TELEVISION The current Emma adaptation (BBC1 Sunday 9pm) and the small flame of controversy ignited by the remark of BBC drama commissioner Ben Stephenson – that “bonnet plays” (19th-century novel adaptations, 15 per cent of his output) should make way for 20th-century dramas – illuminate a settled, but not happy, state of affairs. Which is that British television drama is stuck in two ruts.
One is what is better called “historical” rather than “costume” drama. Stephenson’s announced substitutes for Austen are renderings of Andrea Levy’s Small Island, about the 1950s West Indian immigrant generation, and of Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, updated to ... the 1920s. Such dramas are, at their best, reflections on our past with relevance to our present: Levy’s novels will play into our debates on racism, James’s to those on the care of children. “We” – that is, mainly the BBC – do such history pieces well, and they’re likely to be relatively popular, if less so than the bonnets.
The other rut is the contemporary quasi-documentary. At one extreme it is a version of what the writer imagines happens behind the closed doors of power; more often it is a dramatised dilemma drawn from contemporary life. The only recent example in this genre to lift itself above the “all right” category was writer Jimmy McGovern’s series The Street (BBC1). It did so because it affirms the autonomy of the ordinary man and woman – most remarkably in its portrayal of the self-salvation of a soldier whose once handsome face was badly burned in Afghanistan.
Two US imports show us again (our dramatic languor has been put on notice for several years by The Sopranos, The Wire and Mad Men) our reluctance to engage with creative gusto in the business of interpreting our present condition. The first and lesser of the two is FlashForward (Five Monday), a series based on a novel by Canadian science-fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer.
Sawyer has written that much of his work has concerned itself with Immanuel Kant’s three great questions: “Is there a life after death?”; “Does God exist?”; and “Do we have free will?” FlashForward concerns itself with the last of these, by creating a world in which everyone in the world simultaneously loses consciousness for 137 seconds, during which most have a vivid vision of what they will do on a day six months in the future.
FBI agent Mark Benford (Joseph Fiennes), sees a future self that is desperate, pursued, his alcoholism returned. His wife, a surgeon, sees herself with another man; his young daughter sees herself friends with that man’s child; his FBI partner sees nothing, and presumes that that’s because he will be dead. Charged with discovering what this means for the future of the world, the FBI agents find that one or two figures were fully conscious and active, and release an aged Nazi war criminal whose vision may hold a key to understanding what has happened.
Most of all, though, they struggle, like Laocoon and his sons, with the serpents of a new tense, the future definite. Try as they might, they implicitly accept the visions as fate – so that Benford and his wife’s desperate assurances that they will never lose each other, and his partner’s efforts to shake himself from an apathetic surrender to his fate, take on a tragic quality. It partakes a little too much of Tom Clancy action hero sentimentalism, but Fiennes refuses to be Harrison Ford, and the Kantian question is ever-present, probing at their, and our, weak spots.
The must-see series is True Blood (Channel 4 Wednesday), produced by Alan Ball (the man behind Six Feet Under) for HBO and adapted from Charlaine Harris’s vampire stories. It continues the HBO tradition of a genre that mixes genres: it’s part-vampire movie, part-sitcom based round waitresses in a Louisiana bar, part-mystery, part-soft(ish) porn, and overall a brilliant comic creation.
In this world, vampires have just become a recognised minority following the passing of the Vampire Rights Amendment and the provision of synthetic blood supplies so that they need no longer prey on humans. Liberals, such as waitress-heroine Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin, pictured), approve: confronted with evidence that vampires have not abandoned their bloodsucking ways, she says “I happen to think that to judge people on the actions of a few is wrong!”
She falls in love with a handsome vampire and offers him her (rare) virginity; he, falling for her, restrains his desire to sink his fangs into her and keeps his literally bloodthirsty colleagues, who come to his ruined plantation for blood and sex romps, away from her. Around them, young men and women couple, scratch a living and bemoan the boredom of small-town society. Sookie’s best friend, Tara, who is black, mocks whites for their supposed racism or their obvious stupidity, playing with affirmative action pieties for her own advantage and amusement.
It’s a monstrously fine and funny piece of work, because it so cleverly comments on contemporary anxieties, fads and follies while telling a story at the same time. And it is witty too: a tabloid headline on a counter proclaims “Angelina to adopt a vampire baby”. Contemporary American society has been imagined anew, with all its crazinesses and its grandeurs. It’s how comedy should be.
