Monsters of Television

I didn’t do a post about the pilot episode of Awake because, well, it had plenty of folks singing its praises, and I was also more interested in what the show’s second episode was going to be. (And because, months ago, I thought Nick and I had decided he was going to handle it, but whatever! Slacker.)

I wanted to wait for the second episode because Awake is a show that is juggling a lot of balls (all of which are actually very compatible in my mind), and how the show manages to keep those balls in the air is what will determine its success, not how well subsequent episodes live up to the pilot. This is also connected to the idea that Awake simply isn’t sustainable as a television program, an idea that was widely circulated by TV critics who had seen the initial round of episodes (4 of them, I believe.).

Even after the first episode, and after seeing this one, I felt that Awake was sustainable just as it is. But then “The Little Guy” has to go and do something idiotic. Truly idiotic. Unnecessarily idiotic. And while I don’t think it’ll kill the show, it’ll certainly detract from what the show is ultimately about.

Awake is an ambitious show, attempting to juggle the police procedural element, two different personal lives, and is now bringing a conspiracy theory about the two lives into play. The first two, in all honesty, make the show sustainable in my mind, while the third feels like the show (or the network) didn’t think that the first two were actually elements that could keep the show going. Certainly some of this comes from the producers volunteering to take a production hiatus after filming about six or eight episodes, even with them saying they needed to take a step back and figure out where the path forward was, but the idea of Awake not being able to supports its premise existed long before then.

The problem, I think, some people ran into with Awake, and the reason why this conspiracy element may have been introduced, was the notion that the show is, essentially, yet another gimmicky cop procedural, albeit one whose gimmick is more interesting than a woman who doesn’t forget or super-observant guys.

Let me say that Awake is, so far, generally fine as a gimmicky cop procedural, and should do more to embrace that element. The challenge, of course, is this idea that the two realities help Michael solve his cases, making the story a little more difficult to break. We even see this in “The Little Guy” as the show essentially says, “Aw, fuck it.” to solving the murder of the dead homeless version of the sperm-swapping doctor, and uses more as a way for for Michael to solve the latter case. I do like that the show acknowledges that it has done this — no one is going to let Michael work a homeless murder for too long (unless he invents a fake serial killer…) — but it isn’t something it should get into the habit of.

This procedural elements are still a little choppy, and it’s something the show will have to work on smoothing out. I occasionally lost the thread of the episode, perhaps due to the half-baked homeless case, but it is still figuring out how it needs to balance these beats, and I’m willing to give the show time to sort through it.

Meanwhile, Michael moving back and forth between his two personal lives feel a bit more fully realized. I love that the show crafts parallels of not only the cases informing each other but the realities informing one another as well. The bit with the fabric softener in this episode is particularly good example of this, but it is also one that plays to the larger concerns of Michael, and his family in each reality, work through their grief. Little touches, like the fabric softener, help people not only remember but gain a sense of comfort in a world that has lost someone.

I wasn’t thrilled when I found out that there would be sequences without Michael’s knowledge happening, and voiced this on Twitter. Jace Lacob of The Daily Beast made a compelling argument, one this episode supports, that it only adds to the show crafting a fully-realized reality for each survivor, and thus makes them more real for Michael. It’s good, it works, and I felt foolish for feeling it wouldn’t, that it somehow betrayed the show’s premise.

But these two elements, cases of the week and the personal stories, are what make this show sustainable. Awake doesn’t require another element to drive itself forward. You have stand alone cases on a week to week basis to drive the episode while the personal stories help create on-going conflict, from Hannah’s desire for a new child and wanting to move out of the house to Rex figuring out how to communicate with a man he doesn’t know very well. And then you have Michael himself trying to navigate these elements, and what happens when other people, like Rex’s tennis coach, come into the picture. How does this complicate his family dynamics when, in that reality, his family is his son?

Procedurals manage to do both of these things without any problem because they manage to create compelling characters in interesting situations and may also work in on-going personal arcs.  Let me be clear: I do not think there is anything wrong with this.  Castle, Bones, House, and a slew of other shows do these to varying degrees, with varying amounts of success, and have made money for their respective networks and studios as well garner audience attention and ratings.

I understand that this is a matter of taste, because the procedural, even when done well, is typically seen as a lesser program. To me, this is why Awake has put in this absurd conspiracy element. The conspiracy element helps legitimize the program as more than just a cop show about grief (more on that in just a second): It becomes a puzzle program, one that encourages a deep engagement from audiences, something that they can attempt to solve. This is an effort to help legitimize the act of liking what would otherwise be just another cop show.

The problem with this entire notion, is that the pilot, if we go on the notion that pilots teach us how to watch the program, does away with this question when Michael declares that he never wants to get better. Michael does not care why he is moving back and forth between these realities, and we damn well shouldn’t either. But the conspiracy element, introduced at the end of this episode, undermines that lesson. It puts the audience in a position of asking a question that Michael himself isn’t even curious about.

The question of why Michael is moving between the realities is a narrative one, one meant to engage people and keep them coming back. But the concerns of the pilot, and the concerns of the show as a whole, should be about how Michael is leading these two lives and what that means, and how these people cope. It’s similar, for me, to both Rubicon and The Killing in that way. While the notion of the former being about grief was something I found for myself, grief was central to the latter, but it was consistently undermined by repetitiveness and dead-end plots before springing a conspiracy net on everyone in the finale.

It’s seems to me that shows aren’t willing to be sad, aren’t willing to interrogate these aspects of the human condition. Maybe because it moves us too close to forms of melodrama we’d rather not deal with on primetime television (or television at all). So we have to distract ourselves with games and puzzles and spectacle that don’t often fit in or benefit from the current model of television programming. The procedural element of the show provides a buffer between the personal stories that the conspiracy element is not necessary. The show becomes an intellectual exercise, not an emotional one.

So, please, Awake, put down the puzzle and deal with your feelings so that we can deal with ours.