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Mar. 17th, 2015 08:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI'm watching MacGyver... and having to revise my standards a bit, since usually if a new show gets to black guy dies then I give up and try something else. Plus the ongoing problem of one girl per episode. If I'm going to stare at RDA for an hour a day, I'm going to have to ignore the racism and sexism, or possibly just accept that they do seem to be trying cause there are people of colour and women around and being mostly competent, they just have to fail in order to leave room for the white lead to look good.
I'm also wondering if... no, how much more random junk we know nowadays, because internet. I mean, the show relies on Mac being smarter, more knowledgeable, and more flexible than the average random person, and that sets it up with a big problem because if the audience is ever ahead of him it screws with the premise. Not ahead in the 'the camera just showed us the important parts' way, that's following, more like if we happen to know more about the setup and can guess an important thing that he's about to walk in to.
Except actually a lot of the fun for the viewer is to occasionally feel smarter than the smart guy? So really, it's more about making him seem smart enough that when the viewer ends up yelling at the screen they feel pretty good about themselves.
But I was just thinking that the kind of vaguely sciencey facts that the writers must have amassed to get these plots together have become vastly simpler to know. So the audience is going to be ahead much more often, and sometimes the story is just going to look kind of stupid.
Plus, this show has existed, these tricks are out in the world now, however worky or not worky they are, watching the reruns means he has to measure up to characters who built on him already. Kind of unfair.
And we're ahead by one, maybe two tech levels now. The cutting edge gadgeteer is now the make do and mend guy who can adapt old tech to his needs, like, even more than he was.
... tech levels is a clunky GURPS concept but it is on occasion handy. A new level needs some new concepts, not just new versions of old kit. So there's microcircuits changing to nanotechnology to deal with, or bronze after stone. And dealing with a lower tech level has penalties, but not so many as trying to be higher tech.
Since the invention of writing there's a pretty good chance old data gets preserved somewhere, but now with the internet, all of it is available somewhere if you know how to look. Any random human has the whole of human knowledge at their fingertips. It's kind of mind blowing. I can look up documentaries on how to do... pretty much anything humans have ever achieved, at any tech level. And if I want to read the original sources, I can study the languages online, even the most ancient ones.
Humans have taken a whole quantum leap in learning, is my current thinking. Libraries were good, being kind of cyborg with the internet assisting us is super much better.
(And leading to a two track or multi track world, where levels of access to computers just amplify up, so people who aren't good at tech are getting shut out of far more than the obvious tech dependent stuff. Science Fiction has talked for a while about what happens to the non-cyborgs in a borged world, but it's happening here and now. Job applications need a smartphone, benefits applications need an internet connected computer, and people who just can't get the hang of either have some serious disadvantages.)
In GURPS terms the general random knowledge a person in that society might have is covered by IQ. If you haven't specifically studied a thing with teachers for 200 hours, you're just rolling at default against IQ, so random stuff is feeding data into your IQ. It's one reason why GURPS IQ is not the same as IQ test IQ. But that would mean that people from the early 21st century have the opportunity to have, on the whole, higher GURPS IQ than people from... as little as 20 years ago. The kind of random junk we could have been pouring in to our brains in our downtime is vastly expanded in quantity and quality. We still have the same number of hours, but they can be full of podcasts and online lectures while we do the washing up. And yeah, self study is 400 hours for one skill point, which is way cheaper than a whole IQ point, but we have a whole lot of sets of 400 hours in our lifetimes.
And writers are now dealing with audiences that have done all that vague and random study.
The writers room used to be the way to deal with the thing where the writer isn't as smart as the character. One guy under time pressure can be simulated by a room full of people with a good run up... who control both sides of the situation. A team can be smarter than most individual audience members. But now the audience has levelled up too, and they get together, and cumulatively they are way smarter and more educated than any writers room.
... I'm feeling vaguely tempted to give up on writing smart guys and just stick with the noir guy who finds stuff out when it tries to kill him.
... except I'm used to GURPS combat where attempts to kill you, you know, kill you. In general. Since humans are fragile.
