Why we believe in science too much to watch Cosmos.

The reboot of the Cosmos television series just ended, and despite a ton of publicity, lots of money, and being broadcast on ten Fox television channels, the series still didn’t do well. Some scientists may be tempted to conclude that this is more proof that the public cares less about science than ever before, since in 1980 the first Cosmos with Carl Sagan was a big hit. But are they right? I don’t think so, in fact, I think that the public does believe in science – and that is why Cosmos couldn’t be a big hit today, but it was 35 years ago.

I should admit that I have a slight connection to the Cosmos series – the first one, not the second. In the early ‘90s, I was a budding documentary film maker, working as a writer on a science series about Nobel Prize Winners ( The Nobel Legacy). My boss was Adrian Malone, the executive producer of the first Cosmos series. I heard a lot about Adrian’s dealings with Carl Sagan ( often fractious), and how the show was produced. It was a time when big-budget, 13-part series about serious subjects were more common, and attracted lots of attention. When Cosmos aired on PBS in September of 1980, it received 8.7million viewers in America’s four biggest cities ( that’s how ratings were calculated back then). Cosmos became proof that PBS could produce a ratings hit, and Adrian hoped that he could do it again with our series ( no such luck).

Television was changing in the early 1990s, in ways that would ultimately affect how the next Cosmos series would fare in 2014. I was living in Boston in 1992, and when I went home after work, I watched some of the new cable channels. One of them was TLC, known as The Learning Channel back then. It had just been bought by The Discovery Channel network. I rather liked TLC, since it was basically a PBS and BBC reruns channel, full of fascinating serious documentaries.

But during the 1990s, TLC discovered that science and history shows were not going to get big ratings. However, one kind of show did really interest people: home renovation programs. So, the channel slowly drifted away from science, towards lifestyle shows. Home and personal makeover shows became big hits, followed by shows about atypical people like dwarves, people too fat to get out of bed, and tons of shows about aliens and paranormal events. Science was out, the bizarre was in. This format worked so well, other channels, including the big broadcasters, started producing their own big budget versions of these shows.

When Cosmos came back in 2014, it was facing this new television universe. There were three other shows that were its main competition for most of its run: The Good Wife, Resurrection and Believe. Resurrection is a new fictional series about people who come back from the dead, while Believe is a new J.J.Abrams vehicle which follows a little girl who has paranormal powers. So, in 2014, two of Cosmos’ top competitors were shows about superstition. It lost to both of them, as well as to The Good Wife. In 1980, by contrast, Cosmos was up against Archie Bunker’s Place ( a sitcom), Charlie’s Angels and CHiPs . Not an alien or zombie in sight. In 2014, Fox aired Cosmos on all ten of its channels (for example, FX, and its news channels), and the show still only got a maximum of 8.5 million viewers. Back in 1980, it got slightly more than that in just four major cities ( the way ratings were calculated back then), so in the U.S. as a whole, far more people watched it in 1980 than in 2014.

So does this mean that we are slipping back into an age of superstition, where science is no longer considered true? No. I think we all understand that our televisions, mobile phones and ipads are made possible by science. But - and this is a big but-  we don’t feel like we have any say about what happens in science. It is something produced by experts, who know way more than us, and we will never catch up. And that is a problem for making a hit television show.

Far from being dismissive of science, we’re more like medieval peasants who walk into those huge, beautiful cathedrals. They were in awe, and knew that what the Church said was The Absolute Truth, and not to be messed with. You couldn’t start telling stories about Jesus where he had a wife and kids, you know, for fun. Not an option, since what the bible and the priests were saying was simply fact, no room for debate or alternate versions. The same is true for science today. There’s no point in making up stories about the laws of physics, as if there is some wiggle room there. The universe has laws that can’t be broken or distorted. So we approach science as something that is true and it works, even if we don’t know why. So a show like Cosmos deserves our respect. It may fill us with wonder and awe, but we know that our opinions don’t matter in any way.

The paranormal shows Cosmos was up against don’t have this problem. Their plot lines are flexible, they can make up the rules as they go along, keeping the audience guessing. Few of us would stand around the water cooler talking about the laws of physics, but we happily talk about some show we saw about aliens, or the latest superpowers a character on True Blood or Heroes has acquired. It is like sports: we feel fully qualified to diss a player who makes millions of dollars a year. We feel we have the right to heckle. That’s why watching shows like Honey Boo Boo or Duck Dynasty is fun: their characters are different from us, and we can gossip about them.

