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Monday, June 1, 2009

Death by a thousand cuts

8:21 PM / Television / 6 Comments

Back when the current series of Casualty started airing last September, I put together a write-up about the opening two-part storyline, expressing admiration at how effective it turned out to be. I've remained quiet about the rest of the series so far, however, and while I wish I could that this was because I've been held so rapt by it that I couldn't tear myself away from it long enough to string a sentence or two together, the sad reality is that the bulk of it simply hasn't been worth mentioning. Very little of it has been dreadful per se - if it were truly appalling, I could at least sink my teeth into tearing it to shreds - but most of it has simply been completely an utterly pedestrian and unremarkable. The current series now has less than ten episodes to go, and while I'll probably do a proper write-up when it concludes (provided I can summon the energy), I thought I'd set down a few (well, a few hundred) words about what I perceive to be the current problem.

Casualty was once rather uncharitably described by some critic or other as a no-budget British version of ER. In reality, I'd be more inclined to describe ER as a more superficially flashy American version of Casualty. The UK show beat its American counterpart to the airwaves by almost a decade, and in many ways set the tone, pioneering most of the breakthroughs in the medical drama field that short-sighted critics were all too quick to credit to ER years later. During its golden period of the mid-90s, Casualty was pretty much unmissable stuff. Now... well, now it's little more than a shell of its former self, an over-stretched, over-exposed behemoth that airs every week not so much because it has anything pressing to say but rather because it has become an institution of this country's TV output and a staple of safe Saturday evening viewing. Lack of talent in front of the camera is not the real issue. While sister show Holby City has tended populate its regular cast with established, fairly recognisable stars like Peter Wingfield, Patsy Kensit and even Jesus of Nazareth himself, Casualty has tended to keep things comparatively low-key (guest appearances during the early days from the likes of Kate Winslet, Christopher Eccleston and Alfred Molina excepted), and although I would never claim the cast to be uniformly excellent, the regular characters are played by a solid base of competent actors, with only a couple of true duds among them. (Unfortunately, one of those duds has been getting rather too much screen time of late, and I pray that his storyline plays out the way I think it will and causes him to depart our screens before too long.) I'm even willing to forgive the obviously low-budget nature of the show - and even then, the gore effects are often second to none. The problems instead stem entirely from the writing and current editorial policy.

In terms of its structure, present-day Casualty is a bizarre hybrid of a show. Whereas it was at one point a fairly gritty drama and is nowadays treated by the glossy magazines as an everyday soap, in reality it's neither a drama nor a soap opera. I actually don't think there's anything else quite like it on television; even partner in crime Holby City has lately moved towards something more recognisable as a straightforward soap. (I'm led to believe that The Bill does something similar to Casualty, but I've never watched that show, so I can't comment on it.) In terms of the overarching serial storylines for its main characters, it's soap, pure and simple. The series runs for more or less the entire year (barring a summer break of between four and six weeks), and as a result personal storylines for the regulars are ongoing, with no real sense of a beginning or end, short of a character joining or leaving. For the most part, these storylines have little explicitly to do with the hospital backdrop, and could just as easily be unfolding in Albert Square or Ramsay Street with a little tweaking. (The exception at the moment is the ongoing power struggle between Nick Jordan and Adam Trueman, which, although primarily fuelled by the clashing personalities of the two characters, is largely specific to the medical setting and their roles as doctors.)

Casualty, cast of 2008-2009 (poorly collaged).

At the same time, though, while your average soap opera airs several times a week, usually in half-hourly instalments, Casualty is "only" on once a week, in a 50-minute time slot, giving each episode a duration just slightly longer than the average US primetime drama. Time therefore unfolds at more or less the same pace as in a traditional drama series (broadly speaking, a week of "Casualty time" passes between each episode, although in infrequent cases one episode will follow on immediately from the other). The fact that there is a break between series, however brief, also means that each series tends to have a clear-cut season premiere and season finale, sometimes geared around a particularly significant development in one of the regular characters' personal storylines, but usually with a big budget major incident (think motorway pile-up or bomb blast) dominating. Finally, while there can be little doubt that the writers and producers are first and foremost preoccupied with the love lives of the regulars, the "meat and potatoes" - the patients and their ailments - have continued to feature strongly, meaning that often every bit as much screen time is devoted to the job as in more prestigious "precinct dramas" like Silent Witness and Spooks. (Contrast this with Holby City, where the editorial policy instated in the large eighteen months or so has meant that the medical element has been gradually downplayed, to the extent that the patients are now more often than not played by non-speaking extras, simply sitting in the background while the doctors' and nurses' personal lives unravel in front of them.)

