I'm so impressed with your observations ~ beautifully put! I think you captured Katee and Jamie's unique qualities - quicksilver emotional range and the willing embrace of the emotional messiness of being human - just about as insightfully and concisely as I've ever heard.
One question that lingers in my mind is about the hero role; many people have suggested that the "traditional hero" is boring or thankless, and I guess I'm not entirely convinced on that score. I think making virtues interesting is a dramatic challenge, but it seems like a rewarding one ~ and I'm not sure flaws are inherently *more* interesting. I guess the critique of the traditional hero is that there is no balance between virtue and vice, that it's all one-note moralism. And I do see the problem with that; but sometimes I feel that TV writers go too far in the opposite direction and write in flaws just to shock or tantalize viewers rather than because they contribute to the realistic development of the character in question. It seems to me that there is so much honest and worthwhile disagreement about what is the right thing to do or the best way to act in any given situation that any character, "conventional" or not, will come across as ambiguous. I do believe in portraying all human beings as flawed, but the flaws a character has should flow from their personality and world-view and not be one-note crises or decisions they make and then never refer to again. I think that's why I found that episodes which treated Lee as a 'hero' (Bastille Day, Hand of God, The Captain's Hand, Crossroads Part Two) were among his best, and much more interesting to me than those that seemed designed to knock him off his pedestal (Black Market, Taking a Break from All Your Worries). But of course, he spent a lot of his time in between those two extremes, which is how it should be :)
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2010-07-10 06:14 pm (UTC)One question that lingers in my mind is about the hero role; many people have suggested that the "traditional hero" is boring or thankless, and I guess I'm not entirely convinced on that score. I think making virtues interesting is a dramatic challenge, but it seems like a rewarding one ~ and I'm not sure flaws are inherently *more* interesting. I guess the critique of the traditional hero is that there is no balance between virtue and vice, that it's all one-note moralism. And I do see the problem with that; but sometimes I feel that TV writers go too far in the opposite direction and write in flaws just to shock or tantalize viewers rather than because they contribute to the realistic development of the character in question. It seems to me that there is so much honest and worthwhile disagreement about what is the right thing to do or the best way to act in any given situation that any character, "conventional" or not, will come across as ambiguous. I do believe in portraying all human beings as flawed, but the flaws a character has should flow from their personality and world-view and not be one-note crises or decisions they make and then never refer to again. I think that's why I found that episodes which treated Lee as a 'hero' (Bastille Day, Hand of God, The Captain's Hand, Crossroads Part Two) were among his best, and much more interesting to me than those that seemed designed to knock him off his pedestal (Black Market, Taking a Break from All Your Worries). But of course, he spent a lot of his time in between those two extremes, which is how it should be :)