To paraphrase the Man, “Whether you like it, or you hate it, learn to love it, ‘cuz it’s the best thing going today.”
I really didn’t see myself doing another comic book post so soon after the last one. I was intending to write my thoughts on why I think the FCC really needs to completely rethink airwave regulations in order to save television as we’ve known it of the last 60 years or so. But, it’s still Upfront season, and as I pointed out in the last post, apparently in the future, all TV is comic book inspired. I still worry about that, because that’s definitely going to burn out sooner or later, and as i hinted at before, I don’t want to be forced to watch Manimal again. But I noticed some encouraging trailers the last couple days that got me thinking. Even though I didn’t post about them myself, I pointed out a couple of my thoughts on random other people’s comments on Facebook. @megabee told me that I should continue my thoughts in a follow up to my Please Don’t Save Constantine post and eventually I decided that maybe I do have something worth saying.
First, in movie land, not really TV land, there was a trailer for the new Jem movie (Outrageous!)
And of course, on both of them there was a huge outrage from the comic geek community. In the Jem trailer it was a lot “This is dumb. Where’s Synergy? How come there are no holograms? Who is this for?” And the answer to that is “it’s for 7-14 year-old girls, duh!”
Then a couple days later, we got the Supergirl trailer. I’d actually been waiting for this one…
Then for the Supergirl one I saw a lot of “this is nothing like Arrow at all. This is stupid. How is it ever going to cross over if it’s on another network? It should be on CW. Why does it have to have a bullshit rom-com subplot? This is like basically Ugly Betty, but she can fly. I can’t believe Constantine is getting cancelled and this bullshit is coming on. Who wants to see this?” And the answer to that is “hopefully 20-something women.” See, it’s not “like basically Ugly Betty but she can fly,” it’s “EXACTLY Ugly Betty, but she can fly.” Which is kinda awesome. (Actually it’s not really Ugly Betty… at least not from the looks of the trailer… it’s more Devil Wears Prada, but I have no real desire to debate the finer distinctions of rom coms here).
So. in the Constantine article i made this point of saying that geeks should be happy, after 60 years of television “comic book genre” is like a “thing” now. So much so, that you don’t really have to watch bad ones… you can watch just the stuff you like. And the stuff no one likes will just get cancelled and we need to be fine with that. I stand by that. Sort of…
So here’s the weird thing about the comic book genre. There isn’t one. “Comics” isn’t a “genre.” Not really. It’s actually a literary and artistic “form.” Normally the distinction doesn’t really matter. Here it does. What people usually think of when they say the comics genre is what I’m going to call “Superhero Fantasy” here. There are TONS of comics. The vast majority of comic titles in the world or even just in the US have nothing whatsoever to do with superheroes. It’s just that the biggest sellers in the US have been Superhero Fantasy comics for most of the last 80 years (there was a brief span in the 50s where this wasn’t true because comics are the corruptors of youth, but that’s a long story). So we tend to think of them as the same thing. But Manimal for instance was never actually a comic, even though it’s a superhero fantasy show and what I called “a comic book show” in the previous article. And Walking Dead, totally is a comic and it has nothing to do with superheroes at all.
It turns out that TV sort of accidentally stumbled on something about the Superhero Fantasy genre DECADES before movies did, or even comic books themselves. Namely, the Superhero Fantasy genre is kinda boring as shit. Actually, most genres are kinda boring as shit. Why? Because that’s what a genre is? They’re the generic conventions that make all of their member stories exactly the same. They’re the formula. Generic formulas are by definition boring because you know everything that is going to happen.
For comic books, this is sort of fine. If you’re one of the Big Two comic companies (Marvel and DC) it turns out you can sell about 20,000 copies of a book and be fairly successful. 50,000 puts you in the top 25 comics in America. If you make 100,000 copies, you’re doing backflips. There are 325,000,000 people in this country. If one out every 5,000 is reading your book, you’re doing great. BTW, that’s about how popular the Walking Dead book is (66,000 copies in March). Compare that to the Walking Dead TV show‘s season finale in March→ 15,780,000. Yes, 1 out of every 20 people in the country watched the Walking Dead finale. Since only 56% of the people in the country actually have cable, that’s DAMN impressive. TV (and movies) needs many more viewers to compete. This means you can’t just rely on the genre because it bores people.
There are two ways to do this. One way is to work within the genre and tell a really interesting story by tweaking things. This is hard, but it can be done. Walking Dead is sort of doing that, actually. At the end of the day, they’re basically in the Fantasy Horror genre. The other way, which is much easier, is to mix and match genres and come up with an interesting combination. This is what TV usually does.
