Down with dark: why screen drama needs to lighten up

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/may/17/why-screen-drama-needs-to-lighten-up

Version 0 of 1.

When, exactly, did the work "dark" become a reverential compliment, as opposed to merely a neutral description? When it comes to drama, even comedy, it's one of the first words a critic pulls from their grab bag to denote moral complexity, sophistication, antiheroism, or a withering reproach to the primary-coloured banality of mainstream TV. From updated versions of Marvel comics to longform TV dramas, "dark" has been the thing: dark good, light bad, dark deep, light shallow. But enough of this decades-long, morose winter. Dark has become less of an investigation of reality, more a lazy excuse for male-oriented, gothic broodiness, and ultimately one that bears as little relationship to reality as the Monkees. It's time for the antihero to take a hike into the sunset – or should I say, sunrise?

The first defining moment for "dark" was Tim Burton's Batman back in 1989. Burton was a director who transported into cinema some of the daft, goth notions that overshadowed 1980s rock, from the Cure to the Sisters Of Mercy, like an inflatable Halloween Dracula. Burton initiated a new Batman franchise, the Dark Knight of Frank Miller's reimagining, returned to avenge the violent death of his parents against mutant criminals amid the jet-black columns of a Gotham City long past redemption by ordinary, civic means. 

This new Batman was considered by fans and comic-book aficionados to be the real deal and a long overdue riposte to the infamously camp 1960s Batman TV series, starring a paunchy Adam West as the caped crusader. (I'd argue that not only was the 1960s Batman more fun than its Dark Knight successors but truly superior, the product of a decade that was both visually and creatively bright beyond compare.) As the Batman series lumbered on and the baton passed to Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale, it only became more outrageously, feverishly implausible, yet loaded with dubious gravitas. The Dark Knight Rises even attracted accusations of fascism. The terrorist Bane, it's been plausibly suggested, is an embodiment of the aspirations of the Occupy movement; the order Batman seeks to restore has taken on a sinister, reactionary hue, a dark American fantasy of "justice" in the modern world indeed. Dark gone bad.

Reading this on mobile? Click here to view

Back in the 90s, David Fincher set a tone of Superior Darkness with Seven, one of a number of films in which Kevin Spacey showed how a fearsomely powerful performance could trump conventional, black hat/white hat cinematic morality. He'd later carry this over into Netflix's House Of Cards but before that, TV had already begun to emulate this new, bleak, antiheroic maturity with a cycle of dark, longform, acclaimed dramas, commencing with The Sopranos and culminating in Breaking Bad. It would be the height of foolish contrarianism to dismiss either of these pinnacles of TV achievement. Gandolfini's Tony Soprano, a gangster desperate yet unable or unwilling to come to terms with the psychopathic nature of his trade, was a frightening display of flawed, terrible humanity. Walter White's transition was similarly riveting. You watch both series as if you're hiding alone behind the curtains in rapt terror, as their violent events unfold. The Sopranos and Breaking Bad were also comprehensive, definitive. Their very success should have immediately triggered a moratorium on similar programmes for the next few years; the only spin-off from Breaking Bad itself is to be the comic relief of Better Call Saul.

But of course, that's not how telly works. In their wake has come a slew of me-too dramas, which have lurched between the well-made and just about worthy to the downright turgid, and in certain cases amounted to little more than excuses for veteran Hollywood stars to grab a piece of that TV-is-the-new-cinema action. There was the truculent Ray Donovan, featuring Jon Voight; the truculent Luck, starring Dustin Hoffman as an absurdly tetchy racetrack gambler and gangster, involving much mumbling in half-lit rooms; and there was the truculent Boss, starring Kelsey Grammer as a corrupt Chicago mayor, which never quite escaped the stigma of expecting Niles Crane to burst into the room in a flap about missing his appointment to visit the newly opened downtown doll museum. In all of these programmes, "darkness" was as much about an aversion to light bulbs as an existential mood. 

This visual descent into murkiness was also characteristic of Low Winter Sun, some of whose scenes required night-vision goggles to watch. Many of these shows fell victim to antihero fatigue and were axed but some survived too long, including the interminably hopeless Prison Break, Dexter, the increasingly preposterous American Horror Story, and most tiresome and unpleasant of all, the apparently indestructible 24. The New Mandatory Sombreness has infected recent British drama too, such as the acclaimed but ultimately silly The Shadow Line, created by Hugo Blick and featuring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Christopher Eccleston. Not only was this series hampered by UK "prestige" drama's lingering inability to achieve anything like naturalism, it also ended with the dismally downbeat yet daft proposal that an implausibly athletic Stephen Rea and his two fey counterparts were triumphant forces operating beyond the grasp of the law. As with so much of the New Dark drama, you want to scream at the TV, "Life isn't this bad! Well, yes, it is bad, but not this imaginary-bad!" Jimmy McGovern's saga of the ill-fated residents of The Street was similarly afflicted, despite its pedigree, as was Broadchurch, the unremitting Southcliffe and Prey, the recent Mancunian take on The Fugitive which managed to be both far-fetched and gruellingly mundane.

Although Breaking Bad was only considered the zeitgeist in 2013, it actually first appeared in 2008 and was conceived earlier than that. Like The Sