I Don't Believe Any of This
Milieu Creation, Internal Logic, Contextual Characterization
and the Abysmal Failure of the Herc/Xena-verse
By Jack Shaver
Every story has its own world. In the course of any serial fiction, especially one not taking place in the here-and-now, a complex milieu is invented. Everything in every installment contributes background to later episodes. The audience has to be able to immerse themselves in a drama and suspend disbelief to truly enjoy it. If the backdrop of the story is poorly thought-out, there is little internal logic, and the characters make no sense, immersion becomes impossible and enjoyment difficult to find. That is the greatest failure of the world of Hercules and Xena.
A richly-detailed milieu can be the salvation of an otherwise terrible writer. Anything by Edgar Rice Burroughs shows this. Frank Herbert's books are full of improbable, unlikable, busy people who still take time from their life-or-death struggles to lecture others about their shortcomings, again and again. The universe Dune takes place in is so detailed and well thought-out that it was still worth reading several times over the years. The beauty and grandeur of the setting was the only saving grace of a mostly horrid movie adaptation. Blade Runner is another example of a grand and immersive film world, this time in a good movie. And look at J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series; it's magic, it's beautiful. But if you ignore the gorgeous setting of Middle-earth, it's also 1400+ hundred pages long, with a plot that could have been wrapped up in 200, stretched over seven times the that space. The APPENDIX about Middle-earth at the end of Return of the King runs nearly 200 pages. It's more work to create a background so detailed that much isn't even referred to, but the result has enthralled millions.
That isn't the only way to tell a good story by a long shot, but the only good alternatives are an exciting plot that never stops moving or to make the ride so much fun you don't care where you're going. The best approach combines all three. The series of HERCULES TV-movies in the antediluvian days of the early Action Pack syndication package could have built on the rich background of Homeric saga available, but the producers chose to go another way. This is somewhat understandable, as many a terrible movie starring Steve Reeves and others had already fouled that path. They chose instead to portray a Hercules who'd fit right in in modern America, something perhaps easier for the audience to grasp. The adventure was more important than the background, as it should be.
Then the movies became a show, and the show is in its sixth season with a spin-off in its fourth, and they're stuck with an early creative decision. Instead of using the interesting, intricate background provided by history and classical mythology, they're reduced to robbing its corpse for names, and sometimes for freely-interpreted character ideas. It would be impossible to go into every way the mythology has been ineptly bastardized; even hitting the high points would take time, but I intend eventually to try. The fact remains that even if the mythology is irrelevant, the world of Hercules and Xena still makes no sense.
Why this is true is so self-evident that explaining it to someone who hasn't already noticed is difficult. They'd be right to say that realism makes for a dull fantasy show, but I'd say they're ethnocentric and lazy.
Where are all the cities? Why do the ones we see look like grubby little villages? How expensive are matte paintings or CGI backgrounds? More expensive than animating centaurs? Bull. Part of the appeal of fantasy or historical romance is the grandeur of those massive city walls - the exotic places and the strange people who live there. They're missing out on something by ignoring a basic element of escapist fiction's appeal. When I want a grubby little everyday-seeming reality full of shallow everyday people, I'll start watching NYPD BLUE, or SEINFELD re-runs.
On the other hand, I guarantee that both shows have a poor audience share in rural areas. The best part of a fictional world is the people; a casual review of history makes it clear that in any pre-industrial society, 90% of the people are farmers. But how often do our heroes walk past a field under cultivation? Do you have any idea how many acres it takes to grow enough food to feed a family? The area around the small villages our heroes frequent would be exactly where the majority of agriculture would take place. This is still true today; drive through the Midwest sometime. Only city people would imagine an ancient Greece filled with towns, rain forests, and little else. I would be bored if the shows became about farming, but seeing people plowing in the background occasionally would improve one element that reminds me what I'm watching isn't real. Ancient Greece didn't have tractors or chemical fertilizers, folks, and farming is labor-intensive. I'm sure that farmers of most eras couldn't sacrifice much daylight to talk to a hero about anything short of a marauding dragon or an invasion.
God knows invaders are everywhere. From Draco to Julius Caesar to the Horde, is seems like everyone with a bad attitude and ten nose-ringed friends organizes a band of land-pirates and calls it an army. It didn't take fear of violent death to make my dad grow up insecure about the future; just the Depression. It doesn't take one band of murdering marauders a year to make a population high-strung and hostile to strangers; one Manson Family ruined the reputation of hippies forever with my parents' generation. No king seems to control an area more than a day's walk across, and a land with this much constant warfare would be a horrible place to live, even if you could avoid the fighting. Fear makes people poor company.