That kind of talk doesn’t work for astronomy. Our human instinct for telling stories, for exaggeration and gossip just doesn’t come into play if you believe something is the absolute truth. It does work for superstition, though, which is why serious science shows like Cosmos will rarely do well in the ratings anymore. We have become used to seeing television as an arena where we can heckle, so a serious science program is not going to attract a big audience, unless there is a human element we can engage with. Or, to put it another way, it is not that we don’t believe in science anymore, it is because we believe it so much that we will keep being attracted to superstition, and subjects which are thoroughly unscientific.

The New Shakespeare: Darth Vader Meets Manga

Yesterday, I had lunch with a friend who told me that “Sleep No More” may be coming soon to Toronto, where I live. “Sleep No More” is an amazing staging of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, set in three reclaimed warehouses in New York City. The audience dons white masks and is free to explore the entire stage/set while actors perform the play silently in rooms all over the buildings. It isn’t the only actors who are silent, though: so is the audience. So ghost-like members of the audience drift through the scenes as silent actors perform one of Shakespeare’s most gut-wrenching and bloody plays. It sounds amazing, and I hope it does come here so I can see it. (For more info on the play, here’s a review from The New York Times).

Hearing about this play reminded me of some of the other wonderful new ways Shakespeare is being given a makeover for the 21^st century. One of my favourites is Ian Doescher’s new take on the Stars Wars saga. The first of the Luke Skywalker movies has been reimagined as Star Wars: Verily, A New Hope. In it,  Doescher has rewritten the scripts so that they read like Shakespeare wrote them for the stage. The results are brilliant, and often very funny. Juts like the plays, characters walk on and off set, even if that set is a Death Star. There is very little description, so the dialogue has to do all the work, making this feat of words and imagination to capture the action of battle scenes and encounters with the mysteries of the force.

But by translating the stories into Shakespearean style, the stories and characters get more interesting.Like the plays, the main characters have soliloquies (monologues) addressed solely to the audience. So, you get to hear Dart Vader and Obi Wan’s private thoughts. The speeches often riff off the Bard’s own more famous lines, as in this example where Luke contemplates the helmet of a Stormtrooper he has just killed:

“Alas, poor stormtrooper, I knew ye not,
 yet have I taken both uniform and life
 From thee. What manner of a man wert thou?
 A man of inf'nite jest or cruelty?
 A man with helpmate and with children too?
 A man who hath his Empire serv'd with pride?
 A man, perhaps, who wish'd for perfect peace?
 What'er thou wert, goodman, thy pardon grant
Unto the one who took thy place: e'en me.”

The results are a giggle fest for Star Wars and Shakespeare fans alike ( and even better if you are both). One of the treats for fans of the movies is that the characters act and speak with the full knowledge of what occurred in episodes 1-3 ( the Anakin saga). Thus, unlike the first Luke Skywalker film, Obi Wan speaks of his apprenticeship of Darth Vader with more knowledge than appeared in the films. This gives the characters more depth than they ever enjoyed on screen.

It is a reminder of what makes Shakespeare great: a deep understanding and appreciation of each character’s inner conflicts. Indeed, the literary critics like Harold Bloom have argued that Shakespeare helped create the modern individual, because he gave expression to the thoughts inside our heads. It matters that Hamlet is unable to decide what he should do next – that is a key part of the plot. For Shakespeare, what we think and feel matters as much as what we do. This may be an obvious point in the age of Facebook, but it was not so clear in the 1500s, when your identity had more to do with who you served than what you thought.

In the Shakespearean Star Wars, this approach gives a new depth to otherwise one-dimensional characters. R2D2 gets his own monologues, where he reveals that he is smarter than everyone else around him, and happy to play the fool to get his way. Darth Vader emerges as a real person, too, quite an accomplishment, given how uniformly evil he appeared in the first of his movies. I highly recommend buying or gifting these books for anyone who likes Star Wars, Shakespeare, or both.