There is a real tension between the two sides of the Casualty coin - medical drama series and soap opera serial - and over the years the extent to which one has dominated over the other has fluctuated. At the moment, the soap element is winning out, as it has been doing so for a number of years (a brief return to form at the start of the previous series notwithstanding). This saddens me a great deal, because love triangles and "whose baby is it?" dilemmas have never interested me, and weren't what drew me to the programme in the first place. If I cared even remotely about who knocked up who, I'd cut my losses and tune into EastEnders or Hollyoaks instead, where there wouldn't be any of those pesky medical incidents to get in the way.

Part of the problem, I think, is that the current trend among television producers and executives is "character, character, CHARACTER", meaning that writers are often coerced into concentrating on the personal at the expense of the professional. I'm not against a character-centric approach in theory, because any situation tends to become more involving when it's developed from someone's point of view, vividly depicting how they're affected by it, as opposed to adopting a detached "god's eye" perspective. No-one wants to watch a show about a bunch of faceless automatons just doing their jobs, after all. And, for a perfect example of an extremely character-centric approach working within the Casualty formula, you need look no further than the two opening episodes of Series 22, each of which took a different single character and showed the same events entirely through their eyes. The problem is that the writers and storyliners of Casualty seem to have trouble developing character plots that relate to anything other than domestic fluff, usually romance. In my opinion the range of storylines (or lack thereof) shows an incredible degree of shortsightedness, because the hospital environment is ripe for juicy personal storylines that revolve around the job itself rather than who's playing "hide the sausage" with who. I suspect that this stems mainly from the fact that its writers tend to be culled from the the Writers Academy, the same stable responsible for producing the writers for soaps such as EastEnders and Doctors. In that respect, I have a feeling quite a few of the writers who end up contributing don't really have a pressing interest in medical drama - their end-of-year assessment just happens to include writing a script for a show set in a hospital, so they make the best of the situation even though their interests lie elsewhere. I can sympathise: were I in their position, I imagine I could quite relish writing episodes of Casualty, but if told to churn out an episode of EastEnders, I'd have a strong desire to slit my wrists.

Last Saturday's episode, the 39th of the current series of 48, was penned by a writer called Jeff Povey, who was responsible for several episodes during the Series 13-15 period (when the show was in the last vestiges of being worth a damn on a consistent basis) and has made something of a comeback in the last year. From his IMDB entry, I can see that he has written extensively for EastEnders and is thus no stranger to soap, but he has also done episodes of high-brow fare like Silent Witness and Wire in the Blood. Watching his episode of Casualty on Saturday, the first truly engaging one since the beginning of the new year, I was struck by how different his approach was to that of many of the student writers who regularly turn in scripts for the show. While he continued to develop the turgid ongoing storylines of the regular cast, he devoted far more time to properly setting up and developing three separate patient storylines, each of which was interesting in its own right and was able to function without somehow relating it to the concerns of any of the regular characters (although you could certainly draw parallels if you looked for them). In a season where, more often than not, we've had a single key patient storyline per episode, heavily related to one or more of the regular characters' ongoing storylines, this approach struck me as a breath of fresh air and wholly out of place in the current line-up. Had this episode aired back in the Series 13-15 period, it would probably have been deemed proficient but unremarkable. In Series 23, however, it seemed shockingly good, particularly if you were able to filter out the ongoing serial elements.

Well, this ended up being a lot longer than I thought it would be. Perhaps I do have something to say about the show after all; or perhaps it's just part of a more general moan about the state of television at the moment. For all its faults, Casualty at least manages to more or less hold my attention for 50 minutes every Saturday and gives me something to unwind in front of when I get home from work. And, every so often, it plays a blinder - see, for instance, Barbara Machin's terrific Christmas 2006 two-parter, or the solid two-part openers Mark Catley has penned for the most recent two series. Two brilliant episodes out of 48 for each series is hardly what I'd call impressive results, though. Still, as long as it continues to pull in viewers (and it does pretty well, all things considered), the powers that be are unlikely to see fit to change anything. In that respect, by continuing to watch in the hope of catching the odd unexpected knock-out episode, I suppose I've only myself to blame.

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