On October 1st, the season finale of Doctor Who aired. For those not in the know (shame on you) Doctor Who is a long-running science fiction show produced by the BBC centered on the character of a Time Lord called the Doctor. He travels through time and and the universe with his human companions, tries to right various wrongs, and continually saves various races of the universe from annihilation. Check it out, it's a lot better than I can describe.
The head writer on the show right now is Steven Moffat, a man who can only be described as a genius. I don't want to spoil last week's finale, so all I'll say is that it was a piece of TV craftsmanship that astounded me. In previous seasons, the finales have always been superb, but this one was particularly brilliant. It relied on every single one of the 12 episodes preceding it, bringing in characters, plot elements, and story arcs that spanned both the season and the series as a whole. Every twist and turn gave me a thrill and as the conundrum raised in the first episode of the season was effectively resolved with Doctor Who's traditional combination of dramatic and comedic flair, I couldn't bear to think that I would now have to wait several months before I saw the Doctor again.
Even before becoming the head writer, Moffat consistently wrote the most complex, dark, and inventive episodes of the show. Here is the man responsible for the Weeping Angels, easily my pick for the most terrifying monsters the show has introduced. They are stone statues that move when they're not being watched. The only way to stop them from attacking you is to keep looking at them, and you can't even blink. It's a terrifying prospect and the kind of idea that only a writer of Moffat's calibre could successfully execute.
However, the reason I am particularly awed by Moffat's writing ability is because this is also the man who created and wrote every episode of the brilliant sitcom Coupling. Often touted as the British version of Friends, it is much raunchier, startlingly inventive, and always hilarious. The show played with time and story in a myriad of ways and had a host of characters that never stopped being funny.
Most recently, Moffat along with co-creator Mark Gatiss introduced the world to the astounding Sherlock, a modern-day retelling of the classic Sherlock Holmes tale. The show is extremely funny, energetic, and dark, a combination that is Moffat's particular specialty. The classic "three-pipe problem" in the old Sherlock stories has now been transformed to a "three-patch problem" as Sherlock slaps on nicotine patches in our currently tobacco-eschewing world. John Watson is a veteran of the war in Afghanistan and while still somewhat slow on the uptake is a wonderful everyman in contrast to Sherlock's acerbic genius.
My only quibble with Moffat is that he writes for these British series that never have enough episodes to last me through the year. Doctor Who only had 13 episodes, each season of Coupling ranged from 6-8, and Sherlock is a mere 3 episodes, with 3 more on the way later this year. Of course, the sparse nature of British TV is what makes it particularly well-crafted. Instead of American TV writers churning out an episode a week for nine months, British writers can pore over each episode, finely tuning it so that it achieves perfection every single week. If you are tired of your current television fare and looking for something new, look no further than Steven Moffat, a man who can write for any taste, and is raising the standard of television writing to an unprecedented level.
No comments:
Post a Comment