It's the other snarky 18th century sage

[selenak]

Thoughts:

1) Damn, and I wanted to save money and take a break from Apple because I have to resubscribe to Paramount in April when Star Trek: Discovery comes back.

2) Which one is Beaumarchais? Will Pierre finally get some respect? (cahn who has read Proud Destiny knows what I mean. *g*)

3) More seroiusly, I wonder whether the miniseries solved what I think was Feuchtwanger's problem in that novel, which is that Franklin works better as a supporting character, snarking epigramms at the main character(s), than he does as a main character. It reminds me that I disagreed with most of fandom about wanting The Methos Chronicles as a Highlander spin-off series, despite loving the character. Or because of it. Because in my experience, if you put a morally ambiguous trickster character (or for that matter a snarky mentor character) in the central role, instead of using him as a foil, he'll lose some of the charm and most of the ambiguity and unpredictability.

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Comments

[hannah]

Douglas is good, but he's no Tom Wilkinson - only one of those men can deliver the line "Oh, to be seventy again" and make it work.

[selenak]

Verily. Otoh, did you see Douglas as Liberace? He made that work, too.

[cahn]

Beaumarchais! Yeah! :D

Mmmmph, that trailer does not give me a whole lot of hope that they've solved the problem you talk about in your post. I don't understand how you make a trailer about Benjamin Franklin where I don't giggle once during it! None of the snark is quite... snarky enough, I feel! (As opposed to those other clips you showed me, where Franklin was not the hero, and he was awesome and hilarious!)

[selenak]

In fairness, trailers usually aren't made by the directors but by the marketing department who simply might have felt they need to appeal to the "yes, it's history, but there's also action!!!!" crowd instead of people who alredy know that if you got Franklin, you got snark. In terms of misleading trailers, I'll never forget how a movie about Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy turned out to be a sensitive low key character study with a few funny moments and a few moments of tension but mostly about the intense bond between its leads got a trailer which basically cut together every funny moment in the film and made it seem like its leads are always arguing and seething with resentment which really really wasn't the case in the movie (or in rl, which is why the trailer made me concerned). You could see the marketing department thinking "well, these guys were comedians, therefore we need to signal to the audience FUNNY FUNNY FUNNY.

Going back to this one, though, I do suspect it will suffer from making-trickster-into-hero problem somewhat, but hey, you never know. Michael Douglas certainly can do both, and Apple + has wowed me with some truly good stuff.

[annavere]

I thought I was the only one who was glad we never got a Methos spinoff! I just don't see how it could have worked without undermining what made Methos interesting in the first place. He is not Angel, he's not after redemption and thus has no natural character arc to power a show. I can't see him fitting into the procedural structure favored in the era either, because why would Methos fight crime of any sort? When he sees a problem, unless it impacts one of the few people he gives a damn about, his strategy to the very end of the show is "be somewhere else." That attitude does not power a show. I never saw the golden opportunity lost, I always saw the bullet dodged.

[selenak]

HARD SAME. I mean, yes, there's good Methos-centric fanfiction. Obviously. But that's a different type of story from how tv worked and works, and a Methos-led show would either have to lose key elements of what made the character or would have to be written in a far more cynical way way by an entirely different staff of writers. And honestly, I liked the mixture of earnestness and silliness HL: The Series had for most of its run just in that mixture; cynical, it never was.

[jesuswasbatman]

See also the Pirates of the Caribbean films without Will and Elizabeth.

[selenak]

I'm sure, which is one big reason why I never watched them. (The other one being that for me, the trilogy was Elizabeth's story and it ended in a satisfying way. There was no need for sequels.)

Something I'm always going mentally back and thro about is the case of Avon in Blake's 7, and the Blake-less B7 as such. I mean, the very first episode of s3, you can see an attempt to make Avon into something more of a traditional hero in some of his reactions and sayings, but that doesn't last long, and the fact that s1-2 Avon always insisted he'd use the Liberator to stay safe, not for resistance fighting, and that he wanted only to be rich, safe, and far away from Blake, and s3-4 Avon not following up on this but sparring with Servalan, and trying to find Blake, only made the character more interesting and layered for the fandom (whether or not you ship him with Blake). And I would not want to miss having watched the s3 and s4 episodes, characters (well, except for you know whose sexist trash), and the Avon/Servalan relationship, for that matter. HOWEVER. As a show, I think B7 works better with Blake as the central character and Avon as his foil, than with Avon as the central character. It would be fascinating to have a look into the AU where Gareth Thomas doesn't go to the RSC but stays with B7, and what kind of storylines we'd have gotten then.