Entry tags:
Recent cliffs notes
1. Signups for Hurt/Comfort Exchange close today.
2. I may be starting a new publishing venture because I totally need another of those right now, but details redacted for now. >.>
3. I made a Bill Maxwell gifset from Greatest American Hero a few days ago.
I owe a proper post or three about Greatest American Hero, which I was enjoying but doing FINE at not having too many strong feelings about, until one particular episode made the steel jaws of fandom feelings close around me like a bear trap. As they do. This is a show that was basically wrecked by network meddling, but there are times when you can see that it might have been really amazing and ahead of its time in multiple ways if the creators had been able to do what they wanted to do with it. A few years later the same creative team went on to do Wiseguy (... as well as like 50% of everything else that was popular on TV in the action genre in the '80s) and it's interesting to see this as an early run at things like having season-long continuity and interweaving the characters' personal and work lives, in a more farcical setting.
Also, I've been semi-joking with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sheron that the show's writers had a functional portal to 2020. We've had episodes about a violent, right-wing religious cult co-opting the presidency and sparking LA riots, an outbreak of a disease that forces people to be quarantined for its 2-week incubation period, and an unscrupulous TV personality deciding to run for president on the basis of figuring out how to use celebrity to make people do whatever he wants. (That last one is probably a not-so-veiled swipe at Reagan, given the time period, but still.)
2. I may be starting a new publishing venture because I totally need another of those right now, but details redacted for now. >.>
3. I made a Bill Maxwell gifset from Greatest American Hero a few days ago.
I owe a proper post or three about Greatest American Hero, which I was enjoying but doing FINE at not having too many strong feelings about, until one particular episode made the steel jaws of fandom feelings close around me like a bear trap. As they do. This is a show that was basically wrecked by network meddling, but there are times when you can see that it might have been really amazing and ahead of its time in multiple ways if the creators had been able to do what they wanted to do with it. A few years later the same creative team went on to do Wiseguy (... as well as like 50% of everything else that was popular on TV in the action genre in the '80s) and it's interesting to see this as an early run at things like having season-long continuity and interweaving the characters' personal and work lives, in a more farcical setting.
Also, I've been semi-joking with
sheron that the show's writers had a functional portal to 2020. We've had episodes about a violent, right-wing religious cult co-opting the presidency and sparking LA riots, an outbreak of a disease that forces people to be quarantined for its 2-week incubation period, and an unscrupulous TV personality deciding to run for president on the basis of figuring out how to use celebrity to make people do whatever he wants. (That last one is probably a not-so-veiled swipe at Reagan, given the time period, but still.)
no subject
Bill turned up hungover in the high school men's room and I had feelings.
(That last one is probably a not-so-veiled swipe at Reagan, given the time period, but still.)
Honestly, a lot of the Reagan era would give you a functional portal to 2020, alas.
no subject
Okay, yes .... same. But not really feelings that made me want to write ALL THE FANFIC, more like I just wanted more of these characters, until That Episode happened. You know which one.
Honestly, a lot of the Reagan era would give you a functional portal to 2020, alas.
Regrettably true. The specificity is a bit weird, though.
no subject
It deserved to be that kind of catalyst.
The specificity is a bit weird, though.
No argument there. You had mentioned the quarantine episode, but the Christian soldier skinheads and the unscrupulous celebrity with presidential ambitions were a little . . . jeez, 1981, how about I get into the post-traumatic stage of current events first?
Tacking on from your original post, because I thought of it after I had closed the internet down for the night—
and it's interesting to see this as an early run at things like having season-long continuity and interweaving the characters' personal and work lives, in a more farcical setting.