I find action series levels of violence that only turns into afternoon TV levels of damage really frustrating. I mean, the series that are all about doctors and hospitals and so forth are the only ones that let people actually get damaged. Other people just sort of go argh and have a bit of ribena splashed on them. Or get dead off screen. It's not that I want to watch as people are horribly mangled, I just feel it's a significant problem to claim to approach the world with Science! and method and intelligence and then to just rely on stormtrooper shooting and bullets that only graze people. It makes an inconsistent world where the rules work different for different people. Anti-science.
And if the show as a whole is encouraging the audience to engage with it as 'real', consistent, available to logic, then persistently having one corner where stuff works too nicely is like that sticky out corner on a worktop that you keep bumping into. Just irritating.
MacGyver only has the one consistent character so far, the title guy. And thus far his characterisation and emotions only extends to the end of the episode. Fair enough. But that means the audience is watching for him to do clever gadget things. So they have to stay actually clever.
Part of why I want to watch this series is I'm kind of in awe of the idea writers can keep it clever for that long. I mean, obviously I don't know yet if they did, but it went on for half way to forever, and so far he's improvising slightly new things every week. That's a lot of brain has to go in.
I think science fiction, especially on the TV, frequently shifts the focus away from that. Like, the nut and boltest 'hard' SF comes up with a clever thought or a good tech trick and then writes it up and presents it to an audience like a magic trick, only more fun because potentially real. But that stuff tends to be older? Like, possibly the good tricks were discovered? And even real early the big focus is on how the results will change the world. Only because SF is still literature playing multiple games, often the thing is allegory or metaphor or something, or they don't worry so much about the plausibility of their first step and just follow through on the impacts in internally consistent ways. Social sciences maybe. So you logic out what the impact of travel time will be on interstellar societies, or how relativity messes with ageing which messes with both individuals and society. Fun stuff. But you don't have to keep coming up with new tricks, there's the one big trick, and everything falls from that.
Building a series around hopefully plausible good tricks of real-ish science every week?
Seems ambitious.
But then the actual plots divide up into 'Mac rescues people' and 'Mac rescues information'. There's consistently someone with local knowledge who will help him. Getting him up a tree in the first place is pretty simples when you can send him anywhere in the world. So structurally they've got a solid, dependable formula going on. It's just filling it up with goodies that looks tricky.
The ways this show is like SF in its attitude to the world, but is clearly an establishing text of action series, are currently kind of fascinating me. It's like a new toy. With pretty.
I'm also wondering if... no, how much more random junk we know nowadays, because internet. I mean, the show relies on Mac being smarter, more knowledgeable, and more flexible than the average random person, and that sets it up with a big problem because if the audience is ever ahead of him it screws with the premise. Not ahead in the 'the camera just showed us the important parts' way, that's following, more like if we happen to know more about the setup and can guess an important thing that he's about to walk in to.
Except actually a lot of the fun for the viewer is to occasionally feel smarter than the smart guy? So really, it's more about making him seem smart enough that when the viewer ends up yelling at the screen they feel pretty good about themselves.
But I was just thinking that the kind of vaguely sciencey facts that the writers must have amassed to get these plots together have become vastly simpler to know. So the audience is going to be ahead much more often, and sometimes the story is just going to look kind of stupid.
Plus, this show has existed, these tricks are out in the world now, however worky or not worky they are, watching the reruns means he has to measure up to characters who built on him already. Kind of unfair.
And we're ahead by one, maybe two tech levels now. The cutting edge gadgeteer is now the make do and mend guy who can adapt old tech to his needs, like, even more than he was.
... tech levels is a clunky GURPS concept but it is on occasion handy. A new level needs some new concepts, not just new versions of old kit. So there's microcircuits changing to nanotechnology to deal with, or bronze after stone. And dealing with a lower tech level has penalties, but not so many as trying to be higher tech.
Since the invention of writing there's a pretty good chance old data gets preserved somewhere, but now with the internet, all of it is available somewhere if you know how to look. Any random human has the whole of human knowledge at their fingertips. It's kind of mind blowing. I can look up documentaries on how to do... pretty much anything humans have ever achieved, at any tech level. And if I want to read the original sources, I can study the languages online, even the most ancient ones.
Humans have taken a whole quantum leap in learning, is my current thinking. Libraries were good, being kind of cyborg with the internet assisting us is super much better.
