Eureka: generally in favor.

[mrissa]

Haven't done anything like a State of the Mris report in awhile. I'm tired, tired, tired. Other than that we are doing okay. Timprov's recovery from his tonsilectomy is as good as can be expected or possibly even better than that, although the last few days have been a bit harder than the first few. My grandma is in town celebrating her birthday and markgritter's birthday with us, so that's low-key good fun. All of this is the sort of good thing that doesn't lend much to lj commentary for me right now.

But! One thing I'm enjoying that I did want to mention on lj is the DVDs of season one of Eureka. It's a show about a small town filled with geeks, many of whom work at a secret government research lab. It's not a great show. It's not a brilliant show. What it is, though, is consistently good fun. Timprov summarized one of the plots as, "We stole this from Star Trek but made it funny," which is plenty good enough for me when I'm looking for something to watch while working out.

While it's a great deal sillier, Eureka is a bit like Numb3rs in that it's on our side, the geeks' side. Numb3rs is not about how math works. It's about math working. It's about a setting where math and science are doing something the viewer can immediately see and appreciate. And the geeks in it have fun with their geekery.

Eureka does that, too. It features an ordinary guy sheriff and his ordinary girl daughter, and one of the standard things our culture loves to do with that situation is to have the ordinary people show the geeks about joy and beauty and art and love and simple pleasures and humanity. Blarg. In Eureka, it's very clear that the geeks know a great deal more than this particular "ordinary guy" about any of that. They are--like us, like real geeks--knowledgeable and enthusiastic in a wide range of fields, and fairly willing to try other fields that aren't their primary interest. Also, while the characters are sometimes played for a laugh, their work is taken pretty seriously, regardless of race/ethnicity, age, sexuality, level of pretension, whatever. You don't take yourself seriously, but you treat your work with respect. Eureka gets that.

We wouldn't have picked this show up to begin with if not for Joe Morton, and it's Joe Morton's Henry who makes the show for me. What I really want is The Henry Show. Timprov said, "But how would you structure that?" and I said, "Like The Red-Green Show," and he said, "Ohhhhh." Because it would be like The Red-Green Show with temporal rifts and gender equity and general awesome. And the thing is, everybody respects Henry. He works independently rather than with the main big lab thing, and the ambient attitude towards that seems to be a desire to get him to consult, rather than a standard-issue plot where nobody appreciates the black guy in short dreads who works on his own ideas and never wears a suit. And Joe Morton is so awesome that the one place where his acting slipped so far was when they gave him a completely bullshit line, and watching it, we went, "Yeah, um, not only does Henry not really buy that, neither does Mr. Morton." Which is pretty cool.

My biggest complaint is that there are not enough Asian or Asian-American people on this show. There are some. There should be lots. It's one thing to say, "We don't want to go with stereotypes and make the geek character an Asian-American," but quite another to have an entire show full of geek characters, with more geek characters in the background, and still for some reason not hire more people of Asian ancestry. There are several major characters of color, just not very much in that range of color, which is weird and frustrating to me.

They have done some small things right that just make me so happy, like the way the autistic kid character stands when he's working, and the casually thrown-in--totally correctly handled!--reference to Bayesian vs. propensity interpretations of statistics. I expect there'll be more of that. It turns out that small lines about the discovery of black body radiation can make me disproportionately happy. Anyway: this is a fun one, and I don't recall hearing a lot of geeks talking about it, so I thought I'd say. We've got four episodes left in S1, and I expect we'll be watching the other seasons as well. And it's ongoing. Hurrah for liking a TV show that's still going; it can join Criminal Minds and Numb3rs in my list of things to eagerly await.

Comments

[guppiecat]

Speaking of the Asian thing (an issue in TV in general and fandom in particular (Firefly was constantly confusing in that regard)), if you enjoyed Dr. Horrible, it is worth listening to the sing-a-long commentary.

If the above makes no sense, it just means that our fandoms don't Venn, and that the above comment can be ignored. :)

[snickelish.livejournal.com]

Numb3rs is not about how math works. It's about math working.