But what if you want to get back to the Shakespeare plays, but you find them tough to understand when performed live? Believe it or not, Manga may have the solution. You know Manga: that Japanese style of animation where everyone has enormous eyes. This drawing style has now been enlisted to bring Shakespeare’s plays to the world of graphic novels. I came across them in a bookstore five or six years ago, and now I have ten different plays, all rendered as graphic novels, with Shakespeare’s words as the script for every panel. These books have been a wonderful way to sit down with my kids and read Shakespeare plays together. We can curl up on the couch and read them slowly, starting and stopping as we like to talk about what’s going on. The kids are often delighted to realize that language that sounds high class actually contains a sly dirty joke, or is a lovely bit of poetry. Often these lines fly by when watching a play or movie, but in graphic novel form, you get to savour them.

The books are also quite imaginative in their presentation of the plays. Some are set in the future, where the scenes look like sets from a science fiction movie. In Julius Caesar, the entire civil war in Rome takes place in a modern city whose sky is buzzing with menacing helicopters. Brutus and his fellow assassins ride around on motorcycles. One of the other advantages of presenting the plays as graphic novels is that flashbacks can be illustrated, an approach that is better than watching the plays live, where they get bogged down in plot summaries.

If you are interested in taking a peek at some of the Manga Shakespeare graphic novels, click here.

Shakespeare wrote some of the greatest tales of any age, so it is wonderful that people keep finding ways to make his work come alive, whether it is in silence, cartoon form, or even in a galaxy, far, far away….

The Amazing Spiderman 2.

I saw The Amazing Spiderman 2 this week, and although it has good actors, cool special effects and one of the best of the superhero characters ever created, the film has some story problems which it never recovers from. But many of its weaknesses are common to the whole superhero genre, so I thought it would be good to look at how most of these films work to see why Spiderman 2 isn’t as good as it could have been.

First, a disclaimer. I grew up reading comics, and Spiderman was my favourite. He was a down to earth hero, who had real world worries and problems, and was young enough that I could identify with him. He lived in a world I envied: one where superheroes were common, as were equally powerful super villains. It seemed like every second day  New York was being terrorized by some villain with super powers, and Spiderman had to come to the rescue. But it wasn’t only villains he had to worry about. Often, he would find himself battling another super hero over territory, a girl or bragging rights. One week, Spiderman gets along with the X-Men, the next week they are at each other’s throats. It was a rich, complex world, full of story possibilities and shifting alliances.

When special effects got good enough to make superhero movies worth watching, they took this world, made a lot of money, and then …. they got stuck. You may have noticed that the first movie in most of the Marvel franchises is usually the best. That’s because they all get to start with a story that practically writes itself. An ordinary guy is minding his own business when he accidentally gets into a situation that gives him super powers (e.g., Peter Parker is bitten by a radioactive spider). There follows a period of discovery: he feels strange, slowly realizes something has changed, gets a taste of his weird new talents. So what should he do? Who should he tell? Ignore the powers? Use them for good or evil? Inevitably something happens that forces him to make a choice to become a good guy. Then what? He has to learn how to use his powers against the bad guys, while finding a way to keep his identity  secret( unless he’s Tony Stark in Iron Man). It is all golden story material, the stuff ancient myths are made of. Your character has a built-in story arc, where he goes from normal to extraordinary, has all sorts of tough choices to make, and by the end, he is a new person and he has beaten an enemy, and learnt some important moral lessons. Fantastic.

There’s a reason Hollywood likes comic book characters, these movies  almost write themselves. Even better, most of the long-running comic books have rebooted their series so many times that they have several slightly different versions of how a superhero like Peter Parker was created. You just choose the one readrers like the most. The creation story works so well that it is what most of the comic book movies start with. Batman, Superman, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Captain America, The Fantastic Four – each of these franchises begin with the tale of how their heroes got their super powers. Even The Avengers, which doesn’t show the genesis of any of its characters, qualifies as a creation story, because it is about the formation of a team. Any one of these movies could have featured plots that take place years after the super hero gains his/her powers. It is not like anyone really needs to know all the backstory on Krypton to understand a Superman movie. George Lucas proved with Star Wars that even little kids can handle a few opening titles and then jump into a story. You don’t need to start a comic book movie with a creation story, but most of the movies do because it is easier.

But what do you do with the sequel? Your hero has already been created, so now what? In the comics this is simple: fight some more bad guys, get involved with other super heroes, there are all sorts of possibilities. But in the movies, Hollywood is stuck on first base. They know how to make the first movie, and saw that it made lots of money. So they make it again. But this time, they make the creation story about how the super villains get their powers. So, in Spiderman 2, we meet a poor nerdy schmuck ( played by Damien Wayans*) who, through a workplace accident, gets turned into Electro. We also see how Harry Osbourne becomes the Green Goblin.

