nixsight

A quite cheery and not all that irritating article over at the Telegraph website congratulates the UK success of Heroes:

This was cult viewing for boys waving imaginary light-sabres, not quality drama.

And yet, like the characters whose fates it follows, we now know that Heroes is a seemingly ordinary show possessed of extraordinary powers.

Last Wednesday 4.3 million viewers tuned in, giving BBC2 its biggest peak-time ratings win over BBC1 in more than a decade.

The only problem with the article is its persistent missing of the point by drawing a distinct but arbitrary and entirely imagined line between two “types” of people (“normal” people and ”nerds”), and trying to identify what it is about shows like Heroes and Lost that allows them to break out of their apparently preordained “cult” audiences.

This seems to be a fairly consistent and outdated assumption that traditional news outlets make when dealing with this subject matter… it isn’t that the shows are different, it is more that audiences are becoming more accepting of different types of story, or rather, less prejudiced against areas of interest that they don’t really understand. Articles like this tend to ignore the massive success of shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation, because it doesn’t fit the model of the social situation that they are trying to describe, but shows like this have been doing pretty well for years…

Mass audiences aren’t drawn to Heroes because it is about super-powered individuals, any more then the majority of viewers watch Lost because of the island mystery, or Star Trek TNG because of the space travel: All of those shows have that human element, the soap opera effect, that draws people in… that in fact, we tend to crave, even if we wouldn’t be seen dead watching Eastenders or Coronation Street. The only shift that is happening among audiences is that they are no longer as likely to be utterly turned off by the more imaginative aspects of the shows.

For sure, the more mainstream success of books like Harry Potter, movies like Lord Of The Rings or Spider-Man, shows like The X Files and Twin Peaks (and less commonly stated examples like Northern Exposure or American Gothic) have softened the ground for the current situation… but the fact is that fantasy literature, science-fiction tv, or comic books… none of these things have really changed the way they do things to appeal to a wider audience. The characterisation, the angst, going on in Heroes is all classic (sometimes, I have to say, even old-fashioned) Marvel comics scripting… the creators of that show haven’t done anything different so far than Chris Claremont was doing in The X-Men during the eighties.

The audience, however, is changing. Perhaps it is wrong to say that the viewing public has suddenly decided that they like fantasy… instead, maybe the weight of decades or even centuries of fantastic scenarios in fiction have created a rising amount of fantastic background noise or static, so that now it doesn’t even occur to them to dismiss a show because of it. After all, a sizeable chunk of the audience was born in a world that had always had Star Wars and Star Trek and Spider-Man and Superman, and as such didn’t even see the phenomena of those things as exceptional.

(By way of comparison, I don’t really care about cars, and am not macho at all, but find myself completely absorbed in episodes of Top Gear for the same reason… it is damn good entertainment! The fact that the subject matter doesn’t matter to me doesn’t even occur to me while it is on. The assumption that only genre fans can be nerds just gets me every time. Every area of interest has it’s sub-culture, and every sub-culture it’s fanatics, but it is retarded to assume that they are the sum total of that areas’ adherents. And god knows, car nerds are just as bad, if not worse, then genre nerds)

What articles like this actually end up highlighting is that traditional news media don’t tend to have a clear and accurate barometer of the general public, or if they do, would rather ignore what it tells them in the service of their own reader-base’s demographic. That while the population are, at least where entertainment consumption habits are concerned, growing more tolerant and accepting, and enjoying a broader range of quality entertainment because of it (as well as, admittedly, a whole lot of dreck), the news media are stuck in place, circa twenty-odd years ago.

Still, it is nice to see a genre related article like this that isn’t headlined: “Biff! Bam! Pow! Superheroes swing onto our screens!”