Feeding My Ignorance

Whenever something dramatic happens there is a (very natural) tendency to treat it as "all bad" or "all good" - a mistake surely as it is extremely rare that any event hits either of those extremes, even more so when the event is far reaching either by dint of the number of people affected or due to the length of time involved. Rather there will be a mixture of good consequences and bad ones - all of which need to be taken account of to determine whether the event was beneficial or detrimental in the long term to the wider community.

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In What Is Not Real I mentioned a TV drama that seemed to be moving away from the often bland and/or "attention seeking" style of script to one that reflected much more the 'reality' of a situation - even though that was inevitably going to lead to something that did not contain 'excitement' and could end up as unremitting gloom.

I've now watched the whole series and I am pleased to say that the style continued to explore the extremely complex fall-out from the initial event. I don't intend to put any spoilers in this description - indeed I am not going to even identify the drama.

Where it scored highly for me was the way it examined the effect of events on a variety of people who were connected to it - in some cases they were connected 'unexpectedly' to it and, of course, in the interests of heightening the drama there were some rather big (and unlikely) coincidences where it required a certain amount of suspension of belief. The latter did not detract from the fact that the whole drama was built on showing that something that seems, at first glance, straightforward can become extremely complex and difficult to resolve simply because there are - inevitably - many people involved.

Every single one of them will have a reaction to the initial event based on their own circumstances and their own response to the event. This results in a cascade of changes to "how things were" before the event happened and this is, of course, most 'interesting' when there are conflicts that arise due to these "knock on" effects.

I want to just expand a little on three aspects that were explored by the show.

There are often conflicts between different aspects of an indivdual's character. One of the cast battled constantly with a real dichotomy between what he "should" do as a "professional" and what he felt as an individual. This was thrown into sharp relief when his professional persona had to to act in a way that was completely contrary to what his private persona was screaming out for him to do.

White lies are often used to seemingly "make things easier" in some circumstances. This may be either direct - by telling someone something that is not quite true, but which will bring them some comfort - or indirect - by omitting to tell someone something that would upset them in some way. Whilst these often result in short term benefits, the "web of deceit" that gets built up becomes something that is very difficult to escape from. Often it is better to just "get it over with" and accept the consequences of telling the truth straight away.

The third, and last, aspect was just how difficult it is to see things from someone else's point of view. This is often where the previous tactic goes badly wrong - the actions are taken based on your own worldview rather than that of the person you are trying to "protect". This was emphasised in the story by the fact that the main character had endured much prior to the start of the story. In this, it was like "Prisoners of War" (or Homeland) where no one was able to relate to the state of mind of those who had been held in captivity for several years. The mindset that resulted from dealing with the isolation, the torture, the deprivation significantly changed the emotional response when they were finally released.

Here - everyone tried to "help" in their own way - but in ALL cases the help was driven more by their own needs than the needs of the one they were trying to help. It was therefore no surprise that the "help" often turned out to be making things worse.

All in all, the programme was "enjoyable" (in its own way) and I can only hope that those who watched it managed to get past the "soap opera" type of reaction (but like booing the villain and cheering the hero in a pantomime) and started to understand both WHY some characters did what they did and not just judge the actions based on their own peculiar viewpoint.