In theory, playing this card a second time should work, but in Spiderman 2, it doesn’t. The difference between a super villain and a super hero is that the bad guy rarely has much depth. In the comics, they are foils for the good guys, who are allowed to be tortured souls. But a bad guy who doesn’t want to use his powers for evil isn’t very useful plot-wise, since he doesn’t give the superhero anything to fight against. As a result, most super villains are like hurricanes – they arrive with a lot of rage, and not much interest in negotiating. That allows the heroes to fight, fail, and then  struggle to find new strategies for defeating the bad guys. But if you hang your movie on the bad guy’s story, you are betting on the wrong horse. Most villains, like Electro and Green Goblin, just aren’t that interesting, so the story falls flat. In Spiderman 2, this problem is exacerbated by the fact that many of us remember the Green Goblin storyline from the Toby McGuire franchise, so this isn’t exactly news. To add to the film’s problems, Electro is given way too much power, straining credulity, which is saying a lot in a fantasy movie like this.

The superhero movies don’t have to fall into this pit. As I mentioned earlier, the comics didn’t have this problem because they assumed the world was full of super bad guys who had been created years before. Occasionally a new one would be created, but the stories didn’t hinge on that. I think this is one of the reasons the X-Men movies work better. The mutants are simply a fact of life. Magneto is a great villain because he has to decide whether he will be bad or good, allowing his character to change in interesting ways. Unlike the other films, the X-Men are more faithful to the rich story universes of the comics, so the plots have to be more complicated than simple creation stories.

Franchises like Spiderman do have a future, but they will have to get past the temptation to treat every film like the first. Hollywood doesn’t have this problem with other genres: few thrillers spend the entire movie discovering how a spy became a spy, or how the detective chose his career. We accept that some people are detectives, and then we enjoy watching them solve a mystery. The movies have to realize that we are all willing to accept that the comic book universe has lots of heroes and super villains. Now tell us some stories in that world that will be exciting, without reinventing the wheel every time. It can be done.

Welcome to the Blog

Welcome to the blog. "A Story Walks into a Bar..."  is a blog about stories. Not a blog full of stories, since I am not a fiction writer, nor a raconteur. No, this is a blog about how stories work, in movies, in books, in politics, in myths and in everyday life.

My day-job is writing and producing documentary films. You may well have seen some of them, as most of them have appeared on television for broadcasters like The Discovery Channel, History and National Geographic. ( Click here for some clips online: Aftermath, Museum Secrets, Season 2, Convoy), I specialize in documentaries that deal with historical events, or science subjects, often with a lot of special effects. 

The reason I like making documentaries is because I learn a lot and I get to share that information with millions of other people. But to do that, I have to take thousands of facts and turn them into a story worth watching. Many of the programs I have written have needed a lot of special effects, since they take place in the past ( dinosaurs), the future ( the sun turns into a red giant) , or feature elements of reality you can’t just point a camera at ( ie, molecules or cells). The story has to be compelling enough to attract a big audience so the broadcaster can justify the expense. So, it has been my job to find ways to tell really cool stories about stuff that would otherwise be left sitting inside university textbooks.

So how do you tell a good story? It is harder than it seems. All of us grow up hearing stories, and it is likely that no age has ever surrounded people with more stories than we have right now. But although all of us are born critics of stories ( “this show is boring”), few of us can write them. Like telling a joke well, it takes skill which many of us lack. Indeed, even in Hollywood, most new TV shows are flops, and it is usually because the story is poorly told. But good story telling isn’t a grand mystery. People have been telling compelling stories for thousands of years, and many of those old stories ( now known as myths) still work today. It seems to be one of the human universals: every culture has stories. The trick is to tell a good one.

So, in this blog, I am going to share what I know about stories by talking about the stories that appear in our lives. I will look at new and old movies, not to review them, but to show how they work, or fail to work, as stories. I’ll be dipping into the past to look at ancient myths, where I often find the best stories of all, since they wouldn’t still be around thousands of years later if they were no good. I’ll also look at how people try to use stories to craft how we think now, from politicians putting spin on their actions, to how stories influence us in our day to day lives as we raise our kids and go to work.

So, if you are curious about stories, or if you just love them, stick around. Hopefully you will find some of what’s written here interesting.