Jaime Weinman reports on the impending reboot of Charlie's Angels and the decision to recast Bosley as a young hunk instead of the fluttery, frustrated schlub we all remember. (Does every remake of a TV series have to move one step closer to porn?)
He also includes a terrific anecdote from Todd GItlin's Inside Prime Time in which producer Barney Rosenzweig (later the creator of Cagney and Lacey) describes working for Charlie's Angels creator Aaron Spelling. Read Weinman for the whole thing, but here's part of it:
“You know, when you do television episodes, especially action-adventure shows, you have a tendency to remake all the old great movies. Well, one of the episodes I was doing was sort of a mild ripoff of Foreign Correspondent. It took place at a resort… [a diplomat played by Theodore Bikel has disappeared and] nobody believes [Kate Jackson's character]. She goes back to the apartment, pissed off that her friends don’t believe her, and she sees on the dining room table the cigarette lighter. Very distinctive cigarette lighter. Picks it up. Aha! Evidence that he was here.
‘”Now, we’re running the rough cut, and I say to Aaron, ‘I’m going to get a close shot of the cigarette lighter, and Kate’s hand will come in and pick it up and light it, so it will be one shot, instead of just an insert. So we’ll have that tie-in.’ Aaron says ‘Good idea, good idea.’ Then he says, ‘Listen, when you do it, get the insert earlier with Theo’s hand, showing him putting the lighter down on the table.’ He had a few other notes. I said, ‘I like your notes. We’ll accomplish them, but one I have to really disagree with violently.’ He said, ‘What’s that?’ I said, ‘I really don’t want to put in that insert of Theo Bikel putting the lighter down on the table in the previous scene. It’s a real red flag. I mean, it just says to everybody, Uh-oh, look out!’ And he says, ‘Well, of course, but you must do that.’"
Jeesh. I've been mulling over a list of what I consider the best TV series of all time, and dramas from before The Sopranos are hard to come up with. (Sitcoms are no problem.) I came up with several reasons why dramas haven't aged as well — wooden performances, quaintly euphemistic dialogue, white hat/black hat characterizations — but I hadn't put my finger on this particular style of direction. It's worse on some series than others, but even the ones still worth watching are bogged down by this "show-and-tell" visual style. (I wish someone could re-edit every episode of Columbo to take out all the long close-ups of the clues that the detective has just explained in more-than-adequate detail. We know what shoelaces look like!)
I don't think it's quite as bad in prime time now. Some series, like the CSI franchise and House, have at least made their show-and-tell shots more stylish (Body Cavity Cam!), and series like The Good Wife try not to be as blatant as Spelling did.
Of course, none of those shows get audiences as big as '70s-era Charlie's Angels. And based on my family focus group (no offense, Dad!), a lot of people who used to watch Spelling-type shows now skip dramas altogether because they are too "confusing." Fortunately for them, there are the newsmagazines and Learning Channel reality series. I watched a few episodes of 48 Hours Mystery recently (rerun on TLC), and it specializes in the same stupid murder plots that used to cycle through Charlie's Angels, Barnaby Jones, Hart to Hart, etc. (Being "real" doesn't make them any less inane.) I swear that half of the running time of a 48 Hours Mystery episode is devoted to rerunning earlier scenes from the same hour. (Did you forget that she was poisoned with antifreeze? Well, here's the same shot of the same plastic jug you saw 10 minutes ago!)
So we now have separate "show-and-tell" and "pay attention" zones on TV. Better for all concerned.
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