Escalation. We wear kevlar, they use armor-piercing rounds.
As you know if you read my blog, Switched at Birth roundly raised the bar on what kind of depth is required to compete in the world of good teen drama. The formerly ubiquitous 'rich teens behaving badly' motif has been replaced by sexy vampires and sexy werewolves. So to keep apt against such flashy aesthetics, grounded teen dramas had to fight back with the only recourse left to them: conceptual depth. Switched At Birth brought us all the dependable necessities of young love and parental showdowns, but with a complex family life and a unique cast of characters.
Earlier this week, MTV debuted a program which invites instant parallels to Switched at Birth. They both bring to life an extremely unique familial situation where a child is torn between more than one set of parents.
MTV's Finding Carter introduces us to a girl who was kidnapped as a young toddler, and then raised as her own by the kidnapper. At age 16, young Carter (real name: Linden) finds out everything she remembers about her entire life is a lie. In one fell swoop her entire world is taken from her, her "mother" is on the run from the law, and she's thrust against her will into a family of strangers. Now she struggles with her burgeoning feelings for her biological family, while refusing to let go of her love for the woman that raised her.
This is the kind of scenario that I, as a TV fan, dream of witnessing. A direct correlation where one great show inspires another. So far, Finding Carter seems to effortlessly walk that thin line where the influence is obvious, but the new material is genuine and legitimate without even the slightest hint of rehash.
Those first two episodes of Finding Carter were so fucking fantastic, almost 'next-level' shit. It fills my eternal soul with anguish that I can't watch the whole first season right now. This week to week thing, damn you terrestrial TV and your outdated, 1950s ways. Why couldn't this have been a Netflix series? If I want to watch this show properly, I'll have to wait until the season is done before I can watch the next episode!
While you can't possibly compare 2 great episodes to 40 great episodes fairly, I haven't rolled out the possibility that Finding Carter could be even better than Switched at Birth. And in any case, if this proliferation goes any further, we'll have undoubtedly entered the golden age of teen dramas. There have been so many amazing shows that have come before, but this new class of teen drama brings in a quantifiably more complex emotional dynamic that is highly difficult to usurp.
No comments:
Post a Comment