Storytelling, world-building and such in my favourite TV shows

I've been rewatching a lot of my favourite DVDs recently, and got to thinking about what (if anything) they have in common.

If I sat down and wrote out a list of my favourite ever fiction on TV, almost all of it would in one way or another be SF or fantasy. I'm going to include "West Wing" as fantasy, because come on: two liberal US Presidents in a row? That's got to be a parallel universe, right? (Apologies for the stereotyping of USians there. I hope it got a cheap laugh, though!)

Okay, disregarding West Wing, of the others, the list looks roughly like this:

• Doctor Who (both the original series and the New Who versions)
• Avatar: The Legend of Aang
• Firefly
• Babylon 5 (and its spin-off, "Crusade")
• Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda
• Maid Marian and her Merry Men

(Again, Maid Marian and her Merry Men is fantasy-ish because it's set in the 13th Century or so, but all kinds of goofy references to present-day phenomena, and it's just brilliantly daft - Mediaeval and Fantasy settings often look quite similar anyway)

I wanted to think about what it is I enjoy about each of these. I've already pretty much described what I love about Maid Marian - it's brilliantly daft. It also has great songs performed by Barrington (played by Danny John-Jules, and the Maid Marian universe's stand-in for Allen-a-Dale in the original Robin Hood legend), and a fabulous performance by Tony Robinson as the Sheriff of Nottingham. (Marian, played by Kate Lonergan, was also one of my earliest crushes along with Ace in Dr Who, but that's beside the point).

So, what about the others?

One thing they all have in common, by virtue of being SF/Fantasy based is that there's an element of world-building in each one. Because the settings are not contemporary-Earth or historical-Earth (that is not pre-defined) someone has to sit down and work out a few of the rules that govern the places where the stories take place, so that the story has a context. I love piecing together how things work in fictional universes and regular readers of my "Cyborg Sleeps" story will probably have figured out that I have put a fair amount of thought into how stuff works in that universe. I'm trying to keep from having long explanations of stuff unless it's actually relevant to the story (in which case, I try to show, not tell), but I really want to try to work into the story a reason to show my working on stuff. On DVDs, I always like to view the bonus features if there's anything where the director or writer(s) explain how they came up with the concepts and what the fictional science of it all is going to be.

Avatar: The Legend of Aang fascinates me because there isn't a huge amount, but they deal it out gradually through the show and you get some fascinating hints and gaps. For instance, it's revealed that "bending" is learned for Earth, Fire and Air, from magical beasts (badger-moles, dragons and flying bison, respectively) but water-bending is learned from the spirits of Moon and Ocean. Each element appears to have a "purest form" that only the most powerful benders can perform, or that require the most powerful times of the calendar. Earth-benders cannot normally work with metal, but it is still possible for the most powerful, because metal comes from the earth before it is purified by smelting it; the most powerful and capable fire-benders are also able to create and control lightning as the purest form of fire. It is revealed late in the series that the most powerful water-benders can control other people (it's called "blood-bending" in the series, and is based on the fact that humans are 70% water), implying that this is the equivalent (although describing it as the "purest form" seems awkward, if bending is understood in terms of spirit, perhaps it makes sense). But we aren't told what the equivalent form is for air-bending, which makes my brain tingle with curiosity and trying to figure it out (I don't know, maybe the creators explained it somewhere else?) Both fire and water bending are affected by astrological events (water-bending being related to the moon, and fire-bending related both to the sun and to comets). Are there similar events that affect air-bending or earth-bending? I don't think there's an answer in the series and it's tricky to come up with a reason for what sort of astrological event would affect them.

But what I love most about Avatar is that it's basically pure story-telling. Though there are delightful details, both settings and characters are mainly presented in broad brush strokes, to give the story room to be itself. The depth is in the saga and the interactions that produce the story itself. The characters develop through the story to enable the story to flourish, but that produces by the end, much more complex-looking characters than we started with.

