De Re Defective Detectives
Mar. 28th, 2004 01:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hafoc
In case you missed him, Adrian Monk is the fictional-detective hero of his eponymous TV series Monk. (Somebody sprung 'eponymous' on me 'tother day. I had to look it up in the dictionary, so now I'm passing the misery on to you-- although that leading sentence probably gives away the meaning clearly enough).
Monk is a former San Francisco police officer so beset by mental illness-- obsessive-compulsive disorder, to be specific-- that he can barely leave his apartment. Nevertheless, because he has good insights into crime, he and his nurse are regularly called out to solve them.
Much as I hate to admit I like any TV series, I do like Monk. Unfortunately, though, he seems to have spawned a new craze; the insane detective. First example of this is the show Touching Evil, about a detective who has no inhibitions because he took a bullet into the brain in the line of duty.
Defective detectives are nothing new. Or, if not defective, unusual or unlikely. I think we owe that to Sherlock Holmes. Holmes was eccentric, to say the least. Utterly focused on his craft, he was a genius, a woman-hater, an egotist, a man who cut himself away from the society of his day. And he was a hit. He made Sir Arthur a rich man.
From that we have a long list of detectives who are depressingly the same except for one little distinctive quirk. Another detective, but let's make her a little old lady. A detective, but let's make him a prissy, annoying little Belgian. A priest. An English nobleman.
Starsky and Hutch is an undead spirit from the dark ages of this practice. Why does Hollywood feel compelled to do remakes of shows that never should have been done in the first place? But here we are. Our detectives are original because they dress like 70s disco pimps. They come from an era that also gave us Cannon (fat), Kojak (bald,) Ironside (parapalegic), the Mod Squad (unspeakably stupid). Same lame writing in each case, of course, but Our Detective is Original Because...
It's also an era that gave us Columbo. Our detective is original because he wears a rumpled raincoat. But Columbo was good.
Columbo was good because the rumpled raincoat was a disguise. It wasn't just his quirk, it was part of a whole demeanor he put on to lull people into thinking he was incompetent and stupid. It was an honest-to-God plot element.
So was Holmes's eccentricity. He could solve crimes because he had studied everything about them, had trained himself to be the perfect crime-solving machine, and had abandoned all normal human considerations to do it. So is Monk's obsessive-compuslive disorder. He solves crimes not in spite of his mental disorder, but because of it, because it causes him to notice tiny little details that nobody else would pick up.
And all the other eccentric detectives, and the insane ones who are probably going to be the next big boom-- Perot, Lord Peter, Cannon, Kojak, Miss Marple, the whole long dreary parade of them-- are just examples of lesser writers' near-infinite ability to Miss the Point.
But there's a lot of TV time to fill, and little time to write the stuff to fill it, and it has always been easier to imitate something than to understand it.
(What a coincidence! Thank you, Papa Coyote. I was just pondering why anyone would remake Starsky and Hutch when that show sucked to begin with, and on the radio comes Limp Biskit's remake of "Behind Blue Eyes." Right there is an editorial comment from the Unknown Powers.)
Monk is a former San Francisco police officer so beset by mental illness-- obsessive-compulsive disorder, to be specific-- that he can barely leave his apartment. Nevertheless, because he has good insights into crime, he and his nurse are regularly called out to solve them.
Much as I hate to admit I like any TV series, I do like Monk. Unfortunately, though, he seems to have spawned a new craze; the insane detective. First example of this is the show Touching Evil, about a detective who has no inhibitions because he took a bullet into the brain in the line of duty.
Defective detectives are nothing new. Or, if not defective, unusual or unlikely. I think we owe that to Sherlock Holmes. Holmes was eccentric, to say the least. Utterly focused on his craft, he was a genius, a woman-hater, an egotist, a man who cut himself away from the society of his day. And he was a hit. He made Sir Arthur a rich man.
From that we have a long list of detectives who are depressingly the same except for one little distinctive quirk. Another detective, but let's make her a little old lady. A detective, but let's make him a prissy, annoying little Belgian. A priest. An English nobleman.
Starsky and Hutch is an undead spirit from the dark ages of this practice. Why does Hollywood feel compelled to do remakes of shows that never should have been done in the first place? But here we are. Our detectives are original because they dress like 70s disco pimps. They come from an era that also gave us Cannon (fat), Kojak (bald,) Ironside (parapalegic), the Mod Squad (unspeakably stupid). Same lame writing in each case, of course, but Our Detective is Original Because...
It's also an era that gave us Columbo. Our detective is original because he wears a rumpled raincoat. But Columbo was good.
Columbo was good because the rumpled raincoat was a disguise. It wasn't just his quirk, it was part of a whole demeanor he put on to lull people into thinking he was incompetent and stupid. It was an honest-to-God plot element.
So was Holmes's eccentricity. He could solve crimes because he had studied everything about them, had trained himself to be the perfect crime-solving machine, and had abandoned all normal human considerations to do it. So is Monk's obsessive-compuslive disorder. He solves crimes not in spite of his mental disorder, but because of it, because it causes him to notice tiny little details that nobody else would pick up.
And all the other eccentric detectives, and the insane ones who are probably going to be the next big boom-- Perot, Lord Peter, Cannon, Kojak, Miss Marple, the whole long dreary parade of them-- are just examples of lesser writers' near-infinite ability to Miss the Point.
But there's a lot of TV time to fill, and little time to write the stuff to fill it, and it has always been easier to imitate something than to understand it.
(What a coincidence! Thank you, Papa Coyote. I was just pondering why anyone would remake Starsky and Hutch when that show sucked to begin with, and on the radio comes Limp Biskit's remake of "Behind Blue Eyes." Right there is an editorial comment from the Unknown Powers.)
