No Thespians, please, we're British
I didn't bother to watch ER last night, the Ray Liotta episode. Looked like it was going to be a drag, more like a Casualty than an ER. Casualty tries to do the human interest stuff, ER should stick to what it does best.
You don't watch it for the ac-tors, you honestly don't. Sure there are beautiful people, but that's all about the visual richness of American TV. You watch for Maura Tierney, my secret girlfriend, or Goran Vijsnic, but you don't want them to be noticeably acting, putting on a performance.
I've got no time for thesps, I'm with Hitchcock. They should be treated like cattle, there to hit their marks and say their lines, but god forbid we should notice what they're doing.
I've been enjoying Hack, precisely because it lacks that sense of Big Performance and Show. David Morse is a bit like Dennis Franz, a dues-paid guy who knows what's required. You can see why Hack was cancelled: it's just too morally ambiguous. The hero is a disgraced cop, who doesn't even bother to deny that he's guilty. He's looking for atonement, but without much hope of ever finding it. And his former partner, still a cop, another great TV actor, Andre Braugher, he too is morally ambiguous: guilty but didn't get caught.
And in the midst of all this ambiguity, there are troubled people with problems, which by their very nature are not easily solved (they fall through the cracks, which is why the cab driver ends up helping them). Even though it's gritty and realistic, it's still beautifully lit and designed. The sets look like real places, not some cardboard thing knocked together by a BBC chippy.
Great TV actors know one crucial thing, which is that you don't just have an hour to build a character. You have around 16 hours in a season of 22 episodes to let the storyline build up and the nuances of your performance to tell. I don't want 44 minutes of some Hollywood big shot gracing us with his ac-torly presence, thanks. I'll take Morse and Braugher over that, any day of the week.
Television
You don't watch it for the ac-tors, you honestly don't. Sure there are beautiful people, but that's all about the visual richness of American TV. You watch for Maura Tierney, my secret girlfriend, or Goran Vijsnic, but you don't want them to be noticeably acting, putting on a performance.
I've got no time for thesps, I'm with Hitchcock. They should be treated like cattle, there to hit their marks and say their lines, but god forbid we should notice what they're doing.
I've been enjoying Hack, precisely because it lacks that sense of Big Performance and Show. David Morse is a bit like Dennis Franz, a dues-paid guy who knows what's required. You can see why Hack was cancelled: it's just too morally ambiguous. The hero is a disgraced cop, who doesn't even bother to deny that he's guilty. He's looking for atonement, but without much hope of ever finding it. And his former partner, still a cop, another great TV actor, Andre Braugher, he too is morally ambiguous: guilty but didn't get caught.
And in the midst of all this ambiguity, there are troubled people with problems, which by their very nature are not easily solved (they fall through the cracks, which is why the cab driver ends up helping them). Even though it's gritty and realistic, it's still beautifully lit and designed. The sets look like real places, not some cardboard thing knocked together by a BBC chippy.
Great TV actors know one crucial thing, which is that you don't just have an hour to build a character. You have around 16 hours in a season of 22 episodes to let the storyline build up and the nuances of your performance to tell. I don't want 44 minutes of some Hollywood big shot gracing us with his ac-torly presence, thanks. I'll take Morse and Braugher over that, any day of the week.
Television
posted by Anonymous at
Tuesday, February 15, 2005
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