December 23, 2007

The Rise—well…Fall of ‘Journeyman’

An Idiot Boxing Special Edition

This week, NBC unceremoniously burned off the last two episodes of its best new show, Journeyman. It probably won’t return after the holidays, or the strike—it’s unofficial, but it’s done. NBC gave full-season pickups to two dismal but slightly-more-popular shows, Chuck and Life (and if you don’t believe the latter is a bad show, just take a step back from your frothing e-mail and watch or re-watch this clip; no amount of arguing will convince me that Life isn’t a piece of shit), while The Bionic Woman and Journeyman will be left to die. The former deserves its fate, but I’d like to take an opportunity to explore the failures—both creative and commercial—of Journeyman.

Given the sweet lead-in of Heroes, this seemingly compatible sci-fi effort should have retained that sizable audience share, and it did. For the first half hour of the first episode. Because, it became abundantly clear, the show NBC was selling is not the show that aired. Promos implied this would be a whiz-bang adventure staring that muscly guy from Rome and that hot chick from Daybreak, making out and traveling through time and beating people up and—we got a domestic drama about thirty-something yuppies struggling to adapt their semi-posh lifestyle to the economic realities of the modern, city-dwelling print journalist. We didn’t even get a depressed man yearning for a change from his increasingly tragic life, escaping into time travel to find fun and adventure. We got a guy who didn’t want to travel through time, who reluctantly made minor nudges to change average people’s lives.

Suddenly, Journeyman and Heroes didn’t seem quite as compatible. The misleading promos lured in an audience that never would have enjoyed the show, while at the same time pushing away an audience who may have embraced it.

Would they, though? Certainly, college students or recent graduates don’t want to watch a show that said, “Your future is nothing but financial woes and petty domestic squabbling.” Would an older audience, from the non-coveted slightly-above-34 crowd, enjoy this any more than their younger counterparts? It’s possible, maybe even likely, that they looked at a couple living in a gargantuan house, working fairly glamorous (if jeopardized) jobs, and either had a hard time buying their money problems or had a hard time caring. When you’re living in a saltine-box apartment, working as a bottom-feeding cubicle drone in an enormous corporation, and still can’t make ends meet, it makes the woes of the upper-middle-class a bit less relatable.

Who would this show grab? Hard to say. Nerds like me who enjoy time travel. Where I could easily imagine friends and coworkers getting annoyed or enraged by aging yuppies whining about money, I shrugged it off with a chuckle. In the reality of the show, it’s amusing to me that two journalists didn’t have the foresight to realize their industry was going down as they bought the gigantic house they could barely afford spreading it out across 30 years, rather than going with something a little smaller and more reasonable. It’s emblematic of our communal excesses. Why live within your means when you can get more on credit? Besides that, starting them on such a high financial plane can only mean high drama as they toboggan toward bankruptcy.

Commercially, focusing on a yuppie family’s domestic problems might have ruined the show. Creatively, I can’t imagine anything better. Here, you have a guy who’s job is constantly in question—and he suddenly starts disappearing for long stretches, with no control over it. You have a wife and son who have to make commitments and have to deal with the increasingly unreliable husband and father. It not only adds a layer of depth to Kevin McKidd’s Dan Vasser—it allows him to be the reluctant hero no matter what. “Gee, I could be stopping a liquor-store robbery in 1973, but my kid has a Cub Scouts thing…”

At first I was dubious about the family angle. It made me fear the show would tie him down too much and get bogged down in the strife of a failing marriage and a son who grows more and more detached. Thankfully, with a few Livia-related exceptions, the show never went down that road. Most of the problems within the family could have just as easily been unrelated to time travel. His lateness, lack of reliability—it’s the same as having a high-pressure job with a schedule that’s all over the map (like, for instance, being a newspaper reporter).

Despite doing some things well, Journeyman suffered from creative problems that it couldn’t recover from until the audience had already left. The biggest, perhaps, is leaving Dan so unconcerned with why he’s traveling through time—what’s causing it, what is he supposed to do, what happens if he fails? By the time he finally started asking questions—and getting creepy answers—it was getting numbers that would look low on basic cable.

It also had a major issue, especially in the first three episodes, of downplaying the time-travel elements of a show about time travel. While I didn’t mind the slow pace and concentration on building up its characters so we could really see how the time travel problem would affect them, it seems like a fair assumption that this was a poor creative decision for bringing in the audience and making them stick around. By the time they finally integrated more time-traveling exploits into the show, it was too little, too late.

The important thing here is that the writers recognized these problems and did something about them. NBC’s major crime is canceling Journeyman before it gets a chance to reach its full potential. It had an abbreviated season where it was clear the writers were trying to figure out how to pace their story, and when they finally started getting the mixture right—that’s it, they’re done. Nobody’s watching. When NBC and its notoriously horrific promo department are as much to blame as the writers, you’d think they’d at least suck it up, cut Journeyman some slack, pick up the back nine, and relaunch the show properly after the strike.

But hey, it’s NBC. They fell from #1 to #4 for a reason.

Next week: No columns for the next two. There is that little on TV. Have a good holiday!

D. B. Bates is a film critic and television viewer who has often shouted at fictional characters who probably wouldn’t listen to him even if they could hear him and existed in reality. Interested in explaining to D. B. the many ways he got it wrong? E-mail him.

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