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| The L Word & The Twighlight Princess | | (And Why Billy Bragg's Uncle Was Right) | | 01 August 2005 | | Billy Brag's uncle (the one who once played for Red Star Belgrade) famously said that some things are really left best unspoken. Two contrasting examples, from the worlds of TV and video games, show how right he was.
Season II of The L Word in now showing in the UK, and although it is on far too late (10:00 at night*), on a channel (Living TV) that is about as popular as Reading town center on a Tuesday evening, it is still worth catching.
It opened, though, with a less-than-welcome surprise - and not the one that the writers had forced upon them by the unexpected pregnancy for a key member of the cast! We refer instead to the new opening credits sequence - what, we asked ourselves, were they thinking?
First up against the wall are the stylized graphics, which are supposed to be arty, but actually come over like they've been run through PhotoShop by an over-enthusiastic four-year-old, and somehow serve to make EVERY SINGLE MEMBER of the cast look ugly. Even Jennifer Beals.
Our real issue, though, is with the new theme song - it isn't that it is poorly performed (although, believe us, it is) but that the lyrics are so brash, confrontational and "out". In the first season, Alice made an intelligent quip about Shane's flatmates "saying twat like they have tourettes syndrome", yet this is exactly what we find the shows producers doing here. It lacks the balance that is what we love about The L Word, where "edgy" characters, such as Alice and Shane, are offset by the more mature Tina or the slightly conservative Dana.
In contrast, the Season I credits were very, very brief - a few seconds at most, and came, if not without baggage, at least with only the tiniest of designer purses. We liked it that way - it let the show be what we wanted it to be; which in our case was, we admit, more Tina/Dana than Alice/Shane.
Interestingly, the very same issues come out of a recent debate in the gaming community, concerning the role of "voice acting" in the up-coming GameCube title The Legend of Zelda: The Twightlight Princess. This is the latest in a long series of Japanese-styled adventure games, set in a mystic ancient world of swords and magic. The new installment had been talked-up by its creators as 'the most realistic Zelda game yet'. So (the fans asked) would this realism extend to the use of "voice acting" rather than the traditional text-on-screen method of relaying speech?
No, said creator Eiji Aonuma emphatically - "When the player is reading text on the screen, they're inserting a part of themselves, their imagination, into the reading. They fill out the world. But with fully spoken dialogue, everything about the character becomes fixed in place, and you lose a bit of that imaginative aspect."
The producers of The L Word should have been listening.
* Yes - we know - it is the "adult content" thing, but if they can show Charmed at 5:00 in the afternoon, why can't they show The L Word at 9:00? We note that Channel 4 (E4) are showing their Desperate Housewives re-run at this time, so it isn't like it would be unprecedented. |
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The point is we are all connected... through love... through loneliness... through one lamentable lapse in judgment!
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