearly was a dumb reason. And to be honest a lesson I already learned when I read the entire Twighlight series when I knew very clearly in the first book that I didn't like it. But I wanted to get to the end.
ReplyDeleteNow that I examined my feelings, it is much more difficult to blame the creators. I was the one who chose to keep going after I knew it wasn't that much fun/entertainment/interesting for/to me.
I'm all for you blaming the creators. "Veena Sud, you suck, that was terrible, what a waste of my time, you are a crime against television." (That's hypothetical, because, remember, I didn't watch.) My only point is that you should blame them for making bad TV, not for failing to give you what you had a right to expect.
ReplyDeleteI'm with those who don't think that Sud and team had a contract with me and my fellow viewers to solve the mystery at the end of the season, but I'm still mad. My frustration lies with the fact that this is a show that held a lot of promise, which is why I stuck with it. It had its problems -- not enough information on who Rosie Larsen was to make us really care about her, the endless red herrings, etc. but it also had some really termendous qualities, most of which lay in the characters of Linden and Holder and Mitch and Stan and the terrific actors who portrayed them. I stayed with the Killing, despite my issues with it, because of those characters and performances, and in the last two episodes leading up to the finale, I felt like the story was coming back to a place of solid footing, and I had real hopes for season two, regardless of who the murderer was. But to add yet another red herring with the Holder character, who was my absolute favorite, makes me mad. It's one thing to not say who killed Rosie Larsen, but it's another to take one of the few riveting characters that has kept your audience with you and dump them into the abyss of bad plotting that you can't seem to avoid.
ReplyDeleteI keep thinking about the Killing the way I think about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I wanted to like it. There was a lot of potential there. But ultimately the creators of both opted, in my opinion, for cheap thrills that were inconsistent with the best aspects of the show/book and thus, any goodwill I had for it, despite the problems that existed, was lost. I didn't read, and have no desire to read, the second and thrid Steig Larsson books, and I won't be watching future seasons of the Killing.
Well, I don't think the showrunner necessarily had a contract with the viewer. But AMC's entire ad campaign was based on the tag: "Who killed Rosie Larson?" I'm sorry, but for me that was a pretty definite statement that if we stuck with it, we would find out the answer to that question. It seems pretty clear that as far as the creators were concerned, the season would not end with that answer. But AMC must have known that pretty early on. So why the heavy marketing?
ReplyDeleteSo who is to blame? I'm irritated because the only reason I stuck with a plodding show was that I was invested enough in the Larson family to want to know the anwer to that question. And I don't even have that. And as Maret points out, one of the characters that kept me in (Holden) was blown up with an inexplicable and crazy twist out of nowhere.
As for the two other characters I cared about, there was weird resolution. Mitch just up and walked out on her family, after realizing this was never what she wanted, (um, what?). And our heroine just sailed off to Sonoma. Really? No examination of the rather significant hints that maybe she was on the fence about her new plan the whole time?
Anyway, whether or not AMC or Sud broke a contract, I've wasted 13 hours of my life on this and won't waste a minute more. Which I think will be a bigger problem for Sud and AMC than it is for me.
Agreed with everyone above. I understand why some feel like a contract was broken, because, by the end of the season, there wasn't much else going for The Killing (in some viewers' minds) other than the potential for a satisfying ending. I often wait to judge shows until I've seen how the story is told by the end of the season. I think people just really hoped The Killing would be a good story told well, and when by the end of the season (a) the story wasn't particularly well told (subjective opinion) and (b) the finale didn't provide any real closure, people threw up their hands. It wasn't a betrayal so much as the final straw in a 13 hour long squandering of good will.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, I was so scared that The Killing would be another Rubicon or Terriers that once the critics were so positive about the series, I pounced on the early good reviews and encouraged a lot of people to watch it. And then those people yelled at me. So maybe I'm at fault for breaking my contract with people who expect me to recommend shows that are not terrible.
I didn't watch this show, but I'm curious to know if the original version ended the same way. Does anyone know?
ReplyDeleteAlso, I will say that marketing strategies are often dreamt up by a completely separate team, so it's possible the show creatives stepped in at some point and said, "y'know, maybe taunting the public with who killed Rosie isn't for the best. It's not where we're going." and the marketing creatives said, "but it's awesome! People will watch!" I mean, how often is a trailer or TV commercial misleading? Like, once a week? More? Sud may be to blame for the travesty of the finale, but the marketing fail was most likely not her deal.
As I watched what started out as a promising show, I grew increasingly disenchanted with the lack of progress, but I stuck with it to the end to see what would happen, and it was ultimately disappointing. In other words, I just watched 97% of all TV shows' seasons ever. I won't come back for Season 2, but I don't think my life is the poorer for having spent 13 hours watching Season 1.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, I'm also the guy who in the past couple weeks has TiVoed and watched The Wasp Woman and The Giant Claw, so I don't really have the "that's X hours of my life I'll never get back" gene.
Adlai, you are my new best friend. I have been saying that to my friends since the movie came out. If you talk incessantly about returning the damned rin, at the end, you'd better have returned it or died trying. Instead, at the end of the movie, they'd managed to form a posse to begin thinking about dealing with the ring.
ReplyDeleteI'm still mad too.
As Chekhov said, if you show a ring in Act I, you need to have it thrown into the lava of Mount Whateveritscalled by Act XXXVII.
ReplyDeleteI'm still waiting for th unexpurgated movie version of FotR with Tom Bombadil.