(And leading to a two track or multi track world, where levels of access to computers just amplify up, so people who aren't good at tech are getting shut out of far more than the obvious tech dependent stuff. Science Fiction has talked for a while about what happens to the non-cyborgs in a borged world, but it's happening here and now. Job applications need a smartphone, benefits applications need an internet connected computer, and people who just can't get the hang of either have some serious disadvantages.)
In GURPS terms the general random knowledge a person in that society might have is covered by IQ. If you haven't specifically studied a thing with teachers for 200 hours, you're just rolling at default against IQ, so random stuff is feeding data into your IQ. It's one reason why GURPS IQ is not the same as IQ test IQ. But that would mean that people from the early 21st century have the opportunity to have, on the whole, higher GURPS IQ than people from... as little as 20 years ago. The kind of random junk we could have been pouring in to our brains in our downtime is vastly expanded in quantity and quality. We still have the same number of hours, but they can be full of podcasts and online lectures while we do the washing up. And yeah, self study is 400 hours for one skill point, which is way cheaper than a whole IQ point, but we have a whole lot of sets of 400 hours in our lifetimes.
And writers are now dealing with audiences that have done all that vague and random study.
The writers room used to be the way to deal with the thing where the writer isn't as smart as the character. One guy under time pressure can be simulated by a room full of people with a good run up... who control both sides of the situation. A team can be smarter than most individual audience members. But now the audience has levelled up too, and they get together, and cumulatively they are way smarter and more educated than any writers room.
... I'm feeling vaguely tempted to give up on writing smart guys and just stick with the noir guy who finds stuff out when it tries to kill him.
... except I'm used to GURPS combat where attempts to kill you, you know, kill you. In general. Since humans are fragile.
I find action series levels of violence that only turns into afternoon TV levels of damage really frustrating. I mean, the series that are all about doctors and hospitals and so forth are the only ones that let people actually get damaged. Other people just sort of go argh and have a bit of ribena splashed on them. Or get dead off screen. It's not that I want to watch as people are horribly mangled, I just feel it's a significant problem to claim to approach the world with Science! and method and intelligence and then to just rely on stormtrooper shooting and bullets that only graze people. It makes an inconsistent world where the rules work different for different people. Anti-science.
And if the show as a whole is encouraging the audience to engage with it as 'real', consistent, available to logic, then persistently having one corner where stuff works too nicely is like that sticky out corner on a worktop that you keep bumping into. Just irritating.
MacGyver only has the one consistent character so far, the title guy. And thus far his characterisation and emotions only extends to the end of the episode. Fair enough. But that means the audience is watching for him to do clever gadget things. So they have to stay actually clever.
Part of why I want to watch this series is I'm kind of in awe of the idea writers can keep it clever for that long. I mean, obviously I don't know yet if they did, but it went on for half way to forever, and so far he's improvising slightly new things every week. That's a lot of brain has to go in.
I think science fiction, especially on the TV, frequently shifts the focus away from that. Like, the nut and boltest 'hard' SF comes up with a clever thought or a good tech trick and then writes it up and presents it to an audience like a magic trick, only more fun because potentially real. But that stuff tends to be older? Like, possibly the good tricks were discovered? And even real early the big focus is on how the results will change the world. Only because SF is still literature playing multiple games, often the thing is allegory or metaphor or something, or they don't worry so much about the plausibility of their first step and just follow through on the impacts in internally consistent ways. Social sciences maybe. So you logic out what the impact of travel time will be on interstellar societies, or how relativity messes with ageing which messes with both individuals and society. Fun stuff. But you don't have to keep coming up with new tricks, there's the one big trick, and everything falls from that.
Building a series around hopefully plausible good tricks of real-ish science every week?
Seems ambitious.
But then the actual plots divide up into 'Mac rescues people' and 'Mac rescues information'. There's consistently someone with local knowledge who will help him. Getting him up a tree in the first place is pretty simples when you can send him anywhere in the world. So structurally they've got a solid, dependable formula going on. It's just filling it up with goodies that looks tricky.
The ways this show is like SF in its attitude to the world, but is clearly an establishing text of action series, are currently kind of fascinating me. It's like a new toy. With pretty.
PS: ablism
Date: 2015-03-17 09:17 pm (UTC)(bomber who got his leg blown off, using the same tricks from that incident)