I recently started watching Babylon 5 again. If you’re not familiar with it, imagine a show with the trappings of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and the feel of The Lord of the Rings, plus a healthy dose of world-shattering superships. It’s a pretty good time, is what I’m trying to say.
This time around, I’m watching it with my wife, who’s never seen the show before. Introducing her to Babylon 5 presents a unique challenge. You see, all the really outstanding stuff in the show comes in seasons 3 and 4. The first season (and, to a lesser extent, the second) suffers from bad acting, bad dialogue, and a general shortage of coolness. But you can’t just skip to season 3, because you’d miss out on crucial parts of the story. Sure, you could figure it out as you went, but it wouldn’t be the same. So what do you do?
My solution was to identify a few key, plot-critical episodes from the first two seasons, then watch all of 3 and 4. So far it’s working pretty well.
My point is simple. Not every brilliant piece of art is polished on the surface. As a viewer (or reader), that means sometimes you have to dig a little to find the good stuff. As a writer, you have to do the same thing in your own work. You have to notice the hidden radiance that no one else can see. Then refine it, purify it, strip away everything that obscures that light, so that finally your readers can see it too.
Do you know any books, or shows, where the brilliance is hidden a little below the surface?
Brian D. Buckley 
I don’t mean this to come off the way it’s going to (arrogant, lol) but I think there’s some hidden brilliance in my web series Twenty-Somewhere. I was thinking about and working through so many things as I wrote it. Some of the insights and observations in it are among my best. However, I wrote it for the web, and my main concern at first was to keep each episode short, so I didn’t fully flesh out the writing until I was getting further into the series.
Given what’s happening with the crazy free downloading at Amazon, I’m worried that people won’t give it the chance to develop. That they’ll hate it because the opening couple chapters are “breezy.”
One obvious solution would be to “fix” it. But in my mind, it isn’t broken; it simply is what it was designed to be — an experiment. (Furthermore, I’m working on a different manuscript right now.) So I guess I’ll just have to live with the consequences of making my experiment public… But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous. 😛
Hordes of readers downloading your work is probably one of the better things to be nervous about. 😉 Hope your experiment works out.
Thanks. 🙂
Btw, perhaps a better example of hidden brilliance: Carrie Ryan’s Forest of Hands and Teeth series. While it is, on the surface, a YA series about zombies and romance, there is a lot of philosophical discussion (about what it means to be human) going on in between the pages, which I really appreciate.
Ditto Battlestar Galactica, except the brilliance isn’t really hidden at all. That show is amazing at showing the grayscale of human good and evil. It floundered a bit in season 3, as I recall, but I still have a lot of love for it.
My Babylon 5 experience started in Season 2.
I caught it late at night and I was ragging on it because these two alien races (forehead makeup!) were in conflict and the plucky human captain (ahahaaha Scarecrow!) was clearly going to solve it all by the end of the episode.
And then he couldn’t.
And there was a war.
And it changed the whole environment of the show.
And then I woke up having watched it all the way to the end.
Definite triumph of storytelling over production budget.
What was the question again. Oh yeah. People should watch “Our Friends in the North” its got pre-famous people like Chris Eccleston and Daniel Craig and the gamut of Crusty British Character Actors.
Audacious project to tell recent political history from the 60s – 90s in 9 episodes.
Much as I love Star Trek, the syndrome of Solve-Everything-By-The-End-Of-The-Episode got old after a while. Continuity, and the capacity for real change, is one of B5’s biggest strengths. Didn’t know you were a fan too. 🙂
I read a little about Our Friends In The North just now, and it sounds interesting. Maybe I’ll get around to watching it one of these days.