Near-future Imperfect: This Is Not My Life and Todd and the Book of Pure Evil
One day in the near future Alec Ross wakes up to discover he has a wife, two children, a home in a tony designer suburb, and can’t remember any of it. Don’t you hate it when that happens?
Like many another sf protagonist in a newly-conscious, low-information state he tries to make sense of the strangely self-contained world he is in and find his role in it. Is his amnesia merely the delayed after-effect of a recent fall, as he is urged to believe, or is the reality much more sinister?
This being the premise of a TV series, it’s the latter. (The potential for dramatic conflict given even a crackpot conspiracy theorist character is dramatically increased when there’s a real conspiracy afoot.) And much of the pleasure of This Is Not My Life comes from well-paced revelation, so I’ll be circumspect. But the result is possibly the best sf TV series you will never see.
The small city of Waimoana, his putative home, is as central a character as Ross. A suburban oasis somewhere in New Zealand — where the series was produced and broadcast this summer — Waimoana appears to be a Stepfordesque community not entirely unlike the Disney-planned city of Celebration, Florida, in shades of antiseptic blue and beige. Celebration had its first murder and suicide this holiday season, and likewise there is a dark side to Waimoana not unrelated to the actions of Wellness, the somewhat overbearing medical service personified by frosty Dr Collins (a remarkably controlled performance by Tania Nolan). Moveover, hints accumulate, notwithstanding the firewall of the exclusively insular local media, that despite the ease of living and the somewhat advanced technology in evidence the rest of the world is in great turmoil.
Paranoid stories like this one can massage the ego — yes, it really is all about you — but the risk these days is of being out-dystopia’d by the present. The early 21st century features a public to whom alienation and surveillance of one sort or another is daily portioned (with optional upgrades if you wave your credit card towards the camera), and the technology of surveillance and social control has become part of our bedrock media mythology, if only because its tropes make for concise (though factually improbable) visual storytelling for TV. (Every night on some procedural show or another somebody matches faces to ID databases around the world in real time, or dials up photos of suspects from security cameras that would not typically be networked, magically enhancing fifteen blocky pixels into a likeness.)
For those who can identify with a mainstream Everyman like Alec Ross, this show offers a confrontation with both the future and one’s own replaceable and contingent nature, in coolest Kubrickian tones.
Buffy fans uncertain if guarded enthusiasm, defensive ennui, or naked fear are the appropriate response to news of a reboot version supposedly in development sans Joss Whedon (by the people who ruined the original movie) may in the meantime find the Canadian series Todd and the Book of Pure Evil pleasant solace.
While it is another replaying of the horror movie that is high school — this time as farce, with Satanists, puppets and CGI — this saga of the students and staff of Crowley High is extraordinarily effective in evoking adolescent life and its traumas, in a sort of Serlingesque manner whose karmic/cosmic, metaphor-made-concrete simplicity reminds me of the Afterschool Specials of my spent youth, minus the emotional treacle of either. The typical monster-of-the-week plotting pitfall is evaded handily by a leavening of self-awareness and a season-length discovery arc that of course leaves the viewer with more questions than it answers. A splatter-comedy for the youthful in spirit, it’s all fun and games until someone’s eviscerated, and then it’s just fun. Silent Bob sez check it out.
[Chunga 17, 2010]