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I've been experiencing a kind of artistic over-stimulation, lately. There are so many good stories in the world, and they are all so different and so vivid. I've spent my entire life thinking about stories, in some form or another. All of those thoughts - mine and others' - are getting stuck inside me, gunking up the gears until everything I see is a snowblind, too-bright blur.
In times like these, I find it helps to get small, and specific, and little bit self-indulgent - so I'm going to have a ramble about Class, and what I'd do to fix it.
Class is a 2016 Doctor Who spin-off about a group of plucky teenagers who get drafted into dealing with a space-time rift in their high school, because the Doctor seemingly can't be bothered to do it himself. It owes a lot of its DNA to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, my favourite TV show in the world. Class got cancelled after one series, largely because nobody watched it. Admittedly, the odds were against it: this was a point at which Doctor Who's viewing figures weren't doing great either (which is a pity, because the Capaldi era is a masterpiece). That said, Class also fails on its own terms. It is constantly on the verge of being good, never quite managing to bridge the gap.
And yet - in and amongst these lurching shifts in quality, Class frequently manages to be amazing. As media studies legend Henry Jenkins has observed:
The fans’ response typically involves not simply fascination or adoration but also frustration and antagonism, and it is the combination of the two responses which motivates their active engagement with the media. Because popular narratives often fail to satisfy, fans must struggle with them, to try to articulate to themselves and others unrealized possibilities within the original works. Because the texts continue to fascinate, fans cannot dismiss them from their attention but rather must try to find ways to salvage them for their interests. (Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Particpatory Culture)This is why the biggest and most long-lasting fandoms tend to be for stories that exist in that sweet spot of 'amazing concepts' and 'unfulfilled potential'. I so often find myself looking at a deeply mid piece of media and going 'I can fix her'. I've found people can misunderstand this kind of scrutiny, so I want to be clear that for me, picking a story apart like this is an act of love.
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Let's get the easy one out of the way: Class' production design is just not great, and the Shadow Kin in particular do not work. The base design is very generic and while the bright orange eyes do make them more visually distinctive, the overall effect ends up a bit cartoonish. These are our main villains, so their lack of presence is fatal. This problem is compounded by Corakinus, their leader, who has a weird reverb effect on his voice that renders all of his dialogue borderline incomprehensible. I am not exaggerating here - I found myself zoning out for every single scene he was in because I could not understand a word he was saying. This is a catastrophic trait for your arc villain to have - and it's just him! They don't do this for any other Shadow Kin characters! Baffling!
There's too many goddamn characters in this show. Let's count them, shall we?
A main cast of six is a little unwieldy, but ultimately manageable. Except we also have April, Tanya, and Ram's parents to contend with as secondary characters. And also the dubiously-moral headmistress. And also the villains. In eight forty-five-minute episodes.
This is the show's single biggest problem. Every episode (including the finale!) has a couple of characters who are just standing around in the background of the climax, contributing nothing. Worse: it's hard to write dialogue for this many people at once, so they inevitably get split up into smaller groups - the upshot of which is that they come across less as a group of friends and more as a collection of people who loosely know each other. In the latter half of the series, a lot of the drama hinges on the dissolution of these relationships - and it just doesn't land. I'm not thinking 'is this the end of the group? can they come back from this?', I'm thinking 'damn, I guess that's it'. No suspense, and therefore no narrative stakes.
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Buffy is a good template, here. If you look at the later series, the cast is about the same size as Class - but it built up to that relatively gradually, always maintaining a firm distinction between the core group and characters who sit more or less outside it. Series 1 overwhelmingly focuses on Buffy, Giles, Xander, and Willow - with enough distinct relationships within those four to create a tight-knit web. This is what Class is lacking: that sense of interconnected-ness. A consequence of this is that it's harder to find the dynamics that really sing. Tanya and Quill interact properly for the first time in the final episode of the series - and it's electric. Maybe they would've figured this out earlier if the cast was smaller. I'm gutted that they didn't.
I feel a little bad suggesting this because there's something to like in everyone but... here's how I'd do it.
First: age up Tanya, give her most of April's plotlines, and cut April. Tanya's actress, Vivian Oparah, doesn't really pass for a fifteen-year-old anyhow. (My ulterior motive for suggesting this: Oparah is the strongest actor in the cast, and gets grievously little to work with.)
Second: cut Matteusz, and have Charlie date Ram instead.
Bam, you've created a much more tight-knit group with relatively few rewrites. The only real casualty would be the April/Ram romance (and I must admit that that never did much for me in the first place). The single biggest bonus, though, is the amount of runtime it would free up. Which leads us to...
The single biggest tragedy of Class is that it didn't get enough time. I would've loved to see what the creators would've done with a second series, or even just with a longer first series. Everyone under the sun is bemoaning the loss of a good old 22-episode series, so I won't spend too long on that. Suffice to say: filler actually plays a vital narrative role and I wish contemporary TV shows had more of it.
As is always the case with this show, though, it's half unfortunate circumstances and half unforced errors. Every episode feels a little baggy at the edges, full of sequences that last fractionally too long and/or don't contribute much to the overall story. Then we reach the final 5-10 minutes and suddenly a thousand things are happening at once, with a speed that feels overstuffed at best and nonsensical at worst. In every case, I suspect that just one additional draft would have done the trick.
There's also pacing issues on a macro level. As I mentioned earlier, a lot of the late-series drama involves the messy implosion of pretty much every relationship the show has established. This is some Buffy the Vampire Slayer series 6 stuff: everything is awful, everyone is self-destructing, the fabric of the show itself is falling apart. I really respect the writers' impulses here - series 6 is my favourite part of Buffy! Crucially, though, you can't really do it without the preceding five series. The escalation is all off - it feels less like a horribly inevitable final domino and more like chaos. I can't really fault the writers, though. I'm glad they didn't hold anything back, because this was all the time they got.
Like I said at the beginning: Class gets so much right. Impressively, every single member of the main cast gets something interesting to grapple with at some point. The characters are delightfully jagged and messy - especially Quill, who really stole the show for me. It never pulled its punches. Its (often ill-conceived) messiness meant that I could never quite predict what was going to happen next. To borrow a phrase from Monsterhearts, it kept the story feral.
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The epitome of this: the Chekov's gun of the show is the Cabinet of Souls, and whether or not Charlie will use it. The Cabinet contains the spirits of Charlie's people, which can be weaponised and fired at another species - destroying the souls in the process. It's an afterlife-slash-doomsday-weapon, which is, frankly, an absolute banger of a concept. Throughout the series, we're teased with a fairytale: if the Cabinet is used in the right circumstances, by the right person, it can bring the souls back to life. Spoiler: this never happens. Charlie uses the Cabinet to destroy the Shadow Kin. The doomsday weapon is fired, the cycle of violence continues, nobody comes back. It's horrible for everybody. It's so extremely compelling.
I think about that Jenkins quote so often. It's a weird truth that if I'm good enough at my job, my work will never generate the kind of intense fandom that something more slapdash can. It's a little galling and a little humbling and a little comforting, all at once. What strikes me, looking back at this, is the balance between excess and constraint. Class errs a bit too hard towards the former, yes, but how can I hate it for giving me so much? How can I hate it for daring to spread itself so wide?