It isn’t often that the SciFi channel impresses me with their selection of shows, but their decision to order and air up to 11 episodes of the new show Eureka is encouraging. The show debuted to very strong ratings and with any luck will keep it up and avoid cancellation, because I’m finding it very enjoyable. The pilot and second episode were a bit awkward at times and in some places lacking, but the third episode set just the right tone. It even saw the annoying teenage daughter character get a bit less annoying, always a good thing.
In brief, the premise of the show is that after World War II Albert Einstein convinced Truman and others to establish a secret town in which the most brilliant Americans and their families could live in safety and secrety and create great new scientific works. The town, Eureka, is controlled by the Department of Defense and is also home to a huge secret government research facility the purpose of which is to take the scientific genius of the town and turn it into useful machines, weapons, and the like. The high concentration of brain power brings a high concentration of other things, including quirkiness, dangerous experiments, paranormal activity, and nefarious double agents.
The show is told through the eyes of the more “normal” people who keep the town running, focusing mostly on the new town Sheriff, a divorced US marshall whose teenage daughter decided to come along for the ride.
If you get a chance, check out Eureka, the fourth episode airs on Tuesday at 9pm, and I have the first three if anyone wants ’em. For my UK friends, it is airing on Sky One under the name _A Town Called Eureka_ on Wedsnedays at 9pm.
Alas, I don’t have a TV in Oxford (what with TV licenses and all…), so I can’t watch Sky One, but when I get back to the States, I’d like to check out Eureka. All I’ve seen are the previews SciFi ran a few months ago that were quite vague, but somewhat intriguing.
I’m a little worried that it’s a one-gag show that will just get old. Shows that you can describe in one sentence usually get old fairly quickly (“New people have to learn to live in the DoD’s secret town where all of their smart people live”), at least to me. But I’m willing to give it a shot.
“Girl with supernatural powers battles vampires, demons, and the forces of darkness.”
“Teenage detective in a small seaside town attempts to discover how her best friend was killed.”
“Escaping from a devestating first strike by a race of vicious robots, a ragtag fleet travels across the galaxy looking for an ancient place of refuge called Earth.”
“A time traveling alien and his human companion jaunt across space and time in a ship disguised as a blue police box, solving mysteries and setting things right.”
Yeah, all of those shows suck.
I had a feeling you’d go and do something like that. I guess I need to elaborate:
I should have known better than to “linguify”[1] my claims about shows and their complexity.
Let me propose a new rubric – shows with a single gimmick can often go downhill quickly:
Buffy had other gimmicks involved – her mom doesn’t know about her powers (for a long while), Willow (after season whatever it is), the town being on a nexis of bad things(tm).
VM, you could argue, has only one gimmick… And I’d buy that, and use it as proof of a show with only one gimmick going very downhill after the first season
BSG has so many more aspects to it that the “ragtag survival” deal. First off, you’ve got the fact that the Cylons look like humans, and could be among the fleet. You’ve also got the political angles, classic “hard” SciFi elements (e.g. what is life like in the light of this new technology), etc.
As for Dr. Who, let me first say that its gimmick is superbly suited to a prolongued television series. By allowing the show to take place in any time/place, you can incorpate gimmicks into only a single episode (which they do frequently). That being said, I think this show is largely a counterexample to my proposed rubric.
Also keep in mind that I didn’t say that shows with only one gimmick “suck”, but rather that they *tend* to get old rather quickly. I’ll add to that that they tend to get old rather quickly… if they don’t find some way to incorporate new gimmicks on a pretty regular basis.
Now what you’re going to say is that Eureka has other gimmicks, but I don’t know them yet because I haven’t seen the show/there hasn’t been time for them to develop, and that’s fair, but from what I’ve heard so far, I think I’m right to have some doubts.
[1] See http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003312.html . “To linguify a claim about things in the world is to take that claim and construct from it an entirely different claim that makes reference to the words or other linguistic items used to talk about those things, and then use the latter claim in a context where the former would be appropriate.”
If your original argument was wrongly stated, i.e. that shows that can be summarized in one sentence can still have more than one “gimmick,” as you call it, then there is no need to refute my examples — all of those shows can be succinctly summarized in one sentence and, as with most summaries, tons of details are left out, but you can get a general idea. I think the secondary point I was making with those summaries is that these shows, which are very good, can sound incredibly awful when summarized in one sentence, even if that sentence is fairly accurate.