Which is why NBC's Revolution has been a disappointment from day one. The hour long show (on hiatus until March 25th, but you can stream the first ten episodes at the show's NBC webpage) was supposed to promise so much but quickly demonstrated it was another conceit show in the mode of Alcatraz and Flashforward. The conceit here is that the electricity is gone. We can no longer use our iPhones and iPads and iPods! How will we live?
This alone is supposed to be enough to hold our interest. That thinking goes a long way towards explaining the casting. What JJ Abrams and all the other Lost copycats seems to forget is that Matthew Fox was a pleasure to the eyes. Abrams' Lost delivered a huge audience for many years on ABC. Billy Burke is no Matthew Fox but damned if they haven't shoe-horned him into the part of leading man.
He plays Miles Matheson who is our hero that we follow around and listen to and the camera always finds him so that you'll know he's supposed to be the lead. He's unattractive and his efforts at expression always come off as play acting, like he's working the street late at night for any out of towner looking for a good time. The actor tries very hard to project menacing and complicated but never manages more than sexually conflicted. That's especially true in scenes with Nora (the show's only working actress, Daniella Alonso) who is supposed to be his ex-girlfriend and in scenes with General Sebastian Monroe (David Lyons) who is supposed to be his former friend.
No sexual tension at all exists between Nora and Miles but every scene between Miles and Sebastian drips with sexuality. The show would make so much more sense if a future episode revealed the fall out between Miles and Sebastian was a lovers' row that destroyed everything.
Instead of that, we get one script after another insisting Miles is a leader, the only leader, the true leader -- It's as though series creator Eric Kripke won't stop visiting your house on Saturday mornings. You keep expecting to find literature bearing Miles' likeness on your porch and the windshield of your car.
Miles had a brother: Ben Matheson. Supposedly Ben is dead (viewers saw it!) but on this show, who knows. Ben's wife Rachel Matheson (Elizabeth Mitchell) was dead, of course, until she turned up alive and being held by Sebastian. Ben and Rachel had two children: Charlie (Tracy Spiridakos) and Danny (Graham Rogers). Sebastian sends Captain Tom Neville (Giancarolo Esposito) to retrieve Ben and instead Ben gets killed (or 'killed') and the militia grabs Danny.
Why?
Because Eric Kripke doesn't value women. The creator of Supernatural made clear how unimportant women are to him on that show.
So Charlie's left to rescue her brother. She, computer guru Aaron (Zak Orth) and Maggie (Anna Lise Phillips) set off to rescue Danny but first they have to stop off and get Uncle Miles to join them. Otherwise, this might actually be a show where women do things, right?
After picking up Miles, who immediately becomes group leader, they encounter Nora and Maggie dies because the show hates women. The hatred for women is why Maria Howell is violently attacked and kidnapped -- a terrorizing scene that is made strange both by the fact that she will later be passively working with her kidnapper Randall (Colm Feore) and by the fact that she's absent from whole episodes and has little screen time in the ones she does appear in. The hatred for women is embodied in Tom's wife Julia (Kim Raver). She has no power of her own and is married to a wimp but managed, after the electricity went out, to force her husband to become part of the unethical militia. She's fond of intimidating the help until they're on the verge of tears and telling Tom what he needs to do next.
As you watch Julia, as you watch the whole show, you quickly grasp that you're trapped in the tired ravings of a sexist pig. Science fiction was supposed to transport us, to provide us with a brave new world. But shows like Revolution are created by the unimaginative, by the mentally insufficient.
So you get one male character after another having 'growth' by action -- geeky Aaron in the mid-season finale. By contrast, female characters are made to cry and be conflicted.
Like Jericho before it, Revolution exists in a world where, if everything came crashing down, women would take orders and men would lead and the writers are forever attempting to re-create slash fiction based on Father Knows Best. Popular science fiction in the 20th century like Buck Rodgers, Flash Gordon and, later, Star Trek was based on something more than misogynistic lust.
Revolution is a deeply conservative show. It is to TV what The Dark Knight Rises was to film: Plodding and deeply sexist. Toss in a tiny handful of women to hide behind and the boy-geniuses think they've managed to fool someone. So Catwoman, a Middle Eastern woman that turns out to be the ultimate villian (how novel!) and, in one scene, the wife of Deputy Commissioner Peter Foley. You're never supposed to notice, for example, that there are no women in New Gotham's police force. You're just supposed to say, "Go, Anne Hathaway! You're no Michelle Pfeiffer and your character's kind of weak and pathetic, but, go, Anne Hathaway!"
That's how you get women's role in Revolution: Whores. "Sex and Drugs," episode six, finally shows women at paid work: at a brothel. It's also the last time you saw women at paying jobs. To make that episode 'work,' they take Nora out of commission (to again allow Aaron to 'grow') and push Charlie into prostitution.
And back to New Gotham's all male police force. In the real world, November 27th saw a major lawsuit. The ACLU explained:
The Defense Department’s longstanding policy barring women from thousands of ground combat positions was challenged today in a federal lawsuit by four servicewomen and the Service Women’s Action Network.
The plaintiffs are represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Northern California and the law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP.
The four servicemembers have all done tours in Iraq or Afghanistan -- some deploying multiple times --where they served in combat or led female troops who went on missions with combat infantrymen. Their careers and opportunities have been limited by a policy that does not grant them the same recognition for their service as their male counterparts. The combat exclusion policy also makes it harder for them to do their jobs.
The ACLU is asking that what no longer can be denied -- American women have been in combat for years now -- be recognized officially. It doesn't seem like too much to ask but maybe it is to those involved in Revolution? Time and again, we see the militias, the officers, the rank-in-file, and they're always men.
Again, one episode made clear that women can 'serve' . . . as whores. That's as disturbing as the findings in Rachel Larris' "A Closer Look: Who's Writing Nine Newspapers' Presidential Election Coverage" (Women's Media Center) from August.
Even in its 1978 incarnation, Battlestar Galactica created a world where women had equal opportunities. The same cannot be said for Revolution. And the wall paper of Charlie and Nora does little to conceal the ugly trash this show preaches in one episode after another. Maybe that's why, with the exception of the mid-season finale -- every episode has shown a significant and steady drop in viewers?
Even the increase in ratings for episode ten didn't put it back at the high NBC had trumpeted when announcing they were ordering more episodes back in October. Though nothing can educate Eric Kripke, JJ Abrams is smart enough to grasp that when viewership erodes with every episode, your basic concept isn't the problem, the execution of each episode is. When the series returns in March, we'll quickly learn whether or not he's been able to fix that problem.
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Note Marcia covers Revolution's episodes in real time. For more discussions on the show, see her posts.