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

[apatheia_jane]

I'm trying to think of an example of a show that does not have Main Character Angst/Dark Side, & I'm struggling.

Lost girl has angst, but the audience is usually too caught up in the fluff to care. Rizzoli & Isles does not have much. Community is pretty low on it.

All I'm doing is coming up with examples of main character angst driving plot. Angel, Dr Who, Starbuck, Xena (omg Xena so much), ranma 1/2 (actually a female or panda, rather than a dark side, House.

I feel sure that it is possible. And yet, I can't really think of a good example of it being done.

[rheanna]

TOS James Kirk was a character who had virtually no dark side, which probably reflects the era in which he was created. TOS Kirk was basically a guy who was really, really good at being a starship captain and really, really liked his job, and didn't need much in life except to fly around the galaxy, bed the female guest star of the week, and spend a LOT of time with his Vulcan first officer. Any angst he did experience was generally resolved by the end of the episode. The later movies tried to give him Leading Man Angst in the form of David Marcus, but it never quite stuck. The only trauma you really *believed* Kirk experienced was over Spock's death and the destruction of the Enterprise, and both those things tied back into his original 1969 characterisation rather than the backstory that was added later in the movies. Reboot Kirk, otoh, has Major Angst about the death of his father, and a few anger management issues thrown in: in 2010, Kirk can't be just a guy who's really good at his job and is a success within the system (youngest starship captain ever), he has to be a rebel who succeeds almost in spite of himself.

The ST:TNG characters were pretty angst-free, weren't they? Picard accumulated increasing amounts of angst as the series and movies went on; although he went through his share of traumatic events, the only one which was referenced as having had a deep and abiding psychological impact on him was his time as Locutus of Borg -- famously, he had to face up to the immediate emotional aftermath in 'Family', and after that his feelings about the Borg affected his judgment on several occasions.

[st_aurafina]

Michael Knight had angst, didn't he? Wasn't he repenting for some dark deed in his past? Or am I mixing this up with the Equalizer? (KITT and the Equalizer... woah, I just invented the best crossover ever!) Also, I think the car had a dark side. It went evil this one time.

Oh, wait, this was a serious discussion, wasn't it. Um.

[staranise]

This is not what you asked for, but I had to share. The Wikipedia page on the TV series has been vandalized:

Self-made hundredaire Felix Scott rescues puppies and police detective ALF after a near fatal kitten lick to the face, giving him a new identity (via plastic surgery) and a new name: Michael Knight. Felix selects ALF to be the primary puppy caretaker in the pilot program of his Knight Industries-funded public justice organization, the Foundation for Cute and Adorable (FLAG).

Notes from the days of 3 channels and B&W

[wordweaverlynn]

I've missed a great deal of TV, but when I stopped watching in about 1975 it was possible to be a TV character without angst. Mary Tyler Moore, anyone? How about the characters on Bonanza? Gilligan's Island? I Love Lucy? They had dilemmas but no angst.

TV is a different world now. MASH and All in the Family changed it. Then the X-Files (yeah, I did watch some TV in the 1990s) changed it again. I stopped watching again around 1997 and was astonished.

I'm sure there are flip, empty-headed sitcoms still, but you don't have to choose between them and PBS.

[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.

[happydork]

*laughs* I think what I like best is how few words have been changed!

[staranise]

TBH? I've never seen the show, and I had to google just to make sure it was vandalism.

[sassbandit]

Does Richard Castle have angst? Beckett certainly does but I don't think Castle does, really. Is it just one angsty character per show that's required? How major does the character have to be?

Just mentally going through the shows I've watched recently... Community is moderately free of Dark Angsty Pasts.

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.

[eleanorjane]

Off the top of my head, the only one I can think of is Castle.

[eleanorjane]

Regarding that picture - OH GOD WHY DID I CLICK AUGH AUGH AUGH.

Which is to say, BRB, inflicting it on everyone I know.

[sage]

Okay, this is going back before TV, but I've been listening to the old Gunsmoke radio show, which is super-dark and desperately angsty. Matt Dillon is openly lonely and depressed, his only love interests are the madam of the local house of ill repute, he can't trust any of his acquaintances because odds are he'll have to arrest them, and he frequently doesn't save the day at all.