The thing I've been saying to people as I simultaneously complain about and can't stop talking about this show is that it really didn't need network-mandated wackiness to be funny—it gets sufficient humor out of the character interplay and the friction between superhero tropes and regular life with the wild card of the suit's untapped powers in reserve whenever things threaten to stabilize into routine. Most of its funniest moments have nothing to do with the weirdness of the week and everything to do with a cape-and-costumed Ralph trying to pass himself off as a promotional stunt for a local production of Man and Superman or Bill responding to what he considers bleeding-heart psychobabble with the chef's-kiss kiss-off "Yammer, yammer, yammer, yammer, whoopy-doo, Scooby-Doo, and gobbledy-gook!" (A line I still can't type out without cracking up.) And while it's true that the show got some of its best results out of international-interpersonal high stakes, e.g. "Operation Spoilsport" and "Lilacs, Mr. Maxwell," overall it feels most like itself when it's not in weekly world-saving mode. It's gripping enough to watch the characters try to save one another and whoever else needs it. The first season had the best handle on this balance, I strongly suspect because it was the season where the network was paying the least attention; that said, I really enjoy the stretch of the second season where half the time the plot is terrorists, but the other half the writers threw darts at the trope board and you could wind up watching a biker gang, a haunted house, mythology, a gold mine, or amnesia. I really do appreciate that when the show went for a near-miss with World War III, it wasn't the Soviets' fault.
God, I'm probably going to end up trying to find out if the comics were any good.
no subject
I still kinda can't believe that in 1981 they got away an episode in which, not only are the US government the bad guys, but they call out some of the US's Cold War actions as blatantly evil in so many words. I mean ... it was a made-up government program, not a real one. But the episode never walked it back as a secret Russian spy operation or even rogue elements acting against the best interests of the government. The way in which the one rogue element went rogue wasn't played off as the guy being mentally ill or a Russian spy plant or anything; it was ordinary 1950s patriotism pushed to the point of fanaticism, and the show clearly intended that.
Actually, the episode in which Ralph finds out that the FBI regularly profiles and spies on ordinary citizens who haven't done anything is also kind of like that - walked back, in that case, by one of those people actually being up to something, but it's something I genuinely can't remember seeing in any other show with FBI characters.
This show is such a weird mix of things I wish they hadn't done, and things I can't believe the network let them get away with in that time period, or any time period.
But yeah, I think the show was at its best when it just let the cast play off each other. Some of the intentional attempts at slapstick are painfully unfunny, but then they can turn the characters loose for 10 minutes to argue in a car or bicker at a barbecue, and it's great. I absolutely think a lot of Bill's dialogue is ad libbed, and some of the reactions are the cast genuinely reacting to Robert Culp saying random, off-the-wall things with the cameras rolling.
no subject
Agreed, admired, and it's pretty Radio Free 2020, too.
but it's something I genuinely can't remember seeing in any other show with FBI characters.
I think—insofar as it's intentional, as opposed to a byproduct of the show being fifty percent network meddling and fifty percent id—The Greatest American Hero gets away with it because it has FBI characters, but it's not FBI-centric. Two-thirds of the central trio are civilians; the narrative dips in and out of Bill's work life, but it's anchored in Pam and Ralph's viewpoint, meaning it avoids the trap of so many law enforcement shows where the default morality is the agency/department/precinct's and either it's meaningful when the narrative runs counter to it or the narrative just never does. So the show has the level where a certain amount of Soviet nonsense is the unavoidable buy-in to a superhero story of the early 1980's, but it doesn't get sucked into a vortex of uncritical patriotism, partly because Ralph is skeptical of it (as is Pam—she was ready to lawyer up and take on the FBI over the polygraphs) and partly because our most consistent representative of the flag-waving mindset is Bill and, as with most things about Bill, that's complicated.
This show is such a weird mix of things I wish they hadn't done, and things I can't believe the network let them get away with in that time period, or any time period.