See, even though there are going to be like 18 superhero shows on TV next year, most of them aren’t actually superhero shows. Not purely, anyway (Legends of Tomorrow, actually looks like it might be, but since it’s not out yet, I’m just judging on the trailer). In fact, there hasn’t really been a successful pure Superhero Fantasy genre show on American TV in decades (The most recent big success I can think of is Greatest American Hero — and that was the 80s… before that…. Batman and Wonder Woman? In the 60s and 70s.). Almost all of them are hybrids: Incredible Hulk was actually Superhero Fantasy and Western/Drifter hybrid (it was basically the same show as Kung Fu, but with superpowers instead), Smallville was a teen bildungsroman (it was the same show as Dawson’s Creek), Arrow and Flash are teen soaps (they’re Gossip Girl — as are pretty much all shows on the CW), Agents of SHIELD is a spy show (Man from UNCLE), Daredevil is basically every hardboiled detective series ever (even though he’s a lawyer), Gotham is a police procedural with a little hardboiled detective mixed in, Constantine was trying to be a hardboiled detective series and a supernatural fantasy series and a horror series and a little bit of superhero fantasy (and maybe that’s the problem. It just got to be too confused trying to do too much), and Lois and Clark was a rom com…. JUST LIKE SUPERGIRL WILL BE.
See, the thing is, all those other shows (except maybe Walking Dead) basically relied on their comic book roots a lot. There was a lot of “what can we do to get the geeks to watch our show that we’re marketing towards 16 year old girls. We know, we’ll make sure we drop a random easter egg reference to Denny O’neil every episode. They’ll love that! And in the meantime, we can get the teen girl with disposable income market to buy all of Felcity’s crazy expensive clothes, because that’s where the money is! Product Placement! Also, does anyone want a Microsoft Surface tablet? PLEASE!!!!” Same thing with all the shows. They’re not really marketed AT geeks. They’re marketed somewhere else and if a comic geek happens to like it, Wonderful! Flash has 3.5 million fans. They’ll try to make the 38,000 who read the comic happy, but they’re not the main concern.
But now we have 19 comic shows to put on the air next year. 19!!!! That’s ridiculous. And CBS has kind of learned something from the failure of Constantine. Don’t focus too hard on making everyone happy. Make your target audience really happy and if other markets follow. Wonderful, if not…. oh well. THAT was why Lois and Clark succeeded so well. They took a chance the show was a unique enough take on the rom com that they didn’t have to cater to Superman history too much. Smallville did this too (at first) but then started to cave halfway through the run and it kind of suffered for that.
The thing that I like about Supergirl is that it’s NOT Arrow (and I love Arrow). Rather than making a brooding dark show, they’re doing something lighthearted and fun. This is why I don’t like the Man of Steel movie. Basically, MoS is an attempt to plug Superman into the Dark Knight trilogy formula. It is a pure genre film. There’s almost no story to it. They took Dark Knight and a generic alien invasion script, shuffled the pages and started shooting. My problem with the attempts at the Batman vs. Superman movie is that it LOOKS like the same thing (obviously it’s not out yet). I worry about the Wonder Woman movie a lot, because basically it again looks like the same movie, but their idea of “making it accessible for women” is “we must hire a woman writer/director.” Yes, I want female directors. Yes I want female super hero fantasy. But these are two separate issues.
Supergirl LOOKS like it’s an attempt to do something else. It looks like it’s trying to take the tropes of the superhero fantasy genre and apply them to the rom com genre and maybe a bit of the female bildungsroman and shake things up and see what happens. That’s hella interesting. I’m intrigued and I want to see it. It could be awesome. But I don’t expect fans of Arrow and Flash to go flocking to it. It SHOULDN’T be forcing crossovers like Arrow and Flash do. Can it be in the same world? Sure, but that doesn’t mean that it needs to crossover every week. I live in the same world as Patrick Stewart. We’ve crossed paths exactly once. I live in the same world has Rihanna and I’ve NEVER run into her goddammit, and that’s not for lack of trying.
