The Rise of the Dark Side

[thefourthvine]

Okay, so a few months ago I made a playlist for Best Beloved (based around the theme of heroes and saving the world, additions still gratefully accepted) featuring the song Michael (Jump in), which is actually written (Jumpin) in the version I bought, but I refuse to believe that. Anyway, what I didn't realize when I put the song on the mix is that it is, at least according to BB, a song written by a car to David Hasselhoff.

Best Beloved spent some time explaining this concept to me - apparently, the car was an artificial intelligence, and together he and Michael (played by David Hasselhoff) fought crime. And then I asked her about the line in the song that goes:

"It's not like you/To turn your back and let the dark side win"

Obviously, this gave me a mental image of the show as a kind of Star Wars crossover, where Michael was a Jedi and the car was his - trusty, um, whatever. Racer-thing, maybe. Basically, I was sort of envisioning David Hasselhoff as Anakin Skywalker, which made my brain hurt.

BB explained to me that, no, it wasn't about Michael's dark side. "Because I don't think he really had one," she said.

"But without angst, what do you write about in the third season?" I asked her.

She didn't know. Apparently her television knowledge is not that encyclopedic.

Thinking about it, though, I'm not sure I can imagine this concept. He's a lone wolf white guy out to save the world with just his car (and, I'm guessing, his fists or maybe a gun, although BB did not go into that part)! Surely he must have:

1. Angst, including a tragic back story.
   
2. A dead wife or girlfriend or kid something, or maybe just one who left him with prejudice after she found the photos of him with a puppy on his dick. (Warning for a dude with a puppy on his dick. NSFW, is what I'm saying. Also possibly not all that safe for your brain.)
   
3. A constant struggle with the dark side, whether it be his alcoholism or his desire to eat people or his evil twin or his general dickishness or whatever.

You can't have TV without those things, is my understanding. Even in Sports Night, a half-hour comedy show, Danny had a dead brother, a bad relationship with his parents, and some kind of major emotional breakdown including acting out on air. He had plenty of angst! He had a dark side! He was a news anchor on a half-hour comedy show. So I really don't see how a crimefighter with an intelligent car could get out of this. (BB does recall that the car apparently had some angst. And an evil twin.)

Except, as previously documented extensively in this space, my understanding of TV is limited and narrow. So - can you have TV without those things? I mean, are these the actual requirements, or am I just confused? And if those are the requirements, was it always that way? Can you pinpoint an era as the Rise of Main Character Angst? What about Main Character Dark Sides?

Tell me about angst and dark sides on TV, is what I'm saying!

Comments

[greenygal]

Hmm. Michael has an angsty backstory (and to some degree an angsty present), no question, but I don't remember a lot of dwelling on the angst--you'd have the occasional episode where he broods about What Could Have Been, but mostly he seemed happy to be out there fighting crime with his car. (Which I was totally with him on; I adored that car. Snarky artificial intelligences get me every time.) And while he's certainly got his fair share of hotheadedness and impatience with The Rules--you know the type--I honestly don't remember anything I would class as a Dark Side.

The show I always remember in connection with KR (because I watched them together) is MacGyver, and that took place on a similar angst model--the hero definitely has angst, mostly the deaths of family members plus a tragic gun-related incident in his past. But while these things are important issues to the character, they're not important to the show, which only brings them up occasionally. (Well, I mean, the doesn't-like-guns thing comes up a lot, but more in a "put that away" manner rather than staring hauntedly and having flashbacks.) And he spectacularly fails to have a dark side.

I wonder if the rise of continuity had something to do with it? I mean, you can have a main character who is Driven By Angst by just having him be angsty a lot, but you can definitely work with it more if you're doing emotional arcs and ongoing storylines, something the above shows were really not given to.

Drive-by commenter

[pepper]

I wonder if the rise of continuity had something to do with it?

I would bet money that's the reason. Knightrider, MacGyver, The A-Team, all those kind of shows were episodic - they rarely worried about much continuity of character (this week Mac is an archaeologist! This week he's a physicist! This week he's teaching hockey! This week he's observing eagles!). Mac's friends kept popping their clogs, and he lost more than one potential Love Of His Life - and then next week it's back to wacky hijinks with his crazy neighbours, or whatever.

Someone explained it to me once as those shows being before everyone had a video: you could miss a week and it didn't really matter because basically the same stuff happens again next week. Once you get rid of the weekly reset button, characters in TVland have to be a bit screwed up, with everything that happens to them.

But also, angst is partly in the eyes of the viewer. The A-Team is pretty tragic if you think about it seriously, but I mostly watched it for when they welded armour onto a truck and painted it to look like an ice-cream van. *g* They didn't take mental trauma seriously - shows like Farscape did.

[brownbetty]

What, so MacGyver had gun-angst too? Is this a RDA thing?

[greenygal]

Probably not, since O'Neill's tragic past originates from when the character was Kurt Russell, and it's not like it ever stopped O'Neill from carrying guns or shooting people. But yeah, MacGyver was notoriously opposed to using guns, and in fourth season they revealed that this was due to having been involved in the accidental shooting death of a friend when he was a kid.

[archersangel]

it might have been for macgyver (i vaguely recall that he mentioned he didn't like guns & they put it in) but in the sg-1 verse it was sort of built-in with the death of o'neill's son. but since he was military, he couldn't refuse to carry a gun.

BTW i heard that they used the p-90 because it didn't look like a typical gun & RDA like it better because of that fact.

[gwynevere1]

I wonder if the rise of continuity had something to do with it?

I also wonder if the rise of the Internet lead to the rise of continuity. With the Internet, people from all around the world came together to discuss shows, and the collective mind noticed errors and inconsistencies more than any one individual could. Also, there are whole databases and reference sites dedicated to shows, which makes them easier to follow and, hence, makes continuity easier. I seem to recall both continuity and the Internet rising around the same time, circa late 1990s.

[thefourthvine]

But while these things are important issues to the character, they're not important to the show

Ooo. Interesting. I totally get the distinction.

And I can see that continuity could easily have something to do with that. (Although I had no idea there was a distinct era before continuity; I had assumed there were always shows that had emotional and character continuity, and other shows that hit the reset button at the end of every episode. Not so?)