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It’s Friday, and we’ve probably all had enough of political news, so instead I’m going to gripe about the decline of my favorite kind of television: “mystery box” shows that center on a secret or a conspiracy. The conceit has gotten out of control.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
Show Us the Monster
This article contains spoilers for True Detective, Lost, Dark, Jericho, Stranger Things, Timeless, and a few other shows that are so old that you already know how they end.
In 1996, the Fox network exploited our worries about the coming of the year 2000 with a show titled Millennium, and it was, initially, superb. Millennium followed the adventures of a possibly psychic former FBI agent who seemed to be on the trail of a rising tide of mayhem sparked by the approaching new era. But Millennium wasn’t a crime procedural: Something huge was going on in the show, something that involved demons, a shadowy group (maybe Nazis, maybe not) searching for chunks of the cross of Jesus Christ, and deranged killers shouting things like “The thousand years is over!”
It was, in short, a “mystery box” show: a series built around a paradox or a secret or an unknown event. I loved it—until it was canceled before its writers ever told us what the hell was really going on.
Lately, such shows have started to test my patience by stringing me along without explaining very much. The most recent season of True Detective was the last straw.
I know, I know. Almost everyone loved Jodie Foster and Kali Reis in True Detective, and they were great. The show lured us in with a horrifying mystery: a “corpsicle” of naked, mutilated, frozen bodies in the Alaskan snow. Characters began to see ghosts. The dead spoke to the living. Body parts showed up in a mysterious lab. And after several episodes, we finally learned …
Nothing. We learned nothing. The frozen guys had been made to strip and go freeze to death at gunpoint by some local women for a bad thing they had done earlier. The end.
If you watched the series, you might have been among the many people yelling, “What about the tongue on the floor?” I imagine the writers would answer that True Detective is more than a mystery: It’s a character study, a view into the lives of Indigenous women, a meditation on death and darkness and other Deep Questions.
Yes, yes, that’s all very important. But what about the tongue on the floor?
This is now the umpteenth time I’ve fallen for a show that promises dark secrets and a big reveal but tells me very little. If you have a monster lurking about, you should show us the monster, as the old rule of horror movies once decreed. And if there’s a mythology behind the series, then the writers should keep faith with the viewers and be consistent about it.
I never liked Lost, for example, because I had a sneaking suspicion that a lot of the strange events around the castaways meant exactly nothing. And sure enough, the writers later admitted that once Lost was picked up as a series, they started just sort of winging it. (One writer put it rather bluntly, according to a friend: “We literally just think of the weirdest most fucked up thing and write it and we’re never going to pay it off.”)
Even the venerable classic The X-Files meandered around so much in its own labyrinth that the show eventually released a feature film as a kind of explainer. (Yes, the aliens are real and trying to colonize Earth.) More recent shows begin with an intriguing premise and then, in True Detective fashion, drag us into melodrama while forgetting to explain the world around the characters. I tried, for example, to watch Silo, about a future in which people live in … well, a giant silo. By the end of the first season, I was bored out of my mind; oddly enough, I was very curious about why people were living in a silo. (In theory, it’s because the Earth is an environmental disaster—but also, maybe not.)
The problem of stretching the plot to accommodate another season afflicts shows that would be masterpieces if they were allowed to have a natural ending. The German series Dark—whose time-travel plot defies a short description—was wonderfully thought-provoking until its third season. I can’t spoil it for you, because I have no idea what happened. Even the terrific British show Bodies (which has a nearly perfect exposition of the paradoxes of time travel) couldn’t resist leaving a door open in literally the last 10 seconds of its final episode, a move that upended all the plot resolutions that preceded it.
I have not forgiven Stranger Things, a show whose first seasons were amazingly good, for pulling this same trick. Stranger Things was an example of how to do mystery-box TV right; it revealed, episode by episode, that a small town in Indiana in the early 1980s was the secret location of a U.S.-government program to use children as astral-projecting spies against the U.S.S.R. The evil nerd scientists, however, also opened a rip into an alternate dimension full of powerful monsters. Oops.
The local kids who figured this out had to save the world, and they did. Well, except at the very end of its fourth season, when the world wasn’t really saved, and the finale basically said: To figure all this out, tune in for Season Five, coming in a year or two—or maybe more! I nearly threw my remote at the television.
Some of these shows seem to realize rather suddenly that they need to explain a few things and wrap it all up. I was fascinated by Jericho, about a small town trying to survive after nuclear bombs wiped out 23 American cities. Who did it, and why? We finally get answers in some rushed, we’d-better-clear-up-the-plot episodes. (Turns out it was a cabal within the government, people who … Oh, who cares.)
Early pioneers of the genre were more structured. The Fugitive was a mystery box—who really murdered the protagonist’s wife?—and in a season finale that broke viewing records at the time, we got to see the monster, the actual killer, along with a sensible explanation of the plot. In the short-lived 1967 series The Invaders, the “architect David Vincent,” in an early-X-Files-type plot, stumbles upon an alien ship, but his battles each week with the Invaders follow a sensible progression, and he actually succeeds in converting others to the truth. Fifty years later, the NBC time-travel show Timeless replicated the chase-and-fight pattern as a team of heroes pursued a bad guy with a time machine through history. Why did he do it? Timeless’s finale resolved this and other questions.
But no show did the mystery box better than the series Counterpart, which ran for two seasons on Starz. The short version is that in the late 1980s, East German scientists—this time, the dangerous nerds are Communist brainiacs—accidentally open a passage into a parallel universe, identical to ours in every way up until the two worlds made contact. What follows is some of the most thoughtful and well-conceived television I’ve ever seen; even the smallest details eventually make sense. (I wondered, for example, why their computer monitors were still clunky CRTs and not flat-screens like ours. There’s a reason.)
When Counterpart ended, it rewarded attentive viewers with both resolutions and a depressing peek at the future of both worlds. It never violated its own internal consistency or made a sucker out of the viewer, and that’s all I ask. We live in a golden age of television, and I love these limited-run offerings. But please, writers—don’t make me feel like the kids in Scotland who showed up for that Wonka experience and instead found some posters in a warehouse. If you’re going to lead me in with a secret, tell me the secret. Sooner or later, you have to show me the monster.
Related:
Today’s News
- A judge delayed Donald Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial until at least mid-April after his lawyers and the district attorney’s office received a large quantity of records. The judge will hold a hearing on March 25 to determine if a further delay is needed.
- Special Prosecutor Nathan Wade, who had a relationship with Fani Willis, the lead prosecutor on Trump’s Georgia criminal case, resigned after a judge ruled that Willis could stay on the case if Wade left.
- In an interview on Fox News, former Vice President Mike Pence declined to endorse Donald Trump for president.
Dispatches
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Evening Read
Crows Are the New Pigeons
By Tove Danovich
Every night as dusk falls in Portland, Oregon, the sky fills with birds. While workers make their way from the city center toward their homes, crows leave the suburban lawns where they’ve spent the day picking for grubs to fly downtown. They swirl across the river in large groups, cawing as they go. A community science project recently recorded 22,370 crows spread out downtown—about twice as many as the number of people who lay their heads in that neighborhood.
Across North America, crow populations have been declining for decades. But crows appear to be flocking to cities more than ever before.
More From The Atlantic
Culture Break
Wonder. Jesse Lenz’s new collection of photographs, The Seraphim, shows the rhythms of life and nature through the lens of childhood.
Read. “Saint Dismas,” a short story by Jared Lemus: “We wanted drivers who were willing to spend money to get dirt off their car but not smart enough to keep us from looking inside.”
Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
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