Program: New Amsterdam

Network: Fox

Creators: Christian Taylor and Allan Loeb

Primary Cast: Nikolaj Coster Waldau, Zuleikha Robinson, Alexie Gilmore, Stephen Henderson, Susan Misner

A mid-season debut that has a bit of promise. That assumes, of course, that you can ignore the fact that it is yet another cop show in a sea of cop shows. That fact alone will likely doom it to be cancelled, as the competition in the cop show field is dominated by the various CSI’s and Law and Orders, although Fox has not yet given any indication one way or the other about its future (that I have seen, anyway. They may well have announced its cancellation by now and I just missed it. I don’t pay much attention to that kind of thing). The final scheduled episode is Monday the 14^th (tomorrow).

What makes this show different than the other cop shows is that it blends a bit of genre into the realistic cop-drama with an immortal lead detective. Sounds rather Highlander-ish, but it goes a bit further in that. See, John Amsterdam (Waldau), brilliant NYC detective, was born back in the 1600s in Holland. After traveling to the New World, he saves the life of a young native girl and is stabbed through the heart doing so. The girl and her mother, a kind of mystic or shaman, bring him back to life. A life that will not end until he finds his one true soul mate (annoyingly referred to as “the one” - /blanch). Adding in another twist is John’s desire to throw in the towel. At times the only reason he seems interested in finding “the one” (/belch) is so he can finally die. 350-something years is quite enough, thank you very much.

Unsurprising, each episode uses a flashback of something in John’s past. Not the most original idea, and one that will grow very old, very quickly. See, if you are continually telling me what happened rather than what is happening, then you are telling me the wrong story. The writers mix it up well though, and rather than making the past the focus of each story, they limit it, attempting to account for the influences that still affect John’s thinking. What is most enjoyable is that they don’t use the obvious “big moments” of the last 350 years. They are more personal than that for John, and very, very well done. As a matter of fact, I think the flashbacks are probably the best part of the show right now. They are certainly the most carefully developed and researched, and are tremendously interesting (I especially liked the appearance of Thoreau in the Civil War flashback – extremely well done).

What the show lacks is that kind of attention to the John’s present day. Instead, the focus on the cop-crap and the budding love interest of someone who may or may not be “the one” (/puke). They have a tremendous amount of potential to explore some really interesting stuff if they just let John lose a bit of the “in control” and “master detective” aspects of his character. Perhaps the single thing that stands out to me at the moment is memory. I have issues remembering what happened last week, and this guy remembers details from 300 years ago like he’s recalling a shopping list. How many memories can a 350 year old brain hold? How fragmented can those memories be? How difficult is it to recall them, especially with such accuracy? The cop stuff isn’t interesting. The fact that he’s 350 years old and wants to die… that’s where the story is.

So, all in all, it has potential, and I like it. I hope that Fox gives it another chance, and I hope that they slowly bend it away from the annoying cop-centric plot arc.

• » Comments (0)

Title: The Atrocity Archive

Author: Charles Stross

Publisher: Golden Gryphon Press

Year Published: 2004

First Line: “Green sky at night; hacker’s delight.”

I’ve been wanting to pick up something by Stross for a while now, as the buzz about him all across the netosphere has been tremendously positive. Needless to say I was delighted when my buddy Nick gave me The Jennifer Morgue for Christmas last year. And then I found out that while Jennifer isn’t really a sequel, The Atrocity Archive sort of sets the stage for it, and being the OCD series-whore that I am, I of course zipped over to Amazon and picked up The Atrocity Archive before I even considered starting Jennifer.

First off, there are four distinct parts to The Atrocity Archive (well… five if you count the Glossary, but more on that later). The first is an Introduction by Ken MacLeod. It’s an interesting look at Stross and how he thinks, but it’s short enough to act more of an advertisement than anything else. Not necessarily a bad thing for a newish author (in 2004) to have a “buy this now” endorsement from someone as prolific as MacLeod. The last section is a robust Afterward by Stross detailing what he sees as parallels between the spy thriller, the mystery, and his own science fiction. It is a really interesting read, and I enjoyed it as much as I did the fiction between the Intro and the Afterward.

And speaking of the fiction between, perhaps it’s because I came to it a bit ass-backwards through Jennifer, it caught me by surprise that what I assumed was a novel was actually two separate novellas, “The Atrocity Archive” and “The Concrete Jungle.” They are related in that they share the same universe and characters, but they aren’t linked and stand perfectly well on their own. And I think I actually enjoyed them more because of this. It gave me a firm breaking point where I could catch my breath before I dove back into another story.