The bit players of this world are the oppressed poor, who don't act oppressed, and nobles who don't act like aristocrats. With all the chaos and death going on every day all around them, I don't think the world-views of people Herc and Xena meet would be so much like our own. Contemporary Americans have it easier, and mostly safer, than anyone in history, and one of the things other cultures resent most about us is our inability to recognize that our world-view is mostly just valid for us. Our national self-centeredness seems the offensive arrogance of the rich; I imagine translations of the shows for foreign distribution are pretty amusingly imaginative.
Xena has so much blood on her hands she can never wash it all off, and I think she'd be the first to say so; it's hard to believe she can take five steps without getting in a fight once she's been recognized. In a land where everyone probably had a few relatives unfortunate enough to have lived in a village that got raided, warlords, former or not, would be so unpopular that Xena would be long dead if she didn't travel incognito or in the middle of an army; I doubt she can handle more than fifteen guys at a time. Neither show deals with the inevitable consequences of events very well, especially XENA.
Everywhere our heroes go, they walk in on the local king any time they like. Oh, I'm sure. Not only powerful, but possibly dangerous, celebrities like Herc and Xena do this, but we've often seen common folk with a grievance run in and accost the king amidst whatever he was doing at the time. I don't expect the protocol for obtaining an audience to be as complicated as having tea with Queen Elizabeth, and I wouldn't want to watch the process, but this is stupid. Go to any town today of over a thousand people and try to march in to see the mayor or city manager without an appointment. I'm reminded of a Saturday Night Live sketch "War of Da Woilds", where two shlubs from Brooklyn just ran into the Oval Office to bring the President a ray gun they got from Einstein. (It didn't work; the Martians were defeated by "joims".) That worked because it was supposed to be stupid. These shows are mostly meant to be light and fun, but they're not GILLIGAN'S ISLAND.
Little can be done about the good teeth and physical condition of the modern actors they have to use, but it ought to be kept in mind that most of the bit parts were working for a living before they wandered on-stage. When I'm doing manual labor, I wear ratty clothes because I'm going to get dirty. Costumes and make-up should be adjusted accordingly. And puuhlease conceal the tattoos and piercings. It's exactly the kind of thing the Greeks, worshippers of the body beautiful, would never do. All that stuff reminds the audience it isn't real.
Speaking of which, these "ancients" had an odd sense of humor. The episode of HERCULES that played this afternoon had Salmoneous making a reference to Peaches and Herb. Disco wasn't dead yet then - it hadn't been invented. This kind of thing breaks the illusion in the most obnoxious way possible. Especially if you don't think it's funny. That used to be the only kind of joke you heard. I have to give due credit for both shows moving more and more away from the original total reliance on illusion-breaking for humor. The jokes have increasingly used irony and wit appropriate to the context, and gotten much funnier in the process.
There's a fundamental problem in the wandering hero formula. I'm on the road a good deal of the time because of my work, and being a hippie living outdoors sucks; I can only shudder at the thought of having to travel on foot without a tent to sleep in. If I could stay home with all my stuff and avoid having to pack and unpack constantly I'd do it. I can't emphasize that too strongly; this is not the way a sane person would prefer to live. It does make a little sense for Xena to stay on the move - her former life left her restlessly searching for redemption, divorced from her roots, and people looking for revenge have a tougher time catching up. She probably has money from her raider days buried all over creation. But how in the world does Hercules buy meals and replace his ugly yellow muscle shirts? This guy who has no visible means of support would like nothing better than to settle down; why doesn't he? He doesn't even have a pack horse. Why doesn't he walk into town hungry and covered with leaves from sleeping on the ground?
With a new kingdom every 20 miles, would anyone be able to move around so easily? A war-torn land doesn't have border guards everywhere? Xena would likely always be unwelcome by good kings and bad alike because of her former hobby of destroying nations; who cares what she's done lately? And any tyrant with half a brain would have standing orders to shoot Hercules on sight. He has a long record of wandering around getting rid of kings he disagrees with. Even good kings would still be unlikely to be well-informed enough to welcome him if they didn't know him. A ruler with any sense would see past stories of our heroes' heroism to the fact that they're usually trouble for the king. Why not just shoot 'em or bar their entry to be safe?
All these things bug the hell out of me. I've not even begun to cover everything that doesn't make sense, but my drift should be apparent. At this late date the problems can't be entirely fixed, short of making everything up 'till now a dream and starting over, but improvements could be made. Really, at the basic level the people who bring us these shows just have to realize that quality isn't incompatible with accessibility. Stop thinking no one will know the difference; obviously some of us do. Stop having such a low opinion of the audience; it limits the demographic. More people would watch if they kept the fun but stopped being so lazy about putting some thought into the story. There's no need to interrupt the plot to explain the background; work in hints as you go. It's possible for a story to function on more than one level. Quality fare like HILL STREET BLUES was usually dumb fun as well as sophisticated drama as well as gripping adventure. Give us your best work instead of the minimum needed to remain employed. A broadened audience base is its own reward.