Interesting article about the potential long term damage to AMC:
Hiding Behind the Brand: How The Killing Threatens the Future of AMC
What I’m interested in is the way that this response reflects on larger questions of brand identity that are unquestionably caught up in this response to
The Killing. This weekend, I read
a piece on AMC’s growing dominance at the Emmy Awards at The Hollywood Reporter in which Sud was quoted quite extensively as she waxed poetic on the freedom of the AMC model. Her first quote was perhaps the one that stuck out most, as she notes that the AMC approach is perhaps best defined by the following: “Always assume that your audience is smarter than you are.”
Given how often I felt
The Killing insulted my intelligence as a viewer, this quote struck me as odd. And then I read the rest of her quotes in the article, and discovered the same issue: when she was only spouting a series of platitudes regarding the genius of the AMC brand that we hear from other writers (including a
Breaking Bad writer in the same piece), I could take none of them at face value given the fact that
The Killing has done little to earn them. In a climate in which
The Killing has squandered nearly all of its critical goodwill, Sud’s comments were charmlessly naive, and this was before she made many similar comments in defense of the season finale.
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A Miring Mouthpiece
The problem with this strategy is that Veena Sud has proven an incredible liability in the wake of the show’s divisive season finale. It is one thing for a press release to sell the show as an unqualified success, as we expect executives to talk about how they “elevate the crime drama with this series” or how the show is “incredibly powerful television.” However, Sud’s post-finale interviews have been peppered with this kind of executive doublespeak, relying on broad statements of purpose instead of any actual evidence of the show’s success: take, for example, her repetition of “this is the anti-cop cop show” in several interviews, including twice in
her interview with Alan Sepinwall. That interview, which is somewhat contentious given that Sepinwall has been one of the show’s most vocal critics, also raises some questions regarding Sud’s control over the series’ narrative:
[Sepinwall:] One of the ways in which the story progressed was that it seemed like Holder and Linden would settle in on one person at a time. This person would seem like the obvious suspect, the end of an episode would point at them as clearly the one who did it, and we’d come back at the start of the next episode, learn that it was a misunderstanding, and move on to the next one. In your research of these kinds of investigations, did you find that the cases tended to unfold in that way, or was it something that simply dramatically expedient?
[Sud:] We based a lot of the red herrings on what the Danes did. They did an excellent job, and we did that until they locked in on Bennet Ahmed, and he became a suspect for multiple episodes, and the suspicion deepened. I does feel like, initially, there’s a bit of juggling between the “he did it,” “she did it,” “he said,” “she said,” the natural course of an investigation, and then landing on someone who the cops think potentially did it. And then we spent a while on that, until the twist that happened.
Despite being positioned as an auteur figure, this answer (among many in the interview with Sepinwall, and in many other interviews) reveals a pretty disappointingly elementary understanding of her own show. It reads like a summary more than an explanation: Sepinwall didn’t ask what their process was, he asked why they chose it, and Sud seemed entirely unwilling (or unable) to answer those types of questions. For every question that Sepinwall asks which is clearly looking for some kind of explanation for a divisive creative decision (like the choice to focus so much attention on the political campaign, or the repetitiveness of the storylines for the grieving family), Sud responds with why she was
personally invested in it, with no discussion of narrative form, storytelling, or other such trivial things.
The interview reads as though Sud is the television showrunner equivalent of the Manchurian candidate, someone who has been programmed to respond in a certain fashion but who lacks the actual experience to understand the context of his or her statements. While auteur figures are often somewhat insular in their storytelling, following particular whims, they also have a clear sense of their personal vision that feels intricately linked to television as a medium (or storytelling as an art form, at the very least). It also helps, of course, when the show they’re defending is widely acclaimed, as opposed to a show which has been highly criticized as the season has worn on: in fact, that Sud’s interviews appeared in the midst of the enormous backlash against the season finale only made her seem more oblivious to the disconnect between her vision and the way it was received.
Of course, Sud is entitled to her opinion, and I do not want to suggest that it is fair to take her answers in interviews as a sign of her intelligence or her abilities. However, the larger problem is that all of her comments are being framed in terms of the AMC brand. In the Hollywood Reporter Emmy piece, Sud suggests that “AMC allows us to surprise ourselves and the audience,” one of many comments that creates a clear (and logical) link between her show and the network’s philosophy. In Sepinwall’s interview, she even reveals her attempts to find clear signifiers of that brand, suggesting that “it’s very much an AMC tradition, to take this rapid, unexpected detour from what we think might be a linear story, and find ourselves…lost and trying to make sense.” It’s one thing for Sud to be unwilling to offer explanations for certain storytelling decisions: that is simply a reflection on her own approach to serving as showrunner. It is quite another, however, for her to be explaining storytelling decisions based on her personal effort to boil the AMC brand down to episodic tropes and broad claims of difference unsubstantiated by the text itself.
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The woman sounds like a complete idiot. It's like she made a paint by numbers show based on what other people had done with no clear strategy of what she seeks to accomplish.