The wonderful thing about the original Supergirl comic (in the 50s – the one sitting on the left in the pic with this post) was that it tried to be something else. It was actually intended to be a comic for young girls to look up to. NOT young boys. They had Superman and Superboy. Crossovers were rare. It was an exciting event. The current uber-sexy, rage-filled comic version is totally more of a boy book (not in that picture, but pretty close to the one in the center with the ass). But in the middle were a bunch of others, including my favorite, the Linda Danvers model (white shirt in the pic). There we had a Supergirl that was intended to explore what it was like to be a 20-something woman in the 90s. It was excellent. It was also 20 years ago. So now we’re going to try to do a version that’s to explore the 20-something for 2015… on TV. I welcome it… Honestly, I think there’s a high chance that it’s going to fail… and it could fail big. And if it does, I’ll totally be the first one to admit it.
And that’s why geeks should be excited about the Supergirl trailer and the Jem trailer. They should be excited specifically because there’s something coming out that they DON’T want to see. That’s the only way for the comic book carry adaptations to keep going. They need to be able to try new and different things. Shows need to succeed and fail, just like any other TV shows. You can’t think about them as “we must protect our geek shows!” Think of them as “oh my god, they’re mixing superhero fantasy with everything. This is awesome. Now I have choices.”
And if that keeps happening then maybe there will be other niche shows in the future…
#LetChrisMaverickDie
Damn straight!
How is 15.8 million equal to 1 out of 5 people when there are ~325 million people in the country? My math puts that number at ~1 out of 20 people.
My Secret Identity was quite successful. Based on its run length, it was arguably more successful the Greatest American Hero. But, other than that, your point seems pretty valid.
Well said as always. Devil Wears Prada was my first thought with her boss. And there is nothing wrong with a light hearted Smallville like show in the mix with everything else. Interesting breakdown of the various other comic based shows to showing their true roots. Have a good weekend Mav. 🙂
My only complaint about the trailer for Supergirl is not related to comics. It an industry mistake. It appears that the trailer has distilled the pilot episode down to a few minutes and made it unnecessary to watch. As if whoever edited the trailer was so excited to tell us the story, they couldn’t stop themselves from just telling the whole thing. It’s a balancing act between enticing us to watch while accurately letting us know what to expect. It looks like someone stepped off the balance beam.
That might not be the case. It could be that major beats were left out and the end of the trailer is not the end of the pilot, but it was certainly assembled to seem like it is. It made me feel like I don’t have to watch the first episode.
It is 1 out o 20. The 1 out of 5 was a typo. Originally, I was thinking one fifth, then decided to go with 1 out o 20, and screwed up. I fixed the FB version of the post, but was tired and forgot to fix the blog version, which I guess is how you read it. So yeah. It’s fixed now.
Hmmm… I didn’t not consider My Secret Identity. 77 episodes, according to wikipedia. Greatest American Hero only had 66. But they both ran 3 seasons. I can’t decide i I would have considered it to be a pure superhero fantasy show or not…. It was kinda the formulaic sitcom version of bildungsroman in a lot of ways. The show was way more about protecting his secret than it was about superheroing. Out of this World from the same time period is almost the exact same show
Anyway, you’re right. It doesn’t really change my point.
Yeah, there aren’t really that many try “super hero movies” either. Even most of the MCU movies aren’t really superhero fantasy. It’s just hard to do much with that particular formula. Or they are, but they focus way more on some other story type. Iron Man 2 kinda is…. Maybe Avengers 2. But Avengers 1 is an alien invasion movie for he entire second half. It has very little to do with superheroing. It’s exactly the plot from ID4. They even win the same way. Cap 1 was a war movie. Cap 2 was a spy movie. Etc.
Yeah… maybe. Maybe not. Actually, I expect you’re seeing content in there from the first 2 or 3 episodes distilled to make it into a cohesive story. Upfront trailers aren’t really FOR regular people. They’re for advertisers and network affiliates to get a feeling for the tone of the show. It’s just that we live in 2015 with the internet, so they end up here now. But most people never actually watch most upfront trailers. You only watched this one because it was a geeky comic book one, right? So for the target market of 20-something women, it won’t really matter.
That said, I expect you’re right and you saw a lot of the basics for the first episode or two. But I think there will be a bunch more that you’re not getting there. Cat Grant totally needs to have some sort of subplot other than just being “bitchy boss” for instance, and I’m sure that’s in the series.
So I finally watched the Jem trailer all the way through. She (Jem) does make reference to Synergy in one of the clips. So, you know whatever that means.
Yeah, I’m thinking it’s more of a reference just as a call back to the original show. an Easter Egg. Unless the film is drastically different than the trailer, there’s no place for a magical computer AI. And if it is there, and I went to see the movie based on the trailer alone, then I’d probably be really pissed off because it would be a drastically different film, and I’m 7 and I don’t give a shit about what the cartoon was like in 1988.