Round One

GOTHAM

vs

NCIS: NEW ORLEANS

 

As of this article I am contractually obligated to not talk about Gotham. We are just two days away from the debut of the brand new PopFilter Podcast, The Superhero Hour Hour, which is a show completely dedicated to comic book television. This will also most likely be the last chance I will ever get to discuss NCIS: New Orleans, so let’s shift our attention towards that.

 

When you have been watching and writing about television for as long as I have, you sort of have to come to grips with procedurals. They’re out there, they’re popular, and you can’t just write off an entire genre like that. That being said, I’ve developed some rules for what I, someone who hasn’t liked a procedural since elementary school, need from them:

1. A couple of cool fun facts turned into a plot.

2. A story that takes exactly 44 minutes to tell. Not 22 stretched to 44. Not 90 crammed into 44. A 44 minute story. It seems hard, but the professional television writers that work on procedurals are FUCKING PROFESSIONAL TELEVISION WRITERS.

3. A little bit of mystery. They all bow down to the almighty Procedural Formula, but if there’s maybe one or two things that surprise me I’ll be more tolerant.

4. No cheating.

 

If you think rule number two is hard, rule number four seems to be impossible. There is a rule on Pixar’s now-famous list of writing rules that explains that stories can cheat their characters into conflict, but they can’t cheat them out. The characters in procedurals are never actually in danger. Think about it. They stand around people who were in danger, but are now dead. And if they do find themselves in danger, there are no stakes because everyone always lives to see the reset at the end of the show. It’s all part of the formula, and I’m not begrudging them that. But the other half of the Pixar rule, regarding characters cheating themselves out of conflict, is constantly part of the formula and constantly bullshit.

The second scene of the new NCIS pilot involves the New Orleans team investigating a murder. The only evidence is the severed leg of an African-American man. The third scene involves one of Scott Bakula’s old navy buddies telling him that a navy soldier Bakula was mentoring is missing. We see Bakula remember that his protege was black, and then realize that that the leg he found EARLIER THAT MORNING was probably his.

If that’s not enough evidence, later on in the episode a random four-digit number sounds familiar to a different member of the NCIS team. It finally comes to her: pineapples. One of her ex-boyfriends was sexually into fruit salad (I shit you not), and that four-digit number is the code grocers use for pineapples. She remembers the four-digit codes of all fruit because of her ex-boyfriend. Fucking what the fucking fuck. If you are sexually turned on by watching people remember things, or fruit salad, then procedurals are the shows for you.

 NCIS: NO is so middling and benign that it won’t come close to factoring in to worst of the year lists; Mysteries of Laura is so much more painful than this. But that doesn’t make it good.

Tune in to the new podcast on Friday morning to hear Mike and I discuss Gotham and the new season of SHIELD. We’ll just call this a sneak preview: Congratulations, Gotham. Welcome to round 2.

– Ryan Haley

 

 

TOMORROW!!!

BLACK-ISH 

VS

HOW TO GET AWAY WITH MURDER!!!