The New Show Promos, 1: Southland
This is the first in a series of posts I hope to write, evaluating and discussing not the recent spate of new shows per se, but rather their promos, both on air and online. A good promo shouldn’t just get one turning on the television, but it should also start the text, telling us what to expect, creating characters, introducing themes, and so forth, and a good website should do likewise, while also reinforcing central themes and frames for those who visit after seeing the promo or the show itself.
I start with NBC’s Southland
While the clip above is an extended promo, many of the smaller ones underlined similar points, pushing three key points:
- It stars Ryan Atwood, of The OC fame
- It’s an edgy, gritty, warts and all depiction of the tough job of policing LA’s streets that promises to tell us what it’s “really” like for the city’s cops. Think Training Day meets Colors for television
- It comes to us from the folks behind ER
More after the fold …
Selling Atwood seemed an obvious and wise move. He was widely liked when on The OC, and as the poor kid in the land of rich and out-of-control teens, his character’s were often the eyes through which viewers were invited to see the events. In other words, he has an intertextual history of being a viewer surrogate, which promise a set of eyes through which we can now view this edgy, gritty world. Quite simply, too, it’s important to shoe-horn your audience into any new show, and when the rest of the promo time is spent showing a city on fire, unhappy people, and lots of angst, the promos use Atwood and his character’s silent surprise, horror, disgust, and anger to ease us into the pool and assure us there’s a rail at the side, rather than throw us in the deep end without water wings.
Giving so much prominence to Michael Cudlitz’s trite words of wisdom was regrettable, though. Cudlitz is okay, though very much a poor man’s Denzel Washington or Sean Penn if this is supposed to be something like Training Day or Colors, and the script is at its crappiest during his speeches (“You’re a cop because you don’t know how not to be” is dialogue worthy of Horatio Caine … and that’s not a compliment). Perhaps we’re meant to think of them as trite, and identify with the young Atwood, who is trying to see “behind the badge” to the real truth, but the promo editors have taken some of the cheesiest words in the premiere and made them the show’s rallying cry, never a smart move if you’re trying to sell yourself as smart, fresh, realistic, and edgy.
Framing the show as from the folks behind ER (or John Wells more specifically) also seems rather pointless and hollow a move to me. Once upon a time, ER was synonymous with quality television, and while I’m not a hater, and while I think some of its later season cast were far more talented than its early season cast (give me Parminder Nagra over Eriq La Salle any day), of late it just hasn’t carried that banner. As Alisa Perren’s blog post about the finale notes, it’s a show that sadly just sort of petered out, and so I question the utility of using it to sell something as high quality. I also question its utility to brand a show that otherwise is trying to pass itself off as edgy and Shield-like. Undoubtedly, NBC wanted to hold onto ER’s approximately 9.5 million viewers, especially since Southland was taking its timeslot, but unless these viewers were diehard John Wells fans (and Wells doesn’t exactly command the groupies that Whedon, Abrams, or Schwartz does, for instance), the promo offered little else to confirm that Southland was in any way ER-esque.
Indeed, here I could point to what I think was a major misstep in the promotional campaign. NBC were annoying me with their promos for this show, especially a week before it started. Why? Many ad breaks would have not one but two promos for it, and even more misguidedly, they would often run back to back. Why not do one longer promo rather than two short ones? And, for that matter, I’m not all that keen on the above-embedded clip, if it seems like this would be my ideal longer promo. After watching the premiere, I “got” the ER heritage much more – it has a large-ish cast, it’s paced quite slowly, and it’s seemingly far more concerned with the cast and with broader social and interpersonal issues than with the specifics of a case or with a whodunit. The best way to show this, especially when I’d suspect that our default mode of thinking about cop shows is to imagine a loose whodunit style (I’ve found it hard to convince some people to watch The Wire, for instance, since they can’t get behind what they think will be a season-long whodunit), would be to take advantage of the longer promo, and let at least one scene play out, rather than whizzing through scenes. I can’t say I was won over by Southland after watching it, but its pace was somewhat refreshing, and NBC should have telegraphed this better, especially when the show’s star risked turning off slightly older viewers who feel like reaching for the slop bucket when they think of The OC.
The web presence is a little uninspiring. Its NBC site opens to an image that suggests Atwood and Cudlitz are at Make Out Point, and that gives way too much prominence to web ads (here, stupidly, the ads are for two other NBC shows, and thus they’re interrupting themselves with themselves, whereas when I first logged in, the ad was for a car, which proved somewhat tasteless when the first two screen shots are clearly of a drive-by!). I guess what I’m seeing as Make Out Point is intended to signify the light shining out on the city as a whole, perhaps even building off Atwood’s intertextual history to suggest that we’re now coming down from the hills and off the coast to explore the city at large.
Further down the page is currently the stupidest poll I’ve seen on a show’s website in a long time. Will the show’s lead character, upon whom this cop show seemingly relies, and who therefore is required to make it as a cop, make it as a cop? Gee, let me think about that one. It’s insulting, and thus suggests a stupid show, or at least one that doesn’t think it’s audience is intelligent.
Of slightly more interest are the Take a Cop Quiz and the City of Nightmares video. The first alludes to the specialty vocabulary that flies left, right, and center in many cop and doctor shows, and it seemingly invites the audience to learn the lingo, alongside the rookie cop played by Atwood no less, and be an insider.
The second leads to the following dialogue:
From its founding almost 230 years ago, Los Angeles has been a city of dreams and dreamers. Unfortunately for some, those dreams turn out to be nightmares. A police force of fewer than 10,000 tries to keep the peace among four million residents spread across 500 square miles—a Herculean task. Here are some of the scenes and stories of city life gone bad.
We then are treated to a dark voyage through LA’s past, focusing on such charmers as Charles Manson and the Night Stalker. Again, there’s an aspect of offering insider knowledge to the audience, but it also aims to establish a connection between the show and its storylines, and the city’s sordid crime history. When cop shows like The Wire have become famous for offering an urban ethnography of sorts, the website here aims to give viewers a richer, situated history, and it thereby suggests that the show itself will continue in this pseudo-documentary style, “capturing” the city for us and allowing us to vicariously teleport into it on a weekly basis.
Overall, the promotional material made me somewhat interested in watching the show, but then again I’m interested in seeing an episode of almost any new show. As for its extratextual role, the on air promos did a fairly poor job of accurately telling me what to expect, and of creating the text, while the official website lets web ads kill its visual style (especially when the ads weren’t dark as is the Heroes one here), offers a poll that seems to be addressing a six year-old, and thus overall does pretty poorly, though its quiz and history functions deserve kudos.
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