Often,
when style comes up in terms of contemporary television, it’s about style as a
problem. Or, more specifically, it’s about a certain bland uniformity of style
that testifies to both the pretension and cheapness of the Peak TV environment.
Networks and streamers want shows to look “good,” but that designation is less
about quality or imaginative production design than it is about a set of visual
tropes that read to well-trained viewers as “good.” (M.C. Mah recently
wrote that the ultimate goal of Peak TV was to “annihilate all taste, good and
bad.”) Think of
the Instagram filter aesthetics of Ozark, the dark and oversaturated “Netflix look” of The Sandman, the tinned Fincherisms of A
Murder at the End of the World—Peak TV prestige style can be a copy or a
caricature of itself, but it’s also a wan reflection of beloved texts of the
prior age. Aping the signature look of Breaking Bad or Game of
Thrones or True Detective is a way to activate a set of coded cues
for viewers to notice and approve. Such a style distracts distractible viewers
from the thinness or derivativeness of the show they’re watching. If it didn’t
look like that, they wouldn’t care, or worse, they wouldn’t feel that
they should care.
But
if style is how these disparate shows conform to the aesthetic of prestige, it
can also be how they differentiate themselves from it. Many of the most
acclaimed series of the past few years have been distinguished by their singular
televisual styles. The Bear’s fast cuts and extreme close-ups sutured to
dad rock deep cuts of the mid-aughts; Shogun’s anamorphic lenses and
natural light and swirly bokeh—or blur—around the edges; Succession’s
nauseating handheld and gray landscapes; I’m a Virgo’s ramshackle
practical effects and forced perspective; Euphoria’s loud and
hallucinatory “emotional realism.” Not every TV series has to make
such bold, conspicuous stylistic choices in order to be successful, of course,
and not all shows with a bold, conspicuous style live up to it. But, even in
the midst of this post-boom fallow era that Sam Adams called “trough TV,” the best series have had style to
spare.
3
Body Problem feels
allergic to this kind of cohesive televisual vision. There’s so much to do, so
many characters to introduce, so much science to condense and explain, so many
mysteries to investigate and unveil, so many questions to ask and answers to
complicate, so much book to dutifully adapt. In the moments when we notice the
show making a visual or a stylistic choice, they tend to be strictly
utilitarian: The scenes in Mongolia mark a transition in time, nearly every pop
music cue thuddingly references what’s happening onscreen, two eyes merge into
one inside the headset when the video game begins, the capillaries in one
scientist’s eyeballs seize into a glowing, ticking clock that warps and
deranges everything she (and we) sees. Because these scattered touches nearly
all denote transitions out of the show’s present or serve to emphasize points
or themes within it, that means that the show’s baseline is a kind of
deliberate stylelessness, a boilerplate reality.