We Have Temporarily Taken Control of Your Television

The Watchmen series, probably.

 

About five years ago, the Onion AV Club reported some Good News for Geekdom. The immense commercial success of Game of Thrones had whetted television producers’ appetite for scifi and fantasy shows, particularly adaptations of existing stories, and nearly fifty such adaptations were by 2018 in various stages of development. In today’s post I wanted to check how many of these fannish dreams have become reality, and whether any of them exceeded my low expectations.

Obviously, events in the real world affected those in TV-land. The pandemic delayed or buried plans for several of the new series projected before the outbreak. Moreover, the last-season implosion of Game of Thrones damaged the franchise severely; as a result, we now have only one GOT spinoff instead of four or five. I also suspect the disaster made HBO more leery of investing money in SF genre series, the already-filmed Watchmen excepted. No matter; every large media corporation now has its own streaming service and programming, and most were happy to pick up the slack.

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Foundation, which newcomer Apple TV developed as part of its eclectic programming, bored the hell out of at least one reviewer, who found it forced and soulless. I fell asleep twenty minutes into the first episode, so I can’t comment, but I seem to recall mentioning five years ago that the writers REALLY should have started off with The Mule and filled in the backstory later.

Good Omens has gotten better notices. I made it through the first episode, despite having read the book too many times to find the story interesting any longer, and concluded that good acting (more specifically, David Tennant) would save the series if anything would.

Watchmen was the surprise jewel in the midden. The creators’ willingness to ask uncomfortable questions about race, policing, and vigilantism made it one of the best satires of the last decade - and unexpectedly prescient, given the nationwide police riots seven months later.        

Wheel of Time, to my surprise, got its adaptation (from Amazon) and has been greenlit for at least one more season. I suspect the writers’ willingness to pare down the list of dramatis personae by 98 percent or so will keep it going, if anything does. Certainly the scenery is attractive.

Y: The Last Man had the misfortune of being a series about a deadly pandemic released during a deadly pandemic, and the additional misfortune of being adapted from source material of uneven quality. (Brian Vaughan’s later work is much better.) I made it through the first episode but concluded there was no light at the end of that particular tunnel.

Two series that had not been under consideration in 2018, Andor and The Peacemaker, proved better than nearly all of the titles above, and indeed better than most of Game of Thrones. Andor, graced with thoughtful writing and appealingly lowlife characters, revived the ancient Star Wars franchise by adding moral depth to both the Imperials and the rebels. Peacemaker fulfilled what I suspect was a long-held ambition of DC Studios, which was to make something as original and successful as Marvel’s Deadpool. Doing so meant realizing that their “marquee” properties, like Batman and Wonder Woman, had been played out, and that their best characters now were recovering villains like Harley Quinn. The studio partially realized this goal with Birds of Prey and The Suicide Squad, and reached it with the latter film’s spinoff series. Peacemaker pushes the same emotional buttons as Deadpool, but I suspect it will last longer - when your main characters are lummoxes, there’s more enduring potential for comedy.

The End Is Still Nigh

 

Earlier this year my wife and I got to revisit one of the nightmares of our childhoods: the possibility of a nuclear war between the United States and (post-Soviet) Russia. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and media speculation about NATO intervention spooked us both, and we stockpiled canned water and iodine tablets and discussed possible evacuation plans. I’m sure our preparations would seem silly to younger readers who don’t remember the Cold War, and to older readers who have forgotten the intensely nihilistic dread generated by that conflict’s final phase. Myself, I’m not so embarrassed. (1)

 

We will all go together when we go.

 

To those of us who came of age in the 1980s, when Insane Anglo Warlord (2) stood at the helm of the United States and a succession of frightened old men ruled the Soviet Union, when a new arms race raised the world’s megatonnage to the “general extermination” level, nuclear annihilation seemed more likely than not. Two decades earlier, in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, relieved Americans could laugh at Dr. Strangelove and play satirical card games like Nuclear War. In the detente era of the 1970s, nuclear war could appear in movies as the comic backdrop to gonzo adventure stories (like A Boy and His Dog or Damnation Alley). TSR Hobbies could produce a whimsical post-apocalyptic role-playing game like Gamma World and expect it to garner a large following. After 1980, though, armageddon no longer raised much of a chuckle.

