A Hugo Short List Prediction
Mar. 17th, 2013 01:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akirluThe short list of Hugo Award nominees will be coming out in a couple of weeks, on Easter weekend. I can tell you right now, with close to perfect certainty, that the television series that ought to win the Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form category won't even be on the short list. Well, not unless there's a disproportionately large number of Swedish and Australian members of the upcoming Worldcon compared to previous US years. So, I feel like I'm on pretty solid ground here.
Because the single strongest contender I've seen for best long-form SF drama of 2012 was originally made, and broadcast, in Swedish. And while it's played in Australia, and is currently playing in France and the Netherlands, it doesn't look like it's been picked up by Anglophone US, Canadian, or UK television yet. (HBOMax is carrying it, though. In Spanish.) Surely that lack will be rectified eventually, because it is that good, but it's already too late for nominations for 2012, its year of eligibility.
I'm talking about Real Humans (original series title Äkta Människor: YouTube trailer here, or the rather more stylish and high-energy French language trailer here.).
Holy cow. No really, I mean Holy Cow. This is genuinely excellent television, full stop. Once you accept the premise of an alternate present day where human-formed androids are about as common as e-readers and run on wall current, what you are left with is smart, thoughtful, well-crafted storytelling that happens to be smart, thoughtful, well-crafted SF as well. There is an almost stunning dearth of stupid writing. (I know that sounds like praising with faint damns, but for me, by itself, this is gold. Made-for-TV writing, especially SF TV, is a vast, horizonless morass of idiot plots, convenient coincidences, people acting out of character to advance the plot, time travel paradoxes, dangling plot threads and gaping plot holes. Even transient exceptions are noteworthy, and Real Humans actually manages to sustain the smart writing throughout.)
I love the layeredness of the series, the subtlety, and the willingness to rely on the audience to figure things out for themselves. There are passing references to the "Asimov blocks" in Hubots, but they are not explained, nor are the Three Laws ever explicitly mentioned. There are tricks of the light and subtleties of skin tone that lead you to wonder if certain humans are Hubots after all, but only sometimes do you get a definitive answer on that. The world-building is revealed by encluing, often by environmental cues, action and conversation glimpsed in the background of the main action, and accumulates over time rather than being handed to you in a discursive bolus. I like that the 11-episode series leverages the problems faced by its various humans and Hubots to grapple with all sorts of other issues - racism, bigotry, xenophobia, rape, family conflict & divorce, work place sexism, aging, teen sexual orientation confusion, the meaning of Christianity and belief, what it means to be human and how we define our individuality, free will and self-determination - all while propelled forward by a tense, suspenseful plot that often twists in ways unexpected and that made it damned difficult to restrict our nightly watching to just one or two episodes per.
Among the unexpected touches is comparative lack of violence. I lost count of number of times when a tense and threatening situation does not end in violence, even when the principals have been shown capable of violence, and there's a genuine existential threat looming. There absolutely is violence in the show (a disproportionate amount of which ends up in the trailers), but as often as not the conflicts that arise are navigated by other means.
It's visually beautiful, it's clever, it's thoughtful, and it's smart. It's comparatively light on special effects, though, and like I say, it's in Swedish, and hard to find in English, so sadly, No Hugo For You, Äkta Människor. But if you navigate the Torrents, you might want to check it out yourself (for non-Swedish speakers, the Australian television version is subtitled in English). Or wait for the Kudos Productions version, I suppose, and hope that that resembles The Hour more closely than Spooks/MI-5.
Because the single strongest contender I've seen for best long-form SF drama of 2012 was originally made, and broadcast, in Swedish. And while it's played in Australia, and is currently playing in France and the Netherlands, it doesn't look like it's been picked up by Anglophone US, Canadian, or UK television yet. (HBOMax is carrying it, though. In Spanish.) Surely that lack will be rectified eventually, because it is that good, but it's already too late for nominations for 2012, its year of eligibility.
I'm talking about Real Humans (original series title Äkta Människor: YouTube trailer here, or the rather more stylish and high-energy French language trailer here.).
Holy cow. No really, I mean Holy Cow. This is genuinely excellent television, full stop. Once you accept the premise of an alternate present day where human-formed androids are about as common as e-readers and run on wall current, what you are left with is smart, thoughtful, well-crafted storytelling that happens to be smart, thoughtful, well-crafted SF as well. There is an almost stunning dearth of stupid writing. (I know that sounds like praising with faint damns, but for me, by itself, this is gold. Made-for-TV writing, especially SF TV, is a vast, horizonless morass of idiot plots, convenient coincidences, people acting out of character to advance the plot, time travel paradoxes, dangling plot threads and gaping plot holes. Even transient exceptions are noteworthy, and Real Humans actually manages to sustain the smart writing throughout.)
I love the layeredness of the series, the subtlety, and the willingness to rely on the audience to figure things out for themselves. There are passing references to the "Asimov blocks" in Hubots, but they are not explained, nor are the Three Laws ever explicitly mentioned. There are tricks of the light and subtleties of skin tone that lead you to wonder if certain humans are Hubots after all, but only sometimes do you get a definitive answer on that. The world-building is revealed by encluing, often by environmental cues, action and conversation glimpsed in the background of the main action, and accumulates over time rather than being handed to you in a discursive bolus. I like that the 11-episode series leverages the problems faced by its various humans and Hubots to grapple with all sorts of other issues - racism, bigotry, xenophobia, rape, family conflict & divorce, work place sexism, aging, teen sexual orientation confusion, the meaning of Christianity and belief, what it means to be human and how we define our individuality, free will and self-determination - all while propelled forward by a tense, suspenseful plot that often twists in ways unexpected and that made it damned difficult to restrict our nightly watching to just one or two episodes per.
Among the unexpected touches is comparative lack of violence. I lost count of number of times when a tense and threatening situation does not end in violence, even when the principals have been shown capable of violence, and there's a genuine existential threat looming. There absolutely is violence in the show (a disproportionate amount of which ends up in the trailers), but as often as not the conflicts that arise are navigated by other means.
It's visually beautiful, it's clever, it's thoughtful, and it's smart. It's comparatively light on special effects, though, and like I say, it's in Swedish, and hard to find in English, so sadly, No Hugo For You, Äkta Människor. But if you navigate the Torrents, you might want to check it out yourself (for non-Swedish speakers, the Australian television version is subtitled in English). Or wait for the Kudos Productions version, I suppose, and hope that that resembles The Hour more closely than Spooks/MI-5.
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