Under the Dome: The Newest, Dumbest TV Adaptation Miniseries

I haven't read the Stephen King book Under The Dome, but I got the idea it was like The Stand in length and mildly interesting in its content. Mind you, I haven't so much as read even the critic blurbs about the book, so I'm really guessing what it is like. Recently a miniseries adaptation of the book premiered. I watched the first episode and almost immediately it was apparent that this would be a great study in TV as the Dumbest Form of Entertainment (which I know is particularly a Cantankerous Old Fellow and Pessimist discipline, but I do concur with it on many points). Within five minutes, a hyped sequence involving The Dome coming down around the small town of Chesterfield or whatever leads to a cow being split in half... the best part is that the cow is depicted as being a mass of undifferentiated flesh, as if your given cow in a field were made of 100% American AA grade steaks, and little else. This is basically the execution and guiding philosophy behind the show, as I understand it, and its greatest symbol. Send the anatomists!

I don't know if it was pure stupidity, pure laziness, or pure necessity which led to this hilariously maladroit example of cartoon special effects, but it gets better. The writing is atrocious. The characters are like what you'd expect in a Stephen King novel if he were currently a self-publishing erotica/mystery/fanfic author – or in really bad television. The plot, if it is reasonably close to the novel's (I hope not for King's sake) is itself a good barometer that Under the Dome as a novel is 1000+ pages of tedium: a mini-dome for your mind to suffer in while you fill the time between plot developments and intrigue. This miniseries is going to be a third-or-fourth-rate Lost, except as a miniseries it will waste less of everyone's time.

In television miniseries adaptation the book works out to this: little bit of characterization, then plot device is introduced, then show sputters about trying to create action and tension... then it becomes a huge bottle episode. A massive bottle episode, possibly the biggest and dumbest one ever attempted. In a way, one might even consider this art, not in a sneering 'populist vein' way – but as a true statement from this weird consumeristic world, where a cow being made entirely of ground beef is just this side of believable, and won't get an FX artist fired, or anger the censors (who as always are right on point: what really matters in a show where a guy's pacemaker explodes out of his chest is that the cow being split in two doesn't get too realistic or gruesome for primetime, but somehow remain cartoonish enough to get views).

I don't know why I am watching. Part of me thinks you need to eat a lot of shit (a.k.a - consume lots of mass media entertainment) before you can try selling your own. You got to get the spirit of the times right, and TV is still a grand social barometer, if a bit sterilized. It beats the internet, which can warp a person's perception of reality in bizarre and monotonous ways. But, to continue with the matter at hand, I am watching Under the Dome, and it is fucked. It's going to go down in history as a dumb bastard and, sometimes, amidst the ridiculous dialogue and illogical plot points, I enjoy it. (Eating shit. Gross. I really ought to rethink some things.)

My favorite part so far happens in the fourth episode, where a character who is supposedly a doctor or person with creditable medical knowledge tells a boy that an EEG machine "measures the electronic activity in your brain". A statement so broadly incorrect and dumb, so baldly and ridiculously wrong, that it got me to make this blog post about a TV miniseries in 2013. This show must be written by the texts of high school drop-outs. Fact-checking must have been outsourced to Antarctic Gerbils. It's insane. It sets a great tone for a show which may, despite its best intentions to be generic and dull, become a sleeper comedy of errors. If I look at it just right, it's the best comedy on a mainstream network all year: it got me to laugh out loud. There are all kinds of social commentary going on in this show: like how kids use smartphones (but only to take pictures of themselves right!?), or how everyone is secretly cripplingly irrational. This show has the self awareness of an invisible teenager and the attention span of a troubled child. It will never be glorious. Alas, we hardly knew it...

'Ok, Johnny Kidd, your brain is showing normal levels of electronic activity, what this means is that we don't know about this mystery of the dome at all, but we don't yet know if it even IS the dome so stay tuned while we whittle the device down into something underwhelming so we can keep telling human stories, like yours, getting your electronic brain activity levels checked, by me: a lesbian woman trapped in Small Town America with my wife and child all because of a Mysterious Dome...'

To Any Entity Reading This:

Are you a google crawler? and, if so, why are you leaving posts? I'm mildly disturbed. Can you comment with how you stumbled upon this post? This sort of thing messes with me and now I am just now beginning at the dawn of wonder to try and figure this shit out. I really don't try to be anything but a sloppy blogger. How do I execute these timely, completely earnest, and cutting posts? Well. It's pretty simple actually. This is obviously my nonsensical response to a nonsensical contemporary situation.

And yet. And yet, it's sort of insulting to any real human reader for me to wonder about it. Aren't I supposed to have a naive faith in the internet? "Oh, yeah, it's not a total wrecked derelict piece of shit... well, by volume, only about 5% of it isn't." Sure, you can try to argue it isn't.

Not so insulting either that it could lead to terminal frustration. I mean I write this shit out sometimes, maintaining no real schedule or coherence. There is no focus of attention I never really write about anything except sometimes I'll do that bullshit thing where it's recent events or something. Recently Diablo 3 but who really gave a fuck? I maybe did for a few hours, but the whole world had a lead on me and the thing burned out as things do.

And so I'll do that bullshit thing where I write about or include likely terms but really, what happens but you search google hopelessly and this content farm yields a few matches. That's kind of the shit thing about the internet, it's so vast and organized in such (parallel) preferential hierarchies that finding anything is worse than ever. You'll find bullshit echoes of things you want to find, but everything's moved on or been killed or corrupted.

I'll try to do things for views but mostly you could pejoratively say I just do some self-satisfactory writing exercises, help nobody, basically just wring sentences out of whatever soup of words is in my head at the time. I think it has some worth, but not that much that it'd be a manuscript or something, and so on I post. It's a simple system and I think there are definitely things posted where either the writing or complete inanity has been worth the price of reading.

You'll find news articles much worse than this in execution and style. Go read some right now and come back, and tell honestly of their eloquence and, most of the time, fuck them.  When it comes to well written hack writing, I won't say I'm expert, but I do not lack for trying or panache. Which is why I try to blog it – albeit sloppily.

Humor and Comedy = Tragedy

I just wanted to post this as evidence that the joke-in-itself will never go extinct.