Under the Dome: The Newest, Dumbest TV Adaptation Miniseries

I haven't read the Stephen King book Under The Dome, but I got the idea it was like The Stand in length and mildly interesting in its content. Mind you, I haven't so much as read even the critic blurbs about the book, so I'm really guessing what it is like. Recently a miniseries adaptation of the book premiered. I watched the first episode and almost immediately it was apparent that this would be a great study in TV as the Dumbest Form of Entertainment (which I know is particularly a Cantankerous Old Fellow and Pessimist discipline, but I do concur with it on many points). Within five minutes, a hyped sequence involving The Dome coming down around the small town of Chesterfield or whatever leads to a cow being split in half... the best part is that the cow is depicted as being a mass of undifferentiated flesh, as if your given cow in a field were made of 100% American AA grade steaks, and little else. This is basically the execution and guiding philosophy behind the show, as I understand it, and its greatest symbol. Send the anatomists!

I don't know if it was pure stupidity, pure laziness, or pure necessity which led to this hilariously maladroit example of cartoon special effects, but it gets better. The writing is atrocious. The characters are like what you'd expect in a Stephen King novel if he were currently a self-publishing erotica/mystery/fanfic author – or in really bad television. The plot, if it is reasonably close to the novel's (I hope not for King's sake) is itself a good barometer that Under the Dome as a novel is 1000+ pages of tedium: a mini-dome for your mind to suffer in while you fill the time between plot developments and intrigue. This miniseries is going to be a third-or-fourth-rate Lost, except as a miniseries it will waste less of everyone's time.

In television miniseries adaptation the book works out to this: little bit of characterization, then plot device is introduced, then show sputters about trying to create action and tension... then it becomes a huge bottle episode. A massive bottle episode, possibly the biggest and dumbest one ever attempted. In a way, one might even consider this art, not in a sneering 'populist vein' way – but as a true statement from this weird consumeristic world, where a cow being made entirely of ground beef is just this side of believable, and won't get an FX artist fired, or anger the censors (who as always are right on point: what really matters in a show where a guy's pacemaker explodes out of his chest is that the cow being split in two doesn't get too realistic or gruesome for primetime, but somehow remain cartoonish enough to get views).

I don't know why I am watching. Part of me thinks you need to eat a lot of shit (a.k.a - consume lots of mass media entertainment) before you can try selling your own. You got to get the spirit of the times right, and TV is still a grand social barometer, if a bit sterilized. It beats the internet, which can warp a person's perception of reality in bizarre and monotonous ways. But, to continue with the matter at hand, I am watching Under the Dome, and it is fucked. It's going to go down in history as a dumb bastard and, sometimes, amidst the ridiculous dialogue and illogical plot points, I enjoy it. (Eating shit. Gross. I really ought to rethink some things.)

My favorite part so far happens in the fourth episode, where a character who is supposedly a doctor or person with creditable medical knowledge tells a boy that an EEG machine "measures the electronic activity in your brain". A statement so broadly incorrect and dumb, so baldly and ridiculously wrong, that it got me to make this blog post about a TV miniseries in 2013. This show must be written by the texts of high school drop-outs. Fact-checking must have been outsourced to Antarctic Gerbils. It's insane. It sets a great tone for a show which may, despite its best intentions to be generic and dull, become a sleeper comedy of errors. If I look at it just right, it's the best comedy on a mainstream network all year: it got me to laugh out loud. There are all kinds of social commentary going on in this show: like how kids use smartphones (but only to take pictures of themselves right!?), or how everyone is secretly cripplingly irrational. This show has the self awareness of an invisible teenager and the attention span of a troubled child. It will never be glorious. Alas, we hardly knew it...

'Ok, Johnny Kidd, your brain is showing normal levels of electronic activity, what this means is that we don't know about this mystery of the dome at all, but we don't yet know if it even IS the dome so stay tuned while we whittle the device down into something underwhelming so we can keep telling human stories, like yours, getting your electronic brain activity levels checked, by me: a lesbian woman trapped in Small Town America with my wife and child all because of a Mysterious Dome...'