Imagination

I've been Netflixing some over the break.

That's a verb now.  (I've declared it to be so.)

Netflixing describes that sort of watching that has been enabled--or, rather, encouraged--by the patterns of availability of online streaming of television shows.  (I've been doing it over Amazon Prime, just as much as over Netflix, but we'll give the tip o' the hat to Netflix.)

One can't watch the current season of one's favorite shows on Netflix, so one dredges the catalog of available shows and wonders what calculus of licensing fees, popular demand, and bandwidth capacity led to, for example, the choice of only seasons four and five of Inspector Lewis being available, while the entire run of Midsomer Murders is on tap; Psych but not The Mentalist; or only two or three Jane Austen adaptations at a time (and never the best ones).

Still, one finds a series and watches it from beginning to end--in binges, if it catches one's eye or if one has some obligation to avoid, over a more prudent time span if it is merely enjoyable.

One could do this in the olden days, too, back when DVDs still existed.  But everything old is made new, and we'll let the young'uns believe that they invented glut-viewing.

I've been watching British mysteries, because I've already watched the entire run of West Wing (twice) and Firefly (seven times), and because when a nation decides it would rather have four well-written episodes per year than twenty-two episodes of, well, Castle, they do tend to crank out some decent stuff.

Also, the cliches of a different culture are always new to you, for at least the first several seasons, and even cliched and hackneyed dialogue sounds very fine in at least three-fourths of the different British accents I can more or less identify now.

In any case, once I started to get a feel for British cliches, I noticed one standout among some of the older shows.  They almost never end in armed confrontations, and even when they do, the arms rarely get used.

It's a very interesting contrast to American cop shows, which may, for the first season or two, play with different ways of creating tension and resolving the final show-down.  But if a show survives into the third season, you'll find the number and intensity of shoot-outs increasing dramatically as the series wears on.  (They run out of more interesting things to do, I guess.)

But Inspector Lewis, Inspector Barnaby, Inspector Lynley--they don't carry guns.  So they can't wrap up a case with a nice, satisfying shoot-out.  Oh, there's the odd villain threateningly waving around a weapon, the occasional deranged mass murderer whom the plucky detectives must confront without recourse to anything but their wits and their words.

Interestingly enough, British TV writers can come up with words for that sort of moment.  (The few times the writers of Castle have tried have been painfully cliched and strained the limits of suspended disbelief.)  Perhaps constraint--not being able to write in a shoot-out--is a goad to creativity rather than a limit to it.

Perhaps if writers of American crime shows set themselves a constraining goal--"Hey, let's write five episodes this season where the cops don't draw their weapons!"--they might come up with something better than "She wouldn't have wanted you to do this, would she?" at the pivotal moment.

Whether artistic creativity might be a goad to other sorts of creativity--the moral and intellectual resources to do something other than kill threatening individuals when they come our way--is another question entirely.

Or perhaps not.