The Call of the Open Sidewalk

The digital TV transition has finally begun in Winnipeg. One of the local stations is now emitting a HD signal. This has caused me to encounter TV that I might not of otherwise. The HD aspect of the medium is still an important part of the message for me. The promise of the occasional slow pan over nice scenery is sometimes all that is required to generate interest in a particular program. Off the Map is set in a jungle in South America. I felt I had nothing to lose. I was wrong.

The promos for OTM stated that people who were associated with Grey's Anatomy were somehow involved in its production. This should of been an important warning. I have never actually seen an episode of Grey's Anatomy. Due to the miracle of popular culture I know it is about a group of young medical professionals hooking up in pretty much all possible combinations, only limited somewhat by the sexual orientation of the characters. Obviously the problem is that this is a girl thing but I am not a girl. I get that. The same plot could be done as a boy thing but it would involve way too much grunting for network television and would only last for a single episode. Anyway, OTM is pretty much the same plot (the girl one) as Grey's. I've seen two episodes of OTM. At this point they could do the full porn version on network TV and I would not care. That is even with the somewhat more plausible motivations for the characters. I hope to never have to experience this thing ever again.

The subplot is that three really really American upper middle class people gain redemption in more or less the same way that characters in a situation comedy do. That is by being forced into it by circumstances. They have various upper middle class things they are escaping from. You know, the sort of things that typical lower class people have to deal with all the time without leaving the country. I think one of them was shallow or something. So whatever, this is all about the relationships right?

That brings us to the critical weakness of this program. Either by accident or on purpose (the redemption angle) the characters are very unlikeable. This kind of makes it hard to care about who is eventually going to end up sleeping on the wet spot. By the second episode it was starting to feel unfair that only the patients were getting killed and injured. Why couldn't a big snake slowly crush all the doctors to death? It would of provided them with an excellent opportunity to talk about their stupid emotions. Perhaps some of the local population could set the clinic on fire. They had every right to.

OTM is set in a jungle in South America. No particular jungle. One or all of them I guess. At first I thought that was because the people who made this thing were hoping that it would make it less likely that actual South Americans would be moved to burn down something after having seen their portrayal in OTM. Then I realized that the writers were, to understate things slightly, a bit unfamiliar with any South American countries and probably any countries other than the United States. It was much later that I was struck with the truth. The writers did not actually believe that there was such a thing as a foreign culture. Other countries are simply populated by quirky Americans with bad accents ... those that are not ignorant savages of course.

This is where things went from bad to offensive. Foreign people are, like, so annoying with their inability to understand simple english, their primitive superstitions, their tendency to do things that are actually insane... We are just trying to help these people, dammit! The writers at least have the good sense to avoid having the major characters interact with the locals whenever possible. This makes things a bit weird all the time. The series ends up being about a group of doctors who sacrifice everything to go to the darkest depths of the jungle to help American tourists survive the horrors that are found there, probably. The shallow character even somehow manages to have shallow sex with shallow American tourists.

Fortunately this means that the attractive white people will never try to share sexual feelings with any of the sort of OK looking brown people. One can only imagine how well that would go.

To make the betrayal complete, there is really not that much mega-pixel scenery available in OTM. While the HD program Hawaii Five-0 will do a helicopter pan to show the location of the outhouse used by a character OTM has a few set location shots they use over and over again. I suspect they cribbed the footage from some PBS special about South America. Perhaps they will someday sit down and actually watch the whole thing...

posted at: 02:53 | path: /tv | permanent link to this entry