ReplyDeleteAnd, for what it's worth, I did have the impression that The Killing was a one "season" thing-a-ma-whatever and that I'd have closure at this point in my involvement with it, and I was already kind of wearing out on its red-herring-of-the-week format, but it is still really undeniably well done and I'll be tuning right back in next season thank you very much without any of this "we were made to understand that there would be punch and pie" nonsense that these "critics" that I don't read anyway must be crying about if Isaac is making fun of them.
Woah. What's in your cable package? Don't tell me these things are on the SyFy Channel when I'm not paying attention, because that's exactly what I think should be on the SyFy Channel (when I'm not paying attention) but instead it usually seems (when I am paying attention) to be wrasslin' and infomercials.
ReplyDeleteAlso, where are my Buck Rogers reruns? Gil Gerrard spent a lot of his life squeezing into that corset, and if SyFy won't help the next generation of viewers appreciate the effort, who will? I ask you, who will?
*Gerard
ReplyDeleteIt appears that these films are airing on Turner Classic Movies. I smell another litigation like the one where AMC became "AMC" rather than "American Movie Classics."
ReplyDeleteI remember almost nothing from Lord of the Rings, especially names, but even I remember Mt. Doom. Of all the Tolkein names to whateveritize.
ReplyDeleteI was agreeing with your point. Or at least I meant to.
ReplyDeleteI was agreeing with your point. Or at least I meant to.
ReplyDelete<span>it is still really undeniably well done </span>
ReplyDeleteHuh. What are you seeing in the show to suggest that it is well done at all at the story level?
Yep, TCM has been running a giant-monster fest (as opposed, Friday/Tuesday Grammarites, to a giant monsterfest) this month, and I thnk they slipped in Corman's Wasp Woman when no one was looking.
ReplyDeleteCharacter, acting, mood, in that order, are what I'm coming back for. And I think it's intersting that things I thought I knew about so many of the central characters go put up in the ait in the last episode.
ReplyDeleteGues tis me, obvs.
ReplyDeleteI agree that there were a few actors delivering excellent performances. I continued to watch for those moments in much the same way I would watch a Mets game for Jose Reyes (and I'm not a Mets fan!).
ReplyDeleteI believe Duvall's point was that the story itself had some particular flaws that made all of the fakes become gratuitous. For example, although I can envision a storyline that would put Holder's last scene inline with season arc, the writers have not proven that they can produce a clever, well written script that delivers consistently. As well acted as the Stan & Bennett's wife scene was, it is horribly written and completely implausible within the story itself.
That sounded snippy, and it wasn't supposed to.
ReplyDeleteWell put, Maret. The comparison to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is apt (I read the first and didn't like it as much as I wanted to, either). If the overall plotting of The Killing was better, I wouldn't have minded not finding out who the killer was, but since I'd basically given up on the show and was only watching to find out who killed Rosie, it's incredibly frustrating. I won't be watching next season to find out.
ReplyDeleteAnd I agree that there have been problems with the writing. My main complaint is that the twists are so out of the blue that they feel like cheats. They didn't have to be. More generally, it's odd to have all these complex and subtly portrayed characters in a show that stubbornly refuses to be character-driven.
ReplyDeleteBecause it's fun to bring Sorkin in whenever possible, this reminds me to some degree of the Isaac and Ishmael post Sept 11 episode which launched discussions of Sorkin's responsibility to tell a historically and religiously factual story (whatever that is) versus simply telling a story he wanted to tell because he has a TV show and can do that. I side with the latter.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting how in the age of immediate feedback on their work producers, writers, etc react and use that feedback to varying degrees because ultimately they are producing a product for a customer and if they want to continue to sell it, they have to make tough choices based on consumer demand.
TCM has a pretty broad definition of Classic, and that's fine with me. If it's a classic of the horribly-made campy sci-fi genre, that's ok with me.They also do a lot of theme programming - whole days based around certain actors and actresses, genres, remakes, what have you. Often that means a non-classic ends up in the rotation. Also, fine by me.
ReplyDeleteEvery Sunday night, I go through the upcoming programming on TCM and set my TiVo, in part in furtherance of my quest to watch all the Best Picture Winners. TCM is one of the main reasons I couldn't ever give up cable.
I too was really disappointed with the season finale. But then again, I was disappointed with nearly everything after the first few episodes, but stuck with it because the first few episodes were so compelling, and some of the performances really stellar. I think the reason so many people are using that contract language is because AMC marketed the show with the "Who Killed Rosie Larsen" tag line. When the show started to go south, people stuck around because they wanted to know the answer to THAT question. Now they're mad that they stuck around and didn't get it, hence Sud broke the contract.
ReplyDeleteThe truth is that the show was plagued by terrible pacing, some bad ideas dragged out for too long (Will she go to Napa?), and some sorry excuses for set-up. Does anyone remember that one scene about midway into the season where Holder was on the phone and he said something slightly shady, like "I don't think she knows" or something like that. Let me tell you, as a writer who sweats and slaves and goes over and over and OVER every set-up and pay-off in a script, that infuriates me. It's inexcusably sloppy writing, and (whether this is true or not) it reeks of something that the writers went back and shoehorned in to justify their big stupid twist at the end. A twist has to feel earned, and this one did not. Think of the twist at the end of The Sixth Sense. Suddenly everything that happened with the Bruce Willis character made sense, once you knew what had really happened. And you couldn't believe that you hadn't seen it before.
It's not easy to set up a truly jaw-dropping twist like that. Even Shyamalan has only managed to do it successfully once. My complaint with Sud and AMC is that they didn't even try. And that, I can't forgive.
Orodruin. But yeah, nicknamed Doom. (like the animated version, "Frodo, of the Nine Fingers, and the Ring of Doom . . . ")
ReplyDelete