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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

When Concept Outweighs Content

14:00 / 15.02.03

Sometimes a high concept elevates a program above its genre—and the high concept becomes the draw in itself.

The classic example is Mystery Science Theater 3000. This long-running show was basically a guy and two puppets cracking wise at bad movies—but it was enlivened by its packaging. The conceit was that a hapless fellow had been shot into space by mad scientists and forced to watch these films as part of a psychological experiment, and had built some robots for companionship. Out of that conceit grew some funny intercharacter dynamics and ten years of clever riffing on various sci-fi tropes.

And the conceit threatened to overwhelm the content: when fans latched onto the show, the movies themselves were often a secondary concern. There's MST3K fanfic out there, friends, and it ain't about the films—it's about Joel and Mike and Tom and Crow and the Mads. It's about the framing device.

When the chance arose to do a MST3K feature film, there was some discussion of doing a movie based around these backstory elements—but in the end, the show's creators chose instead to stay with the formula: the movie was basically an episode of the show, but with higher production values.

More recently we've got Iron Chef. It's basically a cooking show, but with the conceit that an eccentric millionaire is staging these culinary battles for his own perverse amusement. There's an operatic, comic-book vibe to the proceedings, from the Chairman's supervillain fashion sense to the uniforms of the Iron Chefs, from the recurring challenges of various "factions" (the Rogue's Gallery, as it were) to the flaming torches in Kitchen Stadium (which has the feel of a Batman villain's lair) to the occasional guest appearances by retired Iron Chefs (who I cannot help but think of as "Silver Age" Iron Chefs).

There's supposedly an Iron Chef feature film in the works, which will focus almost exclusively on these backstory elements, and not on the cooking.

What's your take on all this? Self-referential and postmodern, or just weird? Should the creators of such shows play up and expand on the high concepts, or would that miss the point? Are there other examples of this type of episodic TV? What are the origins? What are the theories at play here?

18:22 / 17.02.03

An Iron Chef *film*?

That seems to miss the point - which is something like "making a narrative where there is none." Because we monkeys like narratives along with the spectacle of, in this example, good-lookin' food.

Is that the kind of thing you're getting at?

12:09 / 18.02.03

Jack Fear - is Iron Chef that thing hosted by William Shatner?

Matthew Fluxington

12:18 / 18.02.03

The American syndicated version of Iron Chef is hosted by William Shatner, but the more popular and well known version is the Japanese version which airs on FoodTV with overdubbed dialogue.

14:31 / 18.02.03

I watch Iron Chef for the wackiness that is Japan. I can't imagine the American version being interesting at all (unless they actually cooked William Shatner and ate his flesh in a variety of tasty and unpredictable dishes).

15:55 / 18.02.03

IRON CHEF USA essentially removes the fictive elements from the show: we are never meant to believe that William Shatner is anybody other than himself—he's not playing a character as such. (IRON CHEF USA also screws with the formula in lots of other subtle ways, wrecking the fun entirely, but that's another thread.)

More examples: pretty much any movie based on a SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE sketch, from THE BLUES BROTHERS through WAYNE'S WORLD and beyond. On SNL, Wayne and Garth had their local cable show from Wayne's basement: the movies were all about getting them out of the basement and running around in the world—taking all the stuff that was backstory to the sketches, and making it the foreground of the movie.

17:22 / 18.02.03

Ali G. Originally used to expose the willingness of various public figures to accept black British youth as largely idiotic (if you believe Channel 4's claims), later the title character in his own movie. Said movie, to the best of my knowledge, doesn't even attempt to justify the use of the broad stereotype under the dubious satire banner.

17:25 / 18.02.03

Did The Blues Brothers start out as a sketch?

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Thinking of non-comedy examples, does this plug into the hype factory/extra-filmic elements around things like The Blair Witch Project, Memento and Donnie Darko?

Or how about something that sounds better on paper - like (from what I hear) Six String Samurai. How's that different?

Is it just in the way the backstory is presented (as backstory rather than as story, full stop)?

This drive might have something to do with hunger for "safe" novelty - like a replacement for gossip maybe, an outlet for a human need to expand snippets of info into full schemes, coupled with a fear of what might be discovered... so the snippets are all from safe sources, healthy doses of irony, that sort of thing.

Or maybe it has more to do with branding and marketing - things labeled Product X sell well, let's give 'em a major motion picture to go with the cookware and hit show. In which case, Elvis might fit the same model. By the time he hit Hollywood, he was a brand, not a singer.

Nietzsch E. Coyote

18:16 / 18.02.03

The Blues Brothers was their musical act. They did it in character and then they made a movie about the back story.

23:07 / 19.02.03

Getting back to the original question, yes - most episodic television is based on example like these. The whole medium is dominated by concept over content, as most shows are begun as little more than catchphrases and concepts. The entire situation comedy genre is based on concept over content - I say 'based' because every once in a while content worms its way to the surface in spite of the rigorous construct penning it into the 22-minute time frame.

The shows Jack mentions are more extreme than a sitcom, sure, but the underlying sensibility is the same - and so it the result. A backstory for the MST3K guys was inevitable because they're funny and likable, so people naturally want to know more about them, and write more about them.

With Iron Chef, I think there's so much mystery that executives are just slathering for a chance to explain it all away - witness the Twin Peaks phenomenon.

(As a side note, it's worth nothing that the original IC was a bomb in Japan, only gaining momentum after it was successful in Western markets, much like Crouching Tiger was in China. The obvious reason is that IC is funny to us because of the dubbing, which is part of the reason the US version blows. Part of it.)

I think its an enescapable fact of television; the 'concept' as king has been in place since advertisers realized the CRT was the perfect way to hawk their shit, and what better way to capture people's imagination than with a clever concept? In the case of IC and MST3K the stuff that's typically used to disarm an audience is disregarded entirely. The result, of course, are shows that are really fun to watch.