Poetry and drama matter.

When the Syfy cable channel began broadcasting their new series “The Expanse”, I was conflicted.  I’ve read the novels by ‘James S. A. Corey’ (a pseudonym for Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck), and I like them a lot.  At the same time, like any writing that’s filmed, I worried about the result.

They got the look down perfectly.  This is speculative fiction, so look and feel are important.  They nailed it.  I loved the innovative details, and the richness of their version of that place.  The first scenes were just wonderful.

And with all that, I still didn’t like the drama.  (Big surprise, I know.)  Why?  The novels had characters who seemed like grown-ups, mostly. They weren’t especially good or bad, but they seemed rational, and got along the way most rational people do: amicably enough, as they worked around each other’s flaws.  It’s the way most people do things, generally.

But the TV version changed the people, reducing each one from charming and complex to mean, angry, short-sighted and openly hostile.

Here’s an example.  The hero is on a mining ship doing the Space Opera version of steaming home.  They receive a distress signal. The Captain notifies the executive officer, our hero, who ‘forces’ the Captain to slow down so they can respond.

In the novel, this decision is mostly theater. The Captain clearly means to stop the ship regardless, but by filtering it through his XO, the Captain can pretend, grumble, and save face.  The XO knows this, and he plays his part genially.  Most of the crew aren’t really fooled, but they play along, too.  It’s the kind of things that people do to get along with each other.  Even with the drama and deaths, you enjoy hanging out with all of them.

The Syfy show changed the style.  I assume executives asked for something ‘darker’.  In this version, everyone hates and distrusts everyone else. The Captain really does want to ignore the distress signal, and the hero/XO has to defy direct orders to force them to stop, almost creating a mutiny.  Everyone hates and yells at everyone else, and instead of comfort, it’s a workplace nightmare.

The pattern is repeated in each successive  scene.  The Syfy version changes everyone to be tenser, less trusting, and primed to harm and betray anyone opposing them.  With all the bullies, threats, and one-note characters, it was like they’d moved the action to a prep school for badly written characters.

I only made it through a few episodes.  I love a good space opera, but I mostly thrive on strong characters, and they’d made everyone too hostile and unforgiving.  I don’t mean to be hypercritical — honestly, it’s magnificent work — but I wasn’t enjoying it.

Then I saw “The Magicians”, another Syfy series made from novels I’ve read.  Same thing.  The novels follow kids selected to attend a secretive college for magic.  The novels aren’t too rosy, and there are conflicts, but they’re mostly internal.  The friction as partly-formed people bounce off each other seems reasonable for college-age kids.

And the series has preening bullies, hypersexualized women, and all the other overblown stuff the novel didn’t choose to dwell on because… why would they?  I tried to keep going, but I just didn’t care about anyone there enough to push through the misery they poured over every scene like it was their secret sauce.

It leaves me depressed.  They transformed two different, wonderfully written novels into the same dreck: miserable shadows the original works filled with dark hostility and bullying anger.

Do they really think that the answer to every vexing problem is determined by who can beat up who?

I know this is Syfy, the land of mediocrity, but I keep seeing those same creative decisions happening in other media sources.  For a story to really sell, you have to make it much ‘darker’.  Ditch the love and affection; that’s for naive fools.  Everyone really knows the world runs on betrayal and self-interest.

I bring it up because our media overlords are doing this both for us (they think that’s what we want to watch), and to us, effectively shaping the lens we use to see our world.  For good or not, we shape a lot of our world image from what we see on TV.  Stilted portrayals matter, because they shape how we look at things.

What they’re saying is clear enough: anyone who believes in charity and good will is a chump and a dupe, and they will — deservedly — fail.  Only fools compromise, or work with other people.  In (media) real life, people are good guys or bad guys, and trusting bad guys is classic chump territory.

Now… where have I heard that message before?  It sounds so familiar….