Not Being A-List

Listening to Veena Sud, the exec producer of The Killing on a KCRW The Business podcast about her show and the reaction to the finale...

I didn't finish the podcast, much like I didn't finish the show, but she compared her "choice" to not solve the Rosie Larsen murder to the ambiguous ending to the Sopranos and the way the Wire didn't wrap things up neatly each season and "opened up into other worlds."

Oh boy. Where do we begin? I hesitate to just call her a hack...because the show at least started well...but her comments show a fundamental misunderstanding of what she is writing: a mystery. The entire premise of the mystery genre is the mystery will be solved. The Sopranos and The Wire are not mysteries. The Sopranos is a family crime epic and The Wire is a procedural. Both shows end up being about a lot more, but in terms of fundamental genres, they know what they are and work within the genre to expand it. The Killing fails because it doesn't understand what it is on a fundamental level. It reminds me of when a nice guy starts acting like as asshole because he thinks it'll help him pick up women. It won't. Some assholes are naturally assholes and some girls are attracted to those guys. But it doesn't mean a nice guy should act like an asshole - it just makes him look like a poser and a fool.

Another writer who doesn't know how to use mystery - JJ Abrams. He misuses it in Super 8 and I assume Lost, by the way viewers of the show reacted.

If I were being more strident, I'd just call these people hacks. In reality, they just aren't A List.