#connie willis
Mockumentary set in medieval England with no explanation as to why or how a camera crew is there
A lot of people have mentioned monty python and the holy grail on this post which is accurate but I was envisioning more of a the office/what we do in the shadows type sitcom complete with talking heads and will-they-or-won’t-theys and with the technology that allows the mockumentary genre to exist going completely unquestioned by the entire cast despise it not occurring anywhere else in the otherwise realistically portrayed setting
…hang on, I think there’s a workable premise here.
The camera crew is a team of time-traveling scientists, studying an isolated village. They don’t bother trying to blend in with the locals much, because they know the village will be wiped out by plague in a few years and no trace of their expedition survives in the historical record. The villagers think they’re wealthy-but-eccentric travelers from a distant land, and they’ve bought off the local lord, a minor knight who doesn’t pay much attention to his serfs anyway.
The scientists are jaded. They’ve all been on multiple expeditions to doomed communities, and they’ve learned not to get too attached to their subjects. Part of the mockumentary format includes their video diaries, internal squabbles, and personality conflicts. The rest is interviews with the locals, footage of the crew tagging along with them in their daily lives, and the various experiments members of the crew are running.
(Most of their research is innocuous: water and soil samples, collecting plant and animal specimens to restore future biodiversity, measuring linguistic drift. All their planned human-subject research had to pass an ethics review board.)
(That said, sometimes opportunities for impromptu data collection arise. And sometimes you get bored and want to know what would happen if you projected a 40-foot holographic cow on the road outside the village.)
(The time travel science ethics review board has very clear rules about starting cults: no matter how funny you think it would be, don’t.)
The tone of the show is pitch-black comedy, at least to start with. The crew is burned out and cynical, the villagers are poor and underfed and overworked. Nobody’s doing their best work, or even trying to, really. This is a team that couldn’t get better, sexier, more exciting assignments, and a village full of people whose idea of a better future is a harvest that fails less than last year’s.
But over the course of, say, three seasons — not quite as long as it’s going to take for the plague to arrive — the research team does something they’re really not supposed to do. They get invested. They start to care, a little. They give the villagers a tiny bit of help, here and there — and they’re shocked to see just how much the villagers manage to do with that help.
But the villagers are still doomed, even if they’re clever and curious and likable. Even if a few of them are smart enough to figure out that the research crew aren’t just weird rich foreigners. Even if letting them all die is starting to feel like a waste, or even a crime.
There’s nothing they can do about it. History is very clear about the village’s fate, and they can’t change history.
Right?
ooh ooh okay. the cold open for every episode (the equivalent to B99’s morning meeting cold opens) is the expedition leader going over a video message from her future self. like just a day or two in the future. usually it’s nothing big, just letting her know about any events in the village that they should try to get recordings of, and warning her about any new bullshit her underlings are going to try to get away with.
in theory she would also get warned away from any actions that could negatively impact the timeline, but this is an extremely low-stakes, low-prestige assignment. everyone with actual career prospects is fighting tooth and nail for the sexy assignments, like pre- volcano Pompeii or Yellowstone. nothing her team can do here really matters, so she never gets warned about anything major.
until sweeps week, probably.
some fun running gags:
the scientists always say decades without specifying the century, leading to constant misunderstandings
“hey it could be worse, we could have been stuck in the 20s”
“what are you talking about? the 1920s are a dream assignment compared to this!”
“oh lol no I meant the 2020s, my bad”
“you know what I miss? live music. when I was stationed in the 90s I got to go to so many concerts”
“no shit? oh man did you get to see Nirvana live, that would rule”
“no but I did see The Magic Flute in Vienna! with Mozart conducting!”
additional running gag: the show starts when the team has already been on site for a while, so most of the villagers are already pretty blasé about seeing future technology. BUT there is one villager who just. always loses her shit, every time. without fail. just full on “BACK, foul creature!!!! WHAT is this FIENDISH SORCERY you wield????” while her neighbors are like “okay calm your tits Maud, they do this every tuesday and it’s fine”
running gag that i am unashamedly stealing from star trek: constant references to events and cultural figures from future history (ie the period between now and when the scientists come from). also it’s never clear, based on the scientists’ offhand references to their childhoods and home lives, whether their future society is a blissful utopia or a very weird dystopia.
running gag with eventual payoff: there are two small and very grubby village children who like to follow the crew around. they never speak. we get lots of reaction shots of the two of them staring blankly at whatever nonsense just happened.
after at least two years of this, a member of the crew is trying to fix a piece of equipment and having no success. the two small children wander into frame (as they often do) and the scientist ignores them (as he usually does)
only this time, the smaller and grubbier child wordlessly pulls a tool out of the scientist’s toolbox and hands it to the larger and slightly less grubby child, who fixes the problem and hands the tool back to the (now dumbfounded) scientist. they walk away, still silent. now it’s the scientist’s turn to stare blankly into the camera.
for maximum comedy the expedition head should be verging on Michael Scott levels of obliviousness. just floating along in a bubble of reassurance from her future self that there’s nothing to worry about.
