24 And American Artistic Bureaucracy

It was the winter of 2017, one of the more difficult stretches of my life. A Saturday afternoon and I couldn’t think of anything to do. At the time I didn’t really have any friends in my area, it was really hard to bring myself to be motivated to do anything, even things that I intellectually knew I liked doing, but got no emotional feedback from. Beyond looking at social media feeds to pass the time and dull the pain.

I remember walking into the family room, brother, mother, and father all gathered around the TV screen next to the crackling of the fireplace, a cozy environment to contrast the thrilling and pulsating show they were watching. Starring Kiefer Sutherland as the renegade federal agent, it was a little show from the 2000s called 24. I decided to join them mid-way through. It didn’t seem too complicated to pick up, besides at that point I’d do anything to distract myself from the emotional vacancy and mental sluggishness I had been experiencing.

This was right around the time that I had started to try take a more aggressive interest in media and entertainment from a critical and artistic viewpoint beyond mostly mindless escapism and subjectivity. But even so I couldn’t help myself but to be fully captivated by it. It’s breakneck real-time pace in a serialized story, it’s writing keeping me on edge, it’s no-holds-barred approach, and Kiefer Sutherland. Combined with the family viewing parties it was an event that afternoons and evenings spent with it was something I aggressively looked forward to whilst the mundanity of the times seemed to drag on.

It’s not exactly a thematically or philosophically deep series and it’s not particularly trying to be either. If I were to derive some form of meaning from it I would say that it is a light criticism of bureaucracy and the chain of command (which is ironic considering what I’m about to discuss). But at that time in my life it was all I really needed to keep going, it gave me something to actually look forward to at a time where I couldn’t even look forward to the things that I wanted to look forward to. 

And I want to make it clear that I’m not saying shows like this shouldn’t exist or that there isn’t a place for them. More that, and I’ve said this before about numerous mediums, that there is an over-saturation of shows like 24 in the current marketplace.

It was as we got towards the end of the series that I started to notice something about the opening credits more than I previously had. It seemed as though every single episode had so many producers and executive producers, not to mention that there was a different director and writers for practically every episode. Noticing that, combined with the shows drastic reduction in quality should have been something I noticed right away but at the time I was more focused on the subjective disappointment I was feeing as each season grew worse and worse, nor was I as “””smart””” as I’ve become over the past four years.

As I started to watch more acclaimed series from other countries, in particular anime and Korean drama, I started to draw a parallel between the consistent quality kept up throughout respective shows such as Cowboy Bebop, Reply 1997, Paranoia Agent, and Fate Zero to name a few. Each of these respective shows had one director, one or two screenwriters, and usually just one producer.

Recently Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex 2045 to a resounding critical “meh” and it had me wondering why. Kenji Kamiyama was helming the project again and as he had proven with seasons 1, 2, and the Solid State Society film, he was more than capable of giving a thought provoking, philosophically driven, morally grey effort again. If you know me well you’ll know that I LOVE the “Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex trilogy” as much as anything. It and Cowboy Bebop are 1 and 1A for me when it comes to the best anime series I’ve ever seen.

One of the main criticisms of 2045 was that it hadn’t touched on any of the themes that the previous iterations of Stand Alone Complex had previously mastered. It felt far more generic than anything people could have previously connected to the SAC continuity.

And then I found it. One of the biggest reasons that 2045 was inferior to it’s predecessors (I think). Whereas the aforementioned previous three SAC works were produced by two, maybe three producers, the Netflix produced (AHA! THERE’S THAT AMERICAN ARTISTIC BUREAUCRACY) 2045 was produced by 15 DIFFERENT PRODUCERS and I can’t imagine those suits would have ever let them do what they did previously, desiring a much more commercially friendly, broadly appealing show that caters to a wider audience than us pompous and pretentious dweebs who loved the deep and meaningful conversations between Gouda and Batou/Kusanagi.

That speaks to a larger issue when it comes to American television in particular. The works created and overseen with a unifying vision and a steady hand, maybe even sometimes a personal one too are rejected in favor of the broadly appealing blockbusters. Again, I’m not saying that there isn’t a place for those, but that doesn’t mean that should be the only kind of works we are subjected to.

In fact if a slimy network executive were to tell me that “those kinds of shows just wouldn’t sell” then how would he explain David Lynch and Twin Peaks? Massively popular even to this day AND in 2017 Showtime (thanks lads) released Twin Peaks The Return to critical praise. Even David Lynch himself has said something to the effect of “the kind of movies I like to make just aren’t being made anymore” in response to someone asking him why it’s been so long since he returned to the big screen.

I’m starting to get a little too carried away with the aggressively bashing of modern Hollywood (who am I kidding it’s never too much) so I’ll finish up with this: It is not impossible to create high quality art with the “American” approach to television. That is absolutely true and I’m not denying that at all. Rather I’m challenging the idea to network executives that it is THE ONLY way of doing things. 24 is not an exception. I’m sure there are many American works that also suffer in the long run due to their lack of creative unity and without compromising this dogmatic bureaucracy you will continue to lose viewers like me to mediums such as anime.