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Three Things I Find Irritating About "24"
Thursday, February 16th, 2006 12:23 am1) The set decor. There is no way in hell you're ever going to convince me that somewhere in Washington, D.C., there is a government office that looks like that. I don't care how edgy and trendy their department is. Efficient functioning calls for bright lighting, with light-colored walls to bounce it around as much as possible. Nobody's going to get a full day's work done in a place that looks like a faux dungeon.
2) The soap opera. When I watch a show like 24 (or The West Wing or E.R. or L.A. Law), I watch it because the subject matter interests me. Curiosity about the workings of such organizations gets me to tune in (not that TV gives you any kind of factual completeness, of course), not the backdoor gossip and melodrama. Reaching for the personal life storyline is, to me, a sign of weakness on the part of the writers - the sphere of work is where these stories should be taking place. Not to mention that crap like Lynn McGill actually leaving in the middle of a national crisis to go give his sister the junkie some money...oh geez. That kinda pissed me off, because it made me think he was not only an idiot, but that he didn't take this assignment nearly as seriously as he pretended to.
The second corollary to this item is the way people who are at work, in this case in a national crisis as I've said, keep wasting time on intrusive personal issues. All those little hissing arguments about who is (or was) sleeping with who, who's sorry for what. Gods, to judge from the sample I'm seeing on the screen, this must be the most inefficient and hothouse environment of any government department in D.C. Characters can't seem to go an hour without making some remark or having some confrontation with a co-worker that transgresses the proper conduct of a workplace. Which leads me to...
3) The whiny terrier. I've been working in offices for 25 years, including government agencies, and I'm sorry, but Chloe is a completely impossible character. There is simply no way that that attitude would be tolerated. She would have been called into her supervisor's office within the first week if she'd been going around barking like that. Especially in a government office. You don't earn the right to be obnoxious in a goverment office until at least your tenth year, and definitely not that kind of obnoxious. Not the kind that attacks and insults co-workers. I don't care what kind of a whiz kid she supposedly is. She's still a civil servant, she's in a professional atmosphere, and the playground bitchiness is neither cute nor complex; it's just nasty.
Unfortunately, each of these problems is endemic to just about every dramatic TV series that is centered on some specific workplace (that is to say, all of them). Each one of them has its ridiculous decor (excepr for E.R. They were pretty good about that place looking real.). Okay, I can see making offices a little more interesting. Gods know I've worked in some dreary looking places. But do they have to look as if these people are working in a before-hours bondage parlor? (We won't get into the likelihood of a government agency having the budget to hire that decorator, either.) Outbreaks of melodrama tend to set in earlier than they used to, seems to me, but they all have distracting silliness seeping in, as if the writers don't trust the audience to be interested in what these people actually do for a living. And every show, to a one, has some obnoxious, usually young, usually "cute" (though there's nothing so unattractive as the kind of bitchy, pissed-off expression Chloe sports constantly), usually female character who is screaming to be sent to an attitude seminar of some sort.
What I want to know is why. Why do the producers of these shows think this crap is necessary? It's distracting and insulting, and I just can't understand why viewers are subjected to it. What a refreshing thing it would be to see a show that didn't look like a magazine spread, that stayed focused on the reason for its existence, and that reassured us that at least the HR department knows what they're doing.
Ah well, at least they couldn't mess with the decor on Lost.
2) The soap opera. When I watch a show like 24 (or The West Wing or E.R. or L.A. Law), I watch it because the subject matter interests me. Curiosity about the workings of such organizations gets me to tune in (not that TV gives you any kind of factual completeness, of course), not the backdoor gossip and melodrama. Reaching for the personal life storyline is, to me, a sign of weakness on the part of the writers - the sphere of work is where these stories should be taking place. Not to mention that crap like Lynn McGill actually leaving in the middle of a national crisis to go give his sister the junkie some money...oh geez. That kinda pissed me off, because it made me think he was not only an idiot, but that he didn't take this assignment nearly as seriously as he pretended to.
The second corollary to this item is the way people who are at work, in this case in a national crisis as I've said, keep wasting time on intrusive personal issues. All those little hissing arguments about who is (or was) sleeping with who, who's sorry for what. Gods, to judge from the sample I'm seeing on the screen, this must be the most inefficient and hothouse environment of any government department in D.C. Characters can't seem to go an hour without making some remark or having some confrontation with a co-worker that transgresses the proper conduct of a workplace. Which leads me to...
3) The whiny terrier. I've been working in offices for 25 years, including government agencies, and I'm sorry, but Chloe is a completely impossible character. There is simply no way that that attitude would be tolerated. She would have been called into her supervisor's office within the first week if she'd been going around barking like that. Especially in a government office. You don't earn the right to be obnoxious in a goverment office until at least your tenth year, and definitely not that kind of obnoxious. Not the kind that attacks and insults co-workers. I don't care what kind of a whiz kid she supposedly is. She's still a civil servant, she's in a professional atmosphere, and the playground bitchiness is neither cute nor complex; it's just nasty.
Unfortunately, each of these problems is endemic to just about every dramatic TV series that is centered on some specific workplace (that is to say, all of them). Each one of them has its ridiculous decor (excepr for E.R. They were pretty good about that place looking real.). Okay, I can see making offices a little more interesting. Gods know I've worked in some dreary looking places. But do they have to look as if these people are working in a before-hours bondage parlor? (We won't get into the likelihood of a government agency having the budget to hire that decorator, either.) Outbreaks of melodrama tend to set in earlier than they used to, seems to me, but they all have distracting silliness seeping in, as if the writers don't trust the audience to be interested in what these people actually do for a living. And every show, to a one, has some obnoxious, usually young, usually "cute" (though there's nothing so unattractive as the kind of bitchy, pissed-off expression Chloe sports constantly), usually female character who is screaming to be sent to an attitude seminar of some sort.
What I want to know is why. Why do the producers of these shows think this crap is necessary? It's distracting and insulting, and I just can't understand why viewers are subjected to it. What a refreshing thing it would be to see a show that didn't look like a magazine spread, that stayed focused on the reason for its existence, and that reassured us that at least the HR department knows what they're doing.
Ah well, at least they couldn't mess with the decor on Lost.
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