the cold open is like “good news! the supply drop will go smoothly, no hiccups” and then in the episode we see that their supplies from the future, which were supposed to be teleported to an uninhabited clearing in the woods, landed in the village square in front of the church. on a sunday. and the villagers opened the crates and walked off with a bunch of future tech that the crew now has to hunt down and reclaim.
and they tell their boss none of this, so when she goes to record her message for her past self at the end of the episode she can be like “good news! ” and carry on living her life with the serene confidence of someone who believes in horoscopes and also gets to write her own horoscopes, because her staff makes sure she never knows about their constant fuckups and eleventh-hour saves.
if this is your jam, while you’re waiting for it to get made may I point you in the direction of
every Connie Willis novel
I had a brain blast so clear about fancasting for Connie Willis’ Blackout and All Clear books, that I thought maybe I’d read a post about it somewhere here? elsewhere on the internet? (I haven’t found it, but the internet is a big place).
Anyways, it is this: Bill Nighy would make an excellent Sir Godfrey Kingsman.
Review by Morgan! Originally posted over at Navigating The Stormy Shelves, on July 25, 2014.
Earlier this summer, I was hit with a fantasy craving.
I needed to read something completely engrossing, something with really cool magic and characters full of surprises. But I didn’t know exactly where to start. Should I try an author I’d never read before? Should I return to an old favorite? Did I want to read fantasy set in our world or another one entirely?
Luckily, there’s a solution to those questions. An anthology! And how convenient for me that an anthology has recently come out containing a huge selection of engrossing, magical, surprising stories. Surely one or two of them would do the trick.
I got Rogues out of the library that very night. I really like the concept of new stories about each author’s rogue-ish and mischievous characters. They’re usually my favorites in Fantasy series, anyways. I only read about five or six of the stories, and started a few others without continuing on, but there were a few I really enjoyed.
Obviously Neil Gaiman’s story, “How The Marquis Got His Coat Back”, was fun. The Marquis de Carabas was easily my favorite character in Neverwhere, and his adventure was funny and twisty. It took us back to the underground and slightly sideways world from the novel, and even introduced us to the Marquis’ brother! The story wasn’t a long one, but it was good to re-visit a character who I sort of consider an old friend. (**** 4 stars)
Michael Swanwick’s “Tawny Petticoats” had a sort of alternate wild-west feel to it. The setting was a futuristic New Orleans, with throwback fashions and some not-quite-human characters. I’ve never read any of Swanwick’s fiction before, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying his story of con men and tricky ladies. There was an interesting take on zombi-fication, which was a little freaky, and the villains weren’t very nice. In fact, even the hustler protagonists weren’t exemplary citizens, but it was fun to root for them and see what would happen. (**** 4 stars)
“Now Showing”, by Connie Willis, was really incredibly strange. It was about college students in such a near future I felt it could be a peek into life ten years from now. There wasn’t much magic to speak of in her story, aside from the enchantment caused by mysterious boys who make you want to listen to them even when they’re being cryptic assholes. In the end I did like the story, even though I was making a really puzzled facial expression the whole time I read it. I then recommended that one of my film-geek friends read it, because I knew she would like the cinematic theme and all the hidden movie references. (*** 3 stars)
As for “A Year And A Day In Old Theradane”, it was my favorite story (of those I read) and another one by an author I’d never tried before. How, exactly, have I made it through 23 and a half years without reading Scott Lynch?!? This situation needs to be rectified ASAP, because I LOVED “A Year And A Day In Old Theradane.” It was EXACTLY the sort of story I wanted to read, and nearly cured my fantasy craving all on its own. The cast of characters was largely female – this deserves an extra huzzah in “high fantasy” literature, where that’s not always the case – and they were all so bloody cool!
This was another heist story of sorts, with lots of entertaining plans and slapstick failures while the fatal clock runs down. The main character and her old crew have sworn off crime after being granted clemency, but they’re getting restless in their retirement. When a wizard battle shatters the serenity of Therandane by causing huge creatures to fall from the sky and into their favorite bar, Amarelle goes and gets herself in trouble. She and her friends have a year and a day to steal an entire street, or an extravagant and powerful woman will ruin them completely. The magic in this story was unique (enchanted mixed drinks, anyone?), the setting was vivid, and I felt like I’d known these characters for years. Next time I want to read some good old fashioned grown-up Fantasy — with creates characters so lively they might walk off the page, and a touch of humor to even the most dire circumstances –I’m absolutely going to try Scott Lynch’s Gentleman Bastard series.(***** 5 stars)
I didn’t get a chance to read about half the stories, but there are a few which caught my eye that I’ll surely try to read during my next visit to the library. Some others failed to capture my attention, but the beauty of an anthology is that you can just move one and find something more appealing. I’m not sure that every author gave the roguery prerequisite an equal amount of consideration, but whatever. The stories I read were pretty good, I now have some new authors to read who might soon become favorites, and the fantasy craving was assuaged. So Rogues is worth checking out, for fantasy fans, whether you’re familiar with these authors or not.
