: President Bush addresses Congress and Americans tonight
: (pre-empting "Dark Angel" and therefore upsetting
: teenagers all across this great land of ours :).

The same student who wrote "Toward a Theory of Media" wrote last semester the analysis pasted below. Student had a list of things upon which to comment. Was limited to two typed, double-spaced pages.

Uri Dowbenko wrote a good analysis of the same premiere episode that may still be posted at
http://www.steamshovelpress.com (hope that url is correct).

Monke

Dark Angel / Light Weight

The irksome thing about keeping one’s observations to two double-spaced computer generated pages is the resultant inability to present both the form and source critical analysis that are appropriate to a discussion of the Fox network’s new show, Dark Angel. The writer will therefore confine his remarks to production values, content, and prediction.

This writer was unfavorably impressed by the show’s hackneyed style of scripting: smug, self-righteous, boyishly insecure male lead / precocious, too-well-informed, street-smart-yet-disarmingly-naive female lead. The brash lesbian friend, the Nigerian member of a post-apocalyptic New Religious Movement (NRM), and a handful of other supporting characters appear on screen like a standard assortment of brand new crayons.

The show’s lighting managed to illumine whatever composition was central to the indoor scenes leaving the rooms dark around the edges. One assumes that lighting effects are deliberate, although here the effect, did not create any sense of dread.

One finds himself unable to remember the names of the female and male protagonists. They will be referred to hereafter as Batters and Bleats after the manner of a child naming his goldfish Poops and Bubbles. The actors playing the leads so resembled Jennifer Lopez and Val Kilmer that one may be justified in calling them knock-offs.

The show has five recurring, permanent sets. The first is the squatter’s flat inhabited by Batters and her roommate. The second is the Taxi-like messenger dispatch center. Third is a Mainstreet set with buildings and derelict vehicles, inhabited by many squatters, seething with pedestrians, punctuated by cops patrolling in body armor. It falls short of the atmospheric standards established in Blade Runner, but this hodgepodge probably cost a lot less. The fourth set is the apartment inhabited by Bleats. This conscience character’s affluent surroundings may be intended to provide a “stark contrast” to the down-at-heel world inhabited by the heroine, Batters. Fifth and final is the ‘Space Needle at Nighttime’ set. The scenes involving this last set provide the opening and closing brackets of the show’s narrative framework. The bar coded grrrl stands or sits, aloof and aloft, high atop Seattle’s Space Needle, now covered with more graffiti than a small-town water tower.

For content, Dark Angel is of the Distancer/Pursuer genre wherein the lead continually flees representatives of semi-legitimate authority while she distances herself also from benign influences drawn into her orbit by whatever je ne sais quoi has been backstoried for her. So the character and thematic elements repel and attract, generating interest or not.

The target audience is probably single persons 16 to 30 years of age. This writer doesn’t know whether Dark Angel will effectively reach its target.

Depicted as atmospheric content is alcohol consumption, characters who are diverse in their sexual orientation, sex, religion, and race - all “getting along.” The message being that, for the masses, a nuclear disaster and subsequent depression may provide a great enough leveling that one could imagine any of the regular, ‘good’ characters quoting the government slogan from Brazil, “We’re all in this together.”

This writer predicts that Dark Angel will flop like Pretender and the Saturday morning children’s drama, Run, Joe, Run! and for the same reasons. Running gets old quickly.