Too Little Information

I love a show with a good central mystery.  I’ll even enjoy a show that makes me wonder what the heck is going on.  The Prisoner, is of course, a classic of this genre, and I'm a fan.  I think I’m one of literally dozens of people who actually kind of enjoyed the baffling surrealism of Push, Nevada as a story rather than a simply a novelty.  I enjoyed trying to figure out what was happening in Persons Unknown.  And—although here I’ll admit that my enjoyment was largely driven by the friends I watched it with—I adored Nowhere Man.  But there’s a crucially important line between creating mystery (good) and simply providing too little information (bad).  While it’s fun to make the characters and audience wonder—and indeed, that wonder is central to any mystery, be it a single episode arc of a procedural or a massive conspiracy series—that wonder won't happen at all without enough information to know what they’re being asked to solve, and how they might solve it. 

I’ll admit, I’m drawing a fine line here.  For my taste, Lost walked right along that line—I enjoyed wondering what was going on until I stopped enjoying it and started feeling vaguely abused by the slow drip of information, and wandered away from the show.   I think the answer is that something needs to be explained in its entirety.  Perhaps it’s who the characters are and why we care about them and their motivations.  Perhaps it’s a set of really interesting or identifiable facts about their world or the challenge they’re facing.  Perhaps it’s the unique set of rules they have to live by.  But if you don’t give us at least one of those to grab on to, we won’t be intrigued enough to care about the mystery…we’ll just be bored.  Or to put it differently:  One of the things that makes whodunnits work so well is that we know—or think we know—exactly what happened, we just don’t know why and/or by whom.  If a show is taking away the “what” portion of “who, what, when, where, and why,” it’d better give us a who—and probably a where and a why—that are well defined enough to make us care.  Or differently still:  the more hooks you take away, the more gripping the few remaining hooks have to be to keep us hooked.

Two new SyFy shows try their hands at the “too little information” approach, with mixed results:

Bitten (Syfy, new.  Supernatural drama.)

Watched: pilot

Premise:  Female werewolf returns to her rural hometown to help track a rogue werewolf.

Promise:  This show is in the time slot after Lost Girl, and it makes gestures toward having a similarly pansexual feel.  But it doesn’t have the same sense of ridiculous fun that makes Lost Girl so effective.  Nor—although the pilot has a half dozen scenes with people in bed, clearly either before or after sex—does it capture the lustful appeal of True Blood.  Instead, it aims for the soapy seriousness of Revenge.  And like Revenge, the pilot provides a scenario, but very little explanation of its characters’ motives and even less about the stakes.  In fact, the pilot spends nearly the whole hour in the modern, urban (and closeted, werewolf-wise) life that our heroine leaves in the episode’s last five minutes.  We are led to believe that the rest of the season takes place in a place we’ve seen for 5 minutes, with characters we’ve hardly met.  We understand that this rogue (a “mutt,” as they call him) must be stopped because he’s killing innocent women, and we know he MUST be a bad guy because in our very first encounter with him he calls a woman a “slut.”  (Or at least that was my reaction to the scene—I disliked him immediately).  But that’s about all we know.  We don’t know anything about how or why werewolves exist, what makes them turn into wolves according to this world’s mythology (it doesn’t seem to be lunar), or why there’s only one female werewolf in existence—something that seems important to the characters, but we’re given no sense of why.  We have no idea why our heroine dislikes her family/pack, nor are we given any indication of why she needs to be involved in this hunt.  In other words, the whole thing is just ill-explained.

Verdict:  I was willing to give it a second episode, but the small remaining space on my DVR was not.  Bye bye, show. 

Helix (SyFy, new.  Horror/Thriller.)

Watched: 2-part premiere plus three episodes

Premise:  CDC scientists go to an artic outpost to explore a possible pathogen outbreak.  Instead they find creepy, dangerous genetic experiments.

Promise:  There isn’t a whole lot of horror qua horror on television right now.  Walking Dead qualifies.  Les Revenants does too.  I’ve heard decent things about this season of American Horror Story, although I don’t watch it myself.  Mostly, though, the current horror-tinged TV series I can think of are either psychological thriller (see, e.g., The Following) or supernatural drama (like Grimm).  So this series—in which, basically, an intelligent contagion threatens to turn all of humanity into zombie vectors, a la 28 Days Later—fills a niche.  And it knows its genre:  it’s suspenseful, creepy, and occasionally gross.  But that sort of horror also depends on being scary, and it doesn’t necessarily live up to the scariness part.  I think that’s a function of pacing:  the action is quite slow, as is the pace of information flow—and yet it sometimes like we’re rushing through key details.  In the two-part premiere, for example, I found myself asking “who is that, again?” more often than I’d have preferred. 

The show’s suspense is largely built on incomplete information, so a complete information dump would undermine the show’s concept.  But this show leaves out so much information that it takes several episodes to start to care.  And even then, we end up caring more about the mystery than the characters, most of whom are never given more than one or two dimensions.  It fills that gap with dramatically high stakes—but even the highest stakes may not be enough to make us care.  Honestly, for the first few episodes, I cared only enough that I wanted to have it on in the background during an evening’s work-time, but not so much that I would have been eager to sit and stare at it without anything else going on.  And it’s perhaps not such a good sign that I didn’t feel like the work hamstrung my ability to follow the show.  That said, the mystery ramps up to more-interesting places in episode 4. So, to get back to the information theme:  I find myself wishing that they had revealed a lot of the mystery faster and made the show focus more on how to deal with the problem, rather than focusing exclusively on trying to figure out what the problem is.

Verdict:  Gets more interesting, but still may not necessarily engender caring. 

On the DVR and/or Unreviewed:  The Assets, Chicago PD, True Detective, Under the Gunn, Looking, Black Sails.