Yes, “October Road” is bad, but NOT for the usual reasons

9 April 2007 | Culture, Marketing, Media, TV & Movies | Comments

If you’re the kind of person who delights in savage reviews, start Googling the reviews for “October Road” — the new ABC one-hour, post “Gray’s Anatomy” series. You can get a fair sample at Metacritic. I AM that kind of person, but the reviews seem wrong to me. Sure, the situations are unlikely and the dialog unbelievable, but those precise qualities haven’t stopped anybody from loving “Gilmore Girls,” have they?

There are three problems with “October Road.” First, there is no structural conflict, which annoys me as a story guy. Second, the show betrays some of its core characters. Third, the show misses some huge opportunities for what Henry Jenkins calls “transmedia storytelling.”

Background (skip this paragraph if you watch the show): Late at night on a business trip to Boston, I found myself watching the pilot episode and caught up on episode #4 over the long weekend. Briefly, the protagonist is Nick Garrett (Bryan Greenberg, a.k.a. “the Jewish JFK Jr.” according to a witty friend), a 28 year old with a hip, successful novel that got made into a movie. The problem is that the novel skewers Nick’s high school friends, so when the local college invites him to give a talk he runs into the friends he has avoided for 10 years. Still, Nick leaves his ritzy New York life to give the talk and discovers that Hannah, his high school squeeze, has a 10 year old son, Sam, who is probably Nick’s, so Nick sticks around.

Absent conflict: the problem with this setup is that it is essentially a retread of “Northern Exposure” in which:

1. the new arrival grew up in the strange environment
2. the environment isn’t all that strange
3. the new arrival doesn’t seem all that conflicted about being in the new environment, and
4. it’s painfully obvious that Sam really is Nick’s kid and the show is wasting our time by not getting to the good part in a hurry

In “Northern Exposure,” Joel Fleischman wanted to be anywhere other than a small town in Alaska, missed his fiancee in New York, found the Alaskans to be weird to the point of surreal, and had mixed feelings about the cutie-pie lady pilot with whom he shared a tortured relationship for years before they hooked up. Conflict!

In contrast, the folks who live off “October Road” spend way too much time being nice to each other, and there is no structural conflict except whether or not Nick will stick around, and OF COURSE he will because if he doesn’t there’s no show. Somebody on the writing staff seems to have realized this because in episode #4 “Ray,” Hannah’s ex-boyfriend has turned into the villain of the piece, out to destroy the business of local gardener Eddie as a way of getting revenge on… Nick. Huh? Nick and Eddie aren’t even friends, so clearly Ray has had been hit in the head by something metal and will soon don a black cape and start twirling his moustaches.

How would I fix this? Nick should be ACHING to get back to New York and incredulous that he has somehow wound up back in the dinky Massachusetts college town he escaped from years ago. He should have been in the middle of a writing spree (instead he was blocked) that he fears is leaking out of his ears while he’s trapped in his dad’s house, and he should have a sexy girlfriend who keeps calling him while wearing little and asking when he’s coming home. And he should be furiously angry with Hannah for hiding Sam from him. We should, in other words, see the New York Nick rather than just the small-town Massachusetts Nick. Oh, and he shouldn’t care about his old high school friends except insofar as they are fodder for a sequel to his novel.

This isn’t rocket science, folks.

Bryan Greenberg has charm to burn. He can make Nick into something of a jerk and we’d still love him. Why don’t the “October Road” writers get it?

Character betrayal: the show isn’t only from Nick’s POV, but it might as well be. Just about everybody in the town is socially retarded. They stopped growing the moment Nick left, and now that he is back they have all started growing again. What a writer’s fantasy come true! “My characters just sit there until I tell them to grow like weeds.” It is, indeed, scarily like Nick has dropped into his novel, rather than into the source material for his novel, and this means that there is, again, little conflict between what Nick remembers and what the hometown folks really are. (I am, by the way, avoiding the other problem which is that there are far too many characters in this show… I’m starting to hope that a virus sweeps the town.)

Transmedia storytelling… denied! Even without multiple media, “October Road” could do so much more with the contrast between Nick’s book (or the movie it became) and the people he exploited to write it. The TV audience should see scenes from the book acted out by the “real” characters in black and white, only then to see the reality in color. We should see the townsfolk watching the movie with angry and befuddled looks. We should see Nick unable to tell where reality and his novel are different or even the same.

None of that happens, which is a shame.

Now, as far as transmedia storytelling goes, the big opportunity that ABC missed was to publish the damn book (getting somebody talented to write it first, of course) before the series started. It wouldn’t have had to be a big run or a best seller, but enough people would have been interested to see the gap between Nick’s novel and the folks upon which he based those characters. Doing this would not have solved the basic structural anemia of the series, but it would have been interesting, probably would only have costed a few thirty-second spots’ worth of media, and would have been truly new both narratively and in terms of marketing. It also would, I think, have engaged the audience longer than the show I’ve been watching is likely to do.

The real question? Why am I still watching this…