I don't like Grey's Anatomy. I find most of the characters pretty unsympathetic. I'm fine with unsympathetic characters if they're interesting (like Denethor of Gondor in LOTR, who was delightfully insane), but they're mostly uninteresting and stereotypical (the well-educated doctor who feels distanced from his working class family, the poor but ambitious student who takes her clothes off to pay for her education, etc) too. I keep hoping all of the interns will lose their medical licenses for all of the horrifyingly stupid, unethical, and just plain bad decisions they make all the time. The McNicknames make me want to McVomit. For a bunch of doctors who have the education to know better and the incentive to do better, they sure end up with a lot of unintended pregnancies and syphilis infections. And I really dislike the soundtrack for the show. The songs they play almost make me regret that music was ever invented. Oh, the list goes on.
Nonetheless, I've seen a number of episodes of the show when other people have been watching it. I have to say that I'm surprised that they chose the Addison Shepherd character for a spinoff. I may have missed some episodes that give some more insight into her character, but she seems bland against the backdrop of all of the other hypereducated, hypertalented characters. The most interesting thing about her is that she fucked someone other than her husband and continued to lie to him about the extent of the affair even when she was trying to win him back, cf. every soap opera ever made.
Then again, what do I know? The Yahoo! News link cited in the writeup says that the show draws 25 million viewers. Some viewers apparently think the Addison character is worthy of fan vids.
I guess the time is ripe for me to write a prime-time drama about this girl I knew in college who fucked 4 or 5 dudes and a woman (mostly not all at the same time) while her military husband was deployed overseas. Apparently that sort of thing lights people's fires.
In regione caecorum, rex est luscus.
And here I thought the king of spin-offs was CSI. Don't they run 20 shows now or something? It seems that they take a character, introduce him in a different time zone, and have yet another of the same show, only with different characters. Or is what CSI called something else?
Thalia
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Parsing "Spin-off"
Tue Feb 27, 2007 at 06:09:42 PM EST
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From the language perspective, that's an interesting question. Most spin-offs before CSI (and Law And Order, to give proper credit) actually changed the basic structure of the show, or at least many of the narrative assumptions that set up the jokes. Archie Bunker was close to George Jefferson, but just about everything else was geared to making a different kind of joke: city vs suburbs, the addition of a maid, the lack of kids in the house, etc.
Is the term "spin-off" ennobled or degraded by applying it to (essentially) carbon copies of the original? Or is the field of "mystery" writing so formulaic that it doesn't matter? One private detective show feels a lot like the others*, likewise with police procedurals, and cozies (like Miss Marple), and so will the serial killer shows (like Prime Suspect) if that particular subgenre ever makes it to the small screen. When you don't expect more than a smidgen of originality from even a new show, why would you expect more from a knock off?
But then what would be a better term? Satellite, perhaps, although the Moon is nothing like Earth. Simulacra has too many syllables (!), and clone too much baggage from decades of S-F use, and is probably not a good fit anyway. Anyone want to play the game of coining a new word, if only in jest?
*Which is why Garrison Keillor's Guy Noir is instantly recognizable. If you know the show at all, think about the host of common assumptions that let the plot go forward in a very short amount of time.
Ex ignorantia ad sapientiam; e luce ad tenebras
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Re: Parsing "Spin-off"
Tue Feb 27, 2007 at 06:40:00 PM EST
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I'm going to vote for "clone" because as far as I can tell there is little difference between it and the original, except it's got a shorter lifespan. So clone seems rather appropos.
Thalia
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Smacks Forehead
Thu Mar 01, 2007 at 08:28:12 PM EST
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OK, this goes to show how little I think about business. There's a perfectly good word to describe what L&O and CSI are doing: franchise. In fact, I think the word has even been used in preference to spin off, though I don't read enough about television to be certain.
Ex ignorantia ad sapientiam; e luce ad tenebras
