Monolithic Perils

What do we lose when everything is the same?

A bit belated perhaps, but for the past few weeks I’ve been dedicating an increasingly large amount of time to catching up with my favorite shows. I think it’s because for so long I was so distracted and scatterbrained to pay attention to all the things I wanted to watch, that I ended up just not watching anything. But, lo and behold, I made the time and managed to gobble up a sizeable chunk of entertainment, but not everything went down easy, to say the least.

Sometimes you’re watching two things at the same time, and inevitably you start to draw these comparisons that perhaps you wouldn’t have paid attention to otherwise. For example, Ms Marvel is a great show; it’s funny, it’s heartfelt, everyone on that show is perfectly cast, and the superhero genre was definitely yearning for the kind of honest representation that doesn’t feel too cloying or pandering, a pitfall that a lot of media recently seems to be prone to tumbling down into. I spent the majority of its runtime with a smile on my face, wishing that the show was 20 episodes, not just 6.

…but at the same time, I was also watching Better Call Saul, the much-lauded Breaking Bad spin-off which I kept on the backburner for months and years and then finally decided to take the plunge and catch up on what I’d been missing, and I was missing a lot. BCS is a wonderful show, at times sad, tragic and devastating, other times it’s funny and ridiculous, thrilling beyond measure. Whenever I’m watching an episode, it feels like I’m luxuriating in a well-made meal, marveling (heh) at the way presentation and taste come together to create something that is truly unique, then also realizing that the people making that meal keep making it, over and over again, without ever skipping a beat or missing a step. It’s frankly miraculous, and it saddens me that we’re about to leave that world for good in a few weeks.

And it’s in watching those two together that I started feeling way worse about Ms Marvel. In a way, that’s always the feeling when it comes to Marvel properties; you’re engrossed in the shock and awe of it all, and then afterwards you’re left thinking ‘did I really like that all that much?’ and usually the answer is no. Sure, a Marvel movie is a communal experience, and the hype of being around hundreds of people cheering for someone onscreen is incredibly fun, but what purpose does it all serve? Ms. Marvel is a little different, because while it does exist mainly to just slot in one more brick into this money-making machine that Disney owns, it still does have a little bit of a separate identity, but I just wish that the show didn’t have to bend over backwards to fit into this whole Marvel hegemony.

The idea of a brown Muslim superhero is great, and fun and necessary, don’t get me wrong, but squeezing everything into the span of 6 episodes is just…insulting. It speaks of a certain….lack of faith, I guess. When I think back to it, I keep wishing that the show could spend more time with its characters, so that they can have some better defined motivations and personalities. I mean, you get the chance to set this show in a highschool, with all the drama involved, and you’ve got the characters right there, and you only spend….what…two episodes rushing through whatever Kamala’s journey is over there? Then all of a sudden it’s ‘let’s introduce new characters…who take exactly give minutes to turn into antagonists’, and then Kamala is off to Karachi, for what is possibly the fastest training montage I’ve ever (not) seen, and whoosh we’re back for the finale. There is just so much nuance here that we’re not getting, and it’s a disservice to both character and audience.

A friend of mine has been recently trying to get me to watch Person of Interest, and when I was looking at the show, I realized that it had multiple seasons, each of which run for maybe 20-something episodes. And that’s the way shows used to be! Sure, at times that felt a little too extensive or padded, but things just had more time to breathe and be. I’m not even asking for that, I mean Better Call Saul manages it in 10-episode seasons, but that’s because the show has a very clear idea of what it wants to be, and where the characters need to go, and it shows. Ms Marvel might have a bit of that too, but it’s hamstrung again by the idea of having to serve the Marvel purpose of placing all the characters in a certain place for what comes next in the continuity, even when there’s more for that character in the here and now. Even the number of episodes is carefully selected to align with the next movie, and the next series….and…and..

And that’s so exhausting. It’s also very obvious that this sort of fatigue is not a singular instance, if the reaction to recent Marvel movies is anything to go by. Who knows, maybe if these reactions keep on coming, something might change.