What’s Good and Bad About “Big Little Lies”

Available on Showmax.

I confess that I don't love the HBO series Big Little Lies, though I watch it with fascination, and find it really interesting and somewhat entertaining. Much of what there is in the show that I don’t like comes from television conventions. The story is spun out in ways that are designed to luringly drip information onto viewers just too slowly for us to stop watching, and the emotional tension is kindled misleadingly until the conclusion reveals that the point of the suspense doesn’t even matter to the story. The approach to and execution of the plot’s structure are dismayingly manipulative and overdetermined. Conversations are cut off; the characters get many good chances to hurl their feelings and barbed comments at one another, but conversations only go so far and characters exist only so deep as the plot requires, and don’t develop into a fuller story lived out by fuller people.

What I do like about it are unique and specific to the show, and come to the fore in Season 2, which, as my viewing companion Sizo agrees, is much better than the first season. Season 1 depended on flashbacks and artificially stoked suspense and intrigue to deliver viewers from the story’s beginning to its tragic (yet supposedly cathartic) end. Season 2 jumps off of that, and observes the characters as they navigate the aftermath of the homicide that closed Season 1. There’s no longer a specific end point to which we’re being ushered, and (again, as Sizo perceptively pointed out) the development of the characters is now the very substance of the plot. What they think and feel, and what it leads them to say and do, is what takes the story from the start to end of each episode.

What I See in “House of Cards”

“House of Cards”

Kevin Spacey as the deliciously corrupt Frank Underwood, first a leader in Congress, then a leader in the White House

The problem with television, expressed briefly in an op-ed piece by film critic Armond White for the New York Times, is that, being made for screens meant to fit into the average living room or bedroom, the creators of a show are not as driven to artfully reflect their ideas and their vision in the images of the show as filmmakers are with a movie. The view is that there is literally too little space to fill the screen with the representation of a director's consciousness, and rather than focusing too intently on composition of shots, on peculiar performances, on mise en scène, the show runner concentrates effort on a continuous and compelling story, because that is what can be sustained, and where a viewer's interest can hope to be held, for a three-episode, or twelve-week, or seven-year run. Story is the triumph of television, and a show's chief creative force is not the director, but the writer. White refers to what many commentators are calling the current state of affairs being broadcast on our home appliances: “the golden age of television”.

Nothing beats the big screen. Simply put: Film is a visual art form and television is merely a visual medium. It’s generally accepted that television is a producer’s, or show runner’s, format, where content is developed to support advertising, but all this talk about “television’s golden age” overlooks the fact that television has never proven to be a medium for artists – or auteurs – who express themselves personally and, primarily, visually.

Although White is not the most revered critic alive, he is a strongly idiosyncratic one, and a highly intellectual one, and he speaks with great honesty and, though many would pettily dispute it, reverence for cinema. From these comments on television (mine, and White's which I've shown here), you've no doubt sussed out where the title of this post is going - the merit I find in House of Cards which is absent in many other series (including a number which I do enjoy, and wolf up expeditiously, such as Game of Thrones, House, CSI, Parks and Recreation, Friends, and my favourite of all, 30 Rock) is the attention given to the images that appear on the screen. Not to put too fine a point on it, what I see in House of Cards is what I see on House of Cards.