The Event went off with a ‘pfft’

I decided I’d sit down and watch Channel 4’s latest purchase, “The Event”, last week. Partly because the advertising campaign had caught my eye, but mostly because it didn’t look anything like Lost. This turned out to be wrong on a level so fundamentally obvious it was only matched by the crushing inevitability of the show’s own plotline. The Event is a pile of turgid poo-poo.

Let me summarise for you. A computer games programmer has…NO. WAKE UP. You see? You were beginning to drift off already, weren’t you? This is what this entire genre of television relies on - being so vague you just start dreaming up the missing sixty percent of the narrative so the writers don’t have to bother.

The first episode was a horrific mishmash of plotlines which were presumably supposed to be excitingly open-ended

The first episode was a horrific mishmash of plotlines which were presumably supposed to be excitingly open-ended - why is a plane being crashed into the President’s summer home? Who are these crow-faced aliens with strange abilities to distort the laws of physics? Why is the saucepan-faced actor playing the protagonist incapable of expressing emotion through facial expressions? You’re supposed to ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ at these, and then immediately mash the ‘Record Series’ button on your remote before the first ad break.

Except, as we all know, most of these shows are written in episode order, with little or no idea how half of the plot strands should end up. Lost’s laughable attempt at ‘closure’ in its final series turned out to be a hasty patching of plot holes and then a shrug of the shoulders in the direction of anything they couldn’t explain sufficiently with a flashback. The Event will be no different.

Of course, it looks like it might. There’s some edgy storytelling that flicks back and forth between timelines, cunningly re-using the same footage over and over again to pad out the episodes. There’s a shady military advisor hiding a secret project from a sceptical and honourable president. It’s all pretty groundbreaking.

But at the end of the day, you won’t be watching it because of its vacuum-like absence of acting quality; or because the dialogue ever makes it beyond summarising everything that is going on around the actors; you’ll be watching it because it’s failing to tell you the whole story, and that has somehow become a ‘technique’.

It’s not a technique. It’s just a lazy way to avoid doing anything that would require a full arse of effort. Half of the reason people play videogames nowadays is that the dialogue and plot structure is no worse than the nonsense on TV, but at least there’s the opportunity to jump on people’s heads while they’re spewing the pointless plot advancement out at you. And if it gets too mysterious, you can always just shoot the nearest, most confusing thing until it explodes. It’s like being Sherlock Holmes, if the stories had been written by Quentin Tarantino.

Anyway, this leaves me at a loss for what to watch while I spike packs of Haribo with laxatives in preparation for this Sunday’s festival of reminding people why children are a bad idea, so this weekend I imagine I will just borrow the CCTV tapes from a few local shops, switch between them every ten seconds or so, and try and work out a plot from the people coming and going. It’ll be just as vague and equally enticing. Plus if I really come onto something, I might be able to pitch it to Channel 4 in time for next October’s schedules.

If youíd like to bang on endlessly about the nuances of modern television, donít forget that my inbox is always open to useless twaddle - anangrygeek@gmail.com. Keep watching the skies.