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Anniversary Edition YEAR TEN BEGINS! |
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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 10, No. 1 |
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CO-FOUNDER WITH OUR TEAM SINCE DEC. 1, 1999 OF MYSTERY
A NEW GENERATION OF MYSTERY HEROES From left, Anna Paquin of HBO's "TRUE BLOOD"; Michael Hall of Showtime's "DEXTER"; William Peterson of CBS' "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation." |
A dying genre? Are
you crazy or what?
of TheColumnists.com
All right, mystery fans: How many times have you been told that your favorite genre is a dying one--in books, on television, in the movies or wherever you used to find it.
Poppycock! Baloney! Horse pucky! The people who tell you that are unable to see what's going on. They're the sort of narrow visioned number-counters hired by accounting firms who can total up figures, but don't know how to draw the proper conclusions from them.
Here's the No. 1 myth of the nine years since DARK CORRIDORS came to life on this website: Mystery is for old people and old people keep getting older and dying. Therefore, mystery is dying.
Why is that a myth? Simple. It's because the people who say such things don't know how mystery is evolving as a genre.
For example, the No. 1 TV drama of the 1984-94 period was CBS' "Murder, She Wrote," an old-fashioned "cozy-style" mystery nurtured and shaped to appeal to the millions of readers who loved Agatha Christie's Miss Jane Marple. It had the largest audience each week of any one-hour dramatic series during that period--and, as a matter of fact, for several more years after that.
While it was the No. 1 drama on regular commercial television, rerun episodes of the sereis also were being watched by millions on cable television.
It lost its place on CBS' Sunday nights not because its ratings finally started to go downhill, but because advertisers wanted younger viewers to see the commercials advertising their products. They were willing to pay more in ad fees for shows with lower ratings just because young viewers were watching them.
So, you're probably thinking, "Well, that means the network guys were right about young people not liking mysteries." Not true. It meant they were right about young people not liking mysteries of that type, which featured a star in her 70s (Angela Lansbury).
So, then, what has been the most-watched dramatic series of the decade after "Murder, She Wrote"? The answer is CBS' "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation." Excuse me, but isn't that a mystery series?
People who make their living working in the world of mystery long ago began to broaden its scope to include what some might call "crime" or "police" stories for the obvious reason that a mystery is usually at the heart of all such stories, whether they be in book, movie or TV formats.
Anybody who has watched the evolution of prime time TV drama in America or England certainly has seen the rise of much more realistic dramas that involve crime or the police in the period from the 1990s through the time we're living in today.
But they are all mystery shows, usually dealing with who committed the crimes or why they committed them. "CSI" still has three prime time hours going on CBS--the original show, "CSI: Miami" and "CSI: New York." The ever popular "Law and Order" franchise still keeps on rolling with the original and its spinoffs still letting both detectives and lawyers settle the age-old questions of who done it.
Mystery also has broadened to include stories bordering on horror and the occult. The "Dexter" novels and the Showtime television series offers us a forensic scientist (he's a blood splatter analyst for the Miami P.D.) who's also a serial killer, but with a code that permits him only to kill criminals who deserve to die. HBO's "True Blood," which began this year, follows the popular series of novels. Though they involve vampires, there are mysteries at the heart of the often romantic stories.
Certainly nobody can argue that "Twilight" doesn't appeal to young people with its romantic vampire and his human girl friend. And "Twilight" skirts the borderline of the mystery world.
Younger readers and viewers tend to like more visceral entertainment, so the mysteries they're hooked on are likely to have much more sexual activity, bloody killings and even supernatural elements. This is where much of the mystery genre has migrated.
The modern mystery also has turned away from conventional private eyes to "sleuths" who come from other fields of endeavor. There are mysteries solved by veterinarians, librarians and gourmets. Three are mysteries solved by people of all races, religions and sexual proclivities. A big trend in mystery from the 1980s to the present has been a focus on different environments for the mysteries. They're often written by people who had nothing to do with law enforcement and worked in other professions. If one was a dog trainer, when they turn to writing mysteries it should be no surprise that the crimes take place in the world of dog training.
Certainly, mystery fans are aware that the women's movement of the last century slowly but surely changed the mystery genre, bringing new voices into the field that wanted to write about female crime-solvers. Now the tough female cop or detective is quite often a woman. TV has responded especially well to such characters, starting with Jane Tennison of the British "Prime Suspect" TV productions.
The legal or courtroom mystery is an old sub-genre dating back to the early 1930s and the first Perry Mason novels by Erle Stanley Gardner. Today we have all kinds of legal thrillers on bookshelves, on television and in the movies. But you don't often hear people refer to "Boston Legal" as a mystery show, do you? That's because it has so many other elements mixed in--comedy, romance, issue-oriented drama, etc. And yet there's often a mystery at the core of the program, involving whether or not the client really committed the crime the lawyers are trying to prove him or her innocent of committing.
What we have today is a much wider, much more popular mystery genre than we ever had before. The trick is to understand how all these veins of mystery, which reach into every age group and demographic, still remain mysteries in the 21st century.
©2008 by Ron Miller. The photo of Anna Paquin is courtesy of HBO; the photo of Michael Hall is courtesy of Showtime; the photo of William Peterson is courtesy of CBS. This column first posted Dec. 1, 2008.
TO ACCESS RON MILLER'S ARCHIVE OF COLUMNS ON THIS SITE, CLICK HERE: MILLER ARCHIVE
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
You can comment on this column online. Please address your message to either "The Editors" or Ron Miller. To send an email, click here and don't forget to mention Ron's name: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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