Firefly, for me, seems to go in the opposite direction: a boat with eight deep and complex characters with histories and motivations aplenty, provides the launching-point to produce stories both serious and humorous. It's a shame that we never got to see the series develop properly because maybe the story arc (a culmination of which we were given in the movie Serenity) would have become more important as it went along, and I would have felt differently about it. But the story seems to be driven in each episode as well as across the series, by the nature of the characters in it.

Both of these excite me for different reasons, and these are the reasons why I love these shows so much. I love story and legend, because it gives an idea of history and of broad generalities of human experience (this is also an aspect I love about Doctor Who); Avatar, though aimed at children, has that sense of story-telling on that level, seen through the eyes of the children at its heart.

Character-driven story, on the other hand, excites me because I find people fascinating: it's presenting the individual interactions of specific people and studying them in detail, rather than taking a broad, general view. It looks not at how "a person" would act, but at how "this person" does act.

In essence, I think these shows represent Plot and Character (probably yang and yin respectively, but I wouldn't like to say for definite that that's how those would line up): they each have both, but one produces the other almost as a by-product.

Babylon 5 famously was created with a "5-year story arc" in mind, and certainly part of its appeal is the epic "legend-story" type of feel, that I mentioned above. But its biggest appeal is slightly different: it strikes me as being essentially a story about politics in space, and focussing on a group of people navigating those politics as best they can and pursuing principles and agendas through negotiation, compromise and, sometimes, through violence. It is the interplay of these political forces that appeals so much, and seeing how people struggle through them, that appeals as a reference to modern day struggles.

Doctor Who, on the other hand, is essentially about one heroic figure bringing his principles into a situation and standing for them as uncompromisingly as possible. At times, the show has used his companion as a "moral compass" persona to guide the Doctor's principled stand, but ultimately he stands on what he believes in and gives as little as possible but forces the world to shape itself around his stance. His passion and the fact that the principles are oriented around helping and saving others, make him heroic rather than a villain.

So, these two shows are also about dynamic opposites: force of will vs political compromise. Again, each contains elements of the other: the Doctor generally wants to find a peaceful, non-violent solution to conflicts (and therefore, effectively, his force of will is directed to persuading others to compromise); the characters in Babylon 5 often use force of will (or just physical force) to resolve a deadlock or to deal with another's aggressive stance (Captain John Sheridan says, "I never start a fight, but I always finish it"). There is some element of the philosophy, "always negotiate from a position of strength" underlying it. Principles versus politics, the politics often have a principle underlying them in Babylon 5, while in Doctor Who, the principles are often thwarted or forced to tangle with others' politics and agendas.

Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda tends towards being the legend-story, and the principled, in these two spectra but in various ways seems more balanced than the way I've described the others. The characters are interesting and have some development and backstory, but mostly they are broadly sketched to provide the basis for story (I guess it's hard to draw a heroic figure in any other way - the minute you try, zie is likely to become "flawed hero" instead). Because the aim is to rebuild a political union, politics necessarily become a part of the playing field, with the inevitable compromises in the aim of achieving a goal. Usually, though, Andromeda comes up with a way that it is unnecessary to compromise the ideals, making the storytelling type still "force of will"/"principles rather than "politics".

From this, it might sound as though I think Andromeda is the best of the best, but that's not the case. It doesn't manage to balance all four corners that I described, and although it does some of them well, it still does not quite achieve greatness on any; so it's not "the greatest ever". I couldn't pick just one to say "this is my favouritest ever" on that basis. Andromeda, though still one of my favourites, falls a little way short of the standard of the others on each dimension so depending on my mood, Doctor Who, Avatar: Legend of Aang, Firefly or Babylon 5 will win the day out of those five (Maid Marian and West Wing are also in the running - Marian strikes me as basically character-driven, while West Wing is most obviously about political compromise a lot of the time).

So that's what I find great about my favourite fiction on telly.