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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
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. . . .