Ooh. Hmm. I'm trying to decide whether looking at it that way might let me be less frustrated with the magical math. Numb3rs is one of those shows that I think I ought to like, for so many reasons, and yet have failed to like in my attempts thus far.

I very much like Timprov's summary of that plot. And Henry is indeed fabulous.

[gaaldine.livejournal.com]

The bits and pieces of "Numb3rs" that I've seen have generally annoyed me, but Scott loves "Eureka" and has done well in getting me hooked. We've been waiting for the new season to start up . . . and waiting . . . and waiting.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

me + Whedon = meh

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think, among other things, that Numb3rs is a bit too stealthy about being one of those shows that's really best watched in order. Bits and pieces don't do very well. On the other hand, I get very frustrated when people tell me, "Oh, you have to watch them all in order! You didn't like the first four episodes? Well, you have to wait for season three, that's when it gets really good!" So I want to avoid doing that to you if at all possible.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

Eureka doesn't always work for me, but usually. I generally compare it favorably to Eerie, Indiana but not quite so much fun as The Big Bang Theory. Henry is one of the better characters, and he has an increasing roll in later shows.

Numb3ers is (are?) a good character study of interesting people, but the math always seems grafted on. "I've used Chaianaraniapapur's Gobbledegook Theory to determine that we should start looking where the crime took place, and then search outward in a spiral."

The first show (that I can recall) where the geeks were not stereotypes and won most of the time is Frasier.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Have you started Numb3rs at the beginning or in the middle?

[copperwise.livejournal.com]

We are very fond of Eureka. I think we're midway through season 2.

[snickelish.livejournal.com]

It's been less a matter of starting anywhere and more of just catching an episode when it happens to be on. Is it a fairly arc-heavy show? Would starting from the beginning help? The biggest problems I had with it - the magical math and the terribly awkward infodumping - seemed to occur pretty regularly. But of course falling in love with one or more of the characters could make up for those.

[saoba.livejournal.com]

Ah Eureka. I have to keep reminding myself that even if it were true and somewhere in the Coastal Range nearby I wouldn't be able to find it.

We have both seasons on DVD and they're very happy-making. We both agree that Henry is the bomb.

I think the reason for telling it through Sherriff Carter is that they are trying to hook in people who are not geeks and don't necessarily know geeks- through Carter's eyes they can say 'Look! Smart people are interesting! Science is cool! Don't be afraid of what you don't understand, learn about it!'.

It works for me because under the humor there is a sincere affection for geeks and a real belief that learning is a Good Thing. When Numb3rs rings those changes it works for me too.

[joeboo-k.livejournal.com]

Not a huge fan of Henry (perhaps because I'm completely caught up and I think Henry gets less awesome as the series goes on - sorry. Of course, I'm one of the few who does not care for Walter Bishop on Fringe), but Eureka is otherwise one of my favorite shows currently on tv. It's just delightful.

[laurel]

We really like Eureka and are looking forward to its return this July. It's a fun show. Sometimes I roll my eyes at the fact that Henry knows everything or when plots have awfully similar patterns, but it's still fun. I love Joe Morton too.

The Middleman is due out on DVD this summer, it just lasted one season, but was fun and geeky. Burn Notice is great fun in part because they love to explain bits of spycraft in it and use it in fun ways. Great cast + spycraft geekery makes it work for me.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That's exactly it: there are some episodes, not very well marked, where you really want the arc of the plot. But mostly you want the arc of the character development. Where by "you" I may not mean you.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, I think Sheriff Carter is clearly the "normal person insertion character." But my point there is that the way they did that doesn't put him above the other characters. It's not like, "Oh look, here's this normal guy like you, and see how much better he is than these geeks here," or, "Yah, he might not know as much, but at least he appreciates [theoretically non-geeky thing here], which these geeks totally don't."

[snickelish.livejournal.com]

But mostly you want the arc of the character development.

Good to know. I've been hearing enough good things about the show that I think I'll have to give it another chance, from the beginning this time.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

We just started watching Eureka--literally, we watched the pilot last night--and this was our general impression: not brilliant, but fun. I'm glad to hear it continues fun, and am hoping that eventually there is at least one female scientist.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, there have been some but not really enough.