And I needed that break. I thoroughly enjoyed both stories, but Stross’ narrative voice took me quite a bit of getting used to. I am not a real “hard” science kind of reader (or writer, for that matter). I am more interested in character development, psychology, and sociology than I am technology. Don’t get me wrong, I love technology, and I wish I was more conversant in the more complex aspects of it than I actually am, but more often than not I find hard science fiction to exist because of the “big idea” of something technological, and that gets boring for me pretty quick. Especially boring in this case was having to use the Glossary so often to refer to what the governmental abbreviations all stood for. In the end I stopped caring and just flew past the three or four letter monikers without giving them much thought, which meant all these various agencies just got lumped under “government stuff” in my brain. Perhaps that was, in some way, the point, but it bothered me that I had stopped caring about part of Stross’ world-building.

One piece of good news, though, is that even though I reached the point of tedium with having to check the Glossary, I was never bored with The Atrocity Archive itself. The ideas and development behind the Stross’ “big idea” technology kept me hooked and were strong enough to make up for what frustrated me. And what frustrated me the most, you ask? I wanted to be smarter than I am. Stross didn’t quite make me feel stupid, but the technology he puts out there is so rooted in possibility (or at least seems to be) that I was forever trying to figure out where exactly his leap from computers to magic originates. More than that, because it was all just barely over my head, I always felt that I was just on the brink of understanding something profoundly important, but that understanding was always just beyond my reach. It wasn’t until I actually stopped trying to figure it all out and just accepted it as Stross explained it that I actually began to really get into the stories.

I think that may well be the single reason why I enjoyed “The Concrete Jungle” more than I did “The Atrocity Archive.” By the time I got to it, I had lowered the bar on my Willing-Suspension-Of-Disbelief-o-Meter and was just soaking up the technology right along with the story. That and the fact that there are some fairly significant and highly technical info-dumps scattered throughout “Atrocity.” I think they needed to be there in order to establish different factors of his world, but they were the least interesting part of the story he was telling.

The other piece of good news is this…

With these two novellas, Stross has created a universe that I absolutely love. His main character is infinitely charming as he struggles with being turned from a cubicle-riding desk-jockey into a secret agent for a government agency that doesn’t exist. The relationships Stross builds along the way intermix with the technology he has created and they compliment each other supremely well. In the end, it is the building of his main character that kept me totally involved in the story. My only complaint is that there was no love-interest continued in “The Concrete Jungle.” The relationship between Bob and Mo was fun to watch as it developed, and the lack of continuation in the second novella was something that was sorely missed.

At the end of the day, The Atrocity Archive is a fun read, but not one I would recommend to anyone not at least a casual fan of technologically-focused science fiction.

• » Comments (0)

Taking a break from grading and updating the site. If it disappears for a moment or three, I probably blew it up. But I am backing it up, so it won’t be gone forever. Hooray for WP-DBManager!

edit: ok that was frighteningly simple… I wonder what I screwed up that I can’t see. Guess we’ll find out! I’ll need to start spending some more time exploring all the new stuff with WP 2.5. It looks a whole lot more fun and easy to use that it was before. There are also a bunch more things for me to figure out how to use. One of these days I’ll have the time to really get into it, but today is not one of those days.

• » Comments (0)

Program: Canterbury’s Law

Network: Fox

Creator: Dave Erickson

Primary Cast: Julianna Margulies, Ben Shenkman, Keith Robinson, Trieste Kelly Dunn, James McCaffrey, Terry Kinney, Aidan Quinn

For some reason, I like Julianna Margulies. Always have. From ER to The Mists of Avalon, I have enjoyed most everything I have seen her in.

Until now.

That sounds harsher than it should, perhaps. There is nothing inherently wrong with Canterbury’s Law. Unless, of course, you are like me and see the same old lawyer drama repackaged with a female lead as inherently wrong. It’s Shark in a skirt (and I’m not overly fond of Shark, either). There’s nothing new here, and nothing worth spending an hour a week of my precious time with. I gave it three episodes to show me something that sets it apart from the rest of the TV lawyer schlock. It failed, I moved on.

The sad thing is, everything is in place for them to do something interesting. The writing and acting is good, the production values are high… but rather than take a risk and try going with something fresh (a la Eli Stone), they break out the lawyer-drama-schtick, right down to the repressed personal issues that affect both home life and work life, and the requisite bad guy DA who has it in for the head of the firm (Canterbury). Regardless of how well written it is, it’s predictable. Yes, predictable… 4 episodes old, and I can say it’s predictable. The only flag they haven’t yet waved is the “woman struggling to make it in a man’s world” but it’s there, lurking in the background in the form of the conflict between the DA (Terry Kinney) and Margulies, so I have to believe it will come out within the next few episodes.

In the end, if you are a fan of lawyer dramas, you’ll probably like Canterbury’s Law. It’s more of the same old tried and true stuff that’s been on prime time TV for the last decade. Unfortunately, there’s just far to much “been there, done that” in this entire genre for a “new” series to ever feel… well… new. Which undoubtedly means it will be around for a few seasons and take up valuable prime-time space. Pity, that.

• » Comments (0)