It's a far cry from the made-for-television Gunsmoke, which tended to be much more light-hearted and typically had a happy ending where justice was done. The radio version was a lot grittier and more "western noir" -- it was totally aimed at fans of Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade, and it was normal for all those protagonists to have a mysterious, aloof, and vaguely tragic past...although they didn't generally reveal too much of it. Pre-1950s, there was a lot more male emoting, but 1950s media -- maybe a cold war thing? -- told the men to be stalwart where ten years before they could cry on screen.

What's interesting to me is that the radio show really holds up...and it might be because Marshal Dillon is such an angst-muffin. You feel for the guy.

[heresluck]

...Beckett's angst about her murdered mother doesn't count?

[musesfool]

I think the rise of the angsty main character started in the 80s with Hill Street Blues, and possibly Cheers - Sam was a recovering alcoholic and they did occasional episodes where he was in danger of falling off the wagon. Before that, I think it was mostly the mainstay of daytime soaps.

[kellyfaboo]

I seem to remember a goatee'd Micheal as an evil version. Wasn't he an evil clone or brother or something?

Thanks. You've gotten me to think about Knight Rider far more than I have wanted to since I caught 60 seconds of a USA re-run a few years back. *shudders*

Sometimes I have to wonder what I was thinking when I was a kid making my entertainment choices.

But in short, I think TV had all these things when it was episodic, it just didn't have the narrative through line until it was decided to be a motivating factor for an episode.

[eleanorjane]

Not if we're talking about Main Character Angst, but she's certainly got enough angst for the pair of 'em ;)

[greenygal]

Michael's evil twin was the son of the guy who'd arranged Michael's whole crimefighting-with-car thing, and the reason they were twins was that when Michael was being given reconstructive surgery at the beginning of the show, the guy evidently said "Hey, let's make him look exactly like my son, who is in prison for life! I may have very obvious psychological issues!" Sensibly he did not explain this reasoning to Michael at the time.

[kellyfaboo]

Wow. Ya, I sort of remember that now. Which makes the Devon and Michael relationship a little creepy.

[pocketmouse]

This. Actually, a lot of the TNG characters had angst in their past, but usually it was used for an episode or two and that was it. Tasha and Worf both had some variation on Troubled Childhood, Dr. Crusher's husband had died, etc. But those things came up probably twice a season at a laaaarge stretch.

[greenygal]

Oh, it wasn't Devon; he was just carrying on for the founder guy, Wilton Knight, who died in the first episode. Devon is just the guy who knew about all this and didn't say anything. But then again, given that it was apparently a done deal by the time he knew about it, and that the guy who'd had it done died soon after, and the guy Michael looked like was supposed to be locked away forever...I can see why he might have honestly felt like explaining to Michael wouldn't help anything. But it's still pretty creepy.

[paxpinnae]

They don't have Dark Pasts, but the folks on Community have plenty of angst. The show just deals with it in a very light-handed manner. The whole debate about Pierce being in the study group, Annie's anxiety about having too much of her life planned out, Jeff's shitty relationship with his father, Britta's struggle between living her ideals and trying to become a responsible job-holding adult - all of them have dealt with some pretty angsty issues.

[lydiabell]

Castle's inversion of the usual gendered storyline continues to intrigue me. Here you have a show where the main character is: a) a white dude; b) played by an actor who already had a following (which Stana Katic didn't, AFAIK); and c) THE TITULAR CHARACTER. Yet the main story arc of the show is fundamentally Beckett's story. (spoilers ho!)It's her tragic past, her quest, her dead mentor. Castle's providing vital support, but he's supporting Beckett's story. It just kind of knocks me out.

My biggest worry for this season is that they will undermine their own undermining of the trope by having Castle take over the quest and moving Beckett to the side to protect her, but I don't think that's actually going to last very long.

[lydiabell]

Does Richard Castle have angst?

I really love how much angst Castle doesn't have about not knowing who his father is. Makes a nice change.

[lydiabell]

As others have mentioned, TV has changed a lot. I'm sure a lot of it has to do with the rise of continuity, but it's also a question of our tastes changing as the nation (talking U.S. here) has gone through economic and social stresses. I watched this TED Talk recently in which Lauren Zalaznick showed the correlations between what was on TV and what was going on in society at the time. I'm not sure I buy everything she's saying, but the correlations are interesting.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/lauren_zalaznick.html

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!

Most of that didn't really do the show any favors, either. I've heard that Danny's storyline in the second season came about due to a falling out between Josh Charles and Aaron Sorkin, but I don't know if that's true.