I just wish they hadn't done the things I wish they hadn't done!
no subject
Oh, no. . . .
no subject
Am I reading things into it, or was he dead drunk when Ralph met him in the desert? (Inauspicious Meeting #2.) The show never actually goes into this in the slightest. When Inauspicious Meeting #3 occurs, Bill claims he's drunk because of the aliens. But he appeared drunk already the night before. I am genuinely unsure if he's supposed to come across that way - if I'm reading things into it and he's actually just stressed - or if he is actually completely trashed because of his partner's death and playing it off as something else later in spite of being completely transparent.
no subject
I don't know! I also read Bill as drunk when he first appeared in the desert—the car's weaving all over the road even before the little green guys put the lights out, he's really blurry and where before in the truck stop he was gunslinger-fast with Tony, here Ralph's able to pull him out of the car and disarm him with no more than a plaintive protest of "No, don't do that, that's my best pistola"—but then the scene made nothing further of it and I wondered if he was just meant to be stunned from using his head to blare the horn. I didn't think he'd actually known his partner was dead before then, since when he sees him beam down all ashen and bloodied, he asks, "Who shot you? Who did that to you, John? Are you all right?" and looks stricken at the response, "I'm dead! Ain't that a laugh? Been dead for six hours," which I took to mean he'd known that John had disappeared on the case (hence his terrible mood in the truck stop), but not yet known for certain what had happened to him. So . . . six of one, a fifth of rye of the other?
no subject
no subject
I found the script for the pilot. (The one script I have found from the show for free! It's hosted on what used to be Cannell's personal website and is now maintained in his memory.) Dated November 6, 1980. According to it, Bill is dazed from stopping the steering wheel with his face. It's an entertaining script to read; I always appreciate stage directions like "He slows his gait as he approaches David Knight, the vice principal who is about thirty-five and an asshole." It is also the kind of script which matches the final production almost beat for beat and line by line diverges significantly. Overall it looks like a matter of the language coming into focus—tightening up conversations, characters sharpening into themselves, rhythms people actually use when they speak—and some lines are unaltered page to screen, but some have undergone minor to massive revision and guess which category most of Bill's dialogue falls into? "That's my best pistola" and "We'll figure it out now, butterfingers" are both TV-only, for example. The high school bathroom scene is funnier and weirder generally in the finished show than it is in the shooting script: it's more efficient with its information, which means there's more room for expanding relatively standard-issue lines like "What I have that you don't have, Mr. Hinkley, is a dead partner . . . and that is not a small point" into the instantly recognizable "Well, what I got here, what you don't got, Mr. Hinkley, is a dead partner. If you will recall, somebody shot him full of holes, which is a definite no-no in my book—that's the same one I mentioned a moment ago, the one I go by?" (Also, emerging from a stall blowing one's nose on toilet paper is an extra-unprepossessing entrance.) Bill facing torture by Christian skinheads in the script sneers, "You ain't getting anything from me. Take your best shot." Bill facing torture by Christian skinheads in the show sneers, "Go ahead, take your best shot. I been here with better switch-hitters than you," and seconds after Ralph's Kool-Aid Man impression is doing that machine-gun babble that in hindsight I believe I recognize as Bill's characteristic adrenaline reaction, "I knew it, I knew it, I knew you'd be there! I never been so scared in my life. These guys are really bananas. One of them's got a key," none of which is in the script. And knowing how much Robert Culp took the character of Bill Maxwell to heart, I'm not willing to bet against his hand in any of these changes, even as far back as the pilot. So, in other words, I still got nothing. But according to the script clearly varied as production went along.
no subject
no subject
Given the dog biscuits, I'd believe it.
no subject
no subject
I realized I'd seen his titles in bookstores, but never read any of them, and being a dead zone where '80's TV is concerned unless it was Jim Henson or the Children's Television Workshop, I didn't recognize the name. Good luck!
no subject
The period in which he was most active as a TV producer was essentially the heyday of my TV watching - the mid 80s through early 90s, before I went off to college and basically stopped having time for it. I didn't watch Greatest American Hero when it currently aired; I couldn't have - we didn't get a TV 'til the mid-80s. So I must have watched it in syndication. But I'd say probably half the shows I watched in my late grade school through teen years were Cannell shows. He was everywhere back then.
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
This is giving me SeaQuest DSV flashbacks.
no subject
At least they didn't swap out half of the cast and large chunks of the worldbuilding!
no subject
no subject
no subject
I'm also looking at your "DNW: ... references to current politics/pandemics..." signup and chortling.
no subject
I need to decide whether to add a letter to my h/c exchange signup so I have the option of adding additional details if I think of them ...
no subject
no subject