The ensuing decade gave us The Day After (3) and Britons’ even bleaker Threads (1984), as well as Testament (1983), a grim little existentialist masterpiece. Science fiction and scifi-adjacent writers warned us that the next war would be the last one; at best, life in the aftermath would be squalid and bleak. So wrote Connie Willis, in “A Letter from the Clearys”; John Varley, in “The Manhattan Phone Book, Abridged”; Gregory Benford, in “Fermi and Frost”; David Brin, in The Postman; Whitley Streiber, in his near-future travelogue War Day; and James Morrow, in his powerful This Is the Way the World Ends. The most distinctive nuclear-war game of the decade was Balance of Power (1985), a simulation of Cold War political conflict that the player immediately lost if s/he started a world war. Whatever civics lessons we received in school and from television, American teenagers knew that our regime, with the help of the Russians, could kill all of us with our families at any time, and that there was absolutely nothing we could do about it. No wonder Gen Xers were so politically apathetic, and no wonder so many of us still fondly remember Mikhail Gorbachev, who ended the arms race and let us grow up. (4)

 

You lost, Ronnie. (From Balance of Power)

I do know one person who would not have laughed at Susan’s and my halting war preparations: my late mother, a hard-nosed Reagan Republican who nonetheless came to fear, in the fall of 1983, that there was a reasonable chance of a nuclear war sometime in the near future. She made a family stockpile of canned food, bottled water, and other supplies, which she stored in a closet for the next decade. In hindsight, one might say she was overreacting to news stories like the Soviet air force’s downing of KAL 007, a passenger airliner with 270 people (including 62 Americans) aboard. With additional hindsight, one can say she was perfectly right to be afraid. In the fall of 1983 a NATO wargame called Able Archer persuaded the addled leadership of the Soviet Union that the Americans were preparing a nuclear first-strike. The USSR in response placed its own nuclear forces on high alert. The world came closer to destruction than at any time since 1962, and, national security services being what they were, very few people learned about it until recently. I suspect we won’t know for another two or three decades exactly how close the Russo-Ukrainian War has brought us to a nuclear exchange. Experience suggests it was closer than we might think. Funny, isn’t it?

 

This is somewhat less than reassuring.

 

 

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1 Admittedly, preparing for nuclear war would have seemed futile to me as a teenager, but one’s calculus changes as a middle-aged parent.

 

2 Anagram of Ronald Wilson Reagan.

 

3 Ben Stein, who found The Day After unpatriotic, helped produce a “Better Dead Than Red” response called Amerika (1987). In this miniseries the Soviet Union conquers the United States and then proceeds to bore everyone in America to death.

4 He thereby helped end Jerry Pournelle’s interminable There Will Be War series, for which he should have won a Special Prize for Literary Merit.

SFnal Doings in May, 2021

 

Reading: Preoccupied as my Better Half and I were this month, I did less reading than usual, but did manage to complete The Burning God. This last book of Rebecca Kuang’s debut trilogy was inspired, like its predecessors, by the modern Sino-Japanese wars, and shared the other volumes' vividness and skillful plotting. Without giving away the denouement, I will say that General Rin’s titular ally, the Phoenix, has no plans ever to give Rin or her homeland peace, even if they desperately need it.

 

Video: My video watching has become sporadic in the last three years and almost non-existent since the start of the pandemic. That said, I watched my first episode of Star Trek: Enterprise in mid-May. I know I’m two decades late to this party, but I was only inspired to try the series by a recently-published alt history blog post. The premiere featured a thin plot and mediocre acting, but I admired the writers’ attempt to build a new Star Trek continuity bridging the older series and the 21st-century milieu of First Contact. I may just give the rest of the series a try, and see how it holds up.

 

Gaming: Susan and I managed a fair amount of this in May, thanks to iOS or compact versions of some of our favorites. We enjoyed Duel, the excellent two-player version of 7 Wonders; Scythe, the cult board game based on Jakub Rozalski’s 1920+ dieselpunk art; and Innovation. Indeed, we were able to play all three while Susi was in early-stage labor with our son. I’d say this gave me an unfair advantage, but Miss S. still trounced me at Innovation, 6-2. Better luck next pregnancy. (Just kidding!)

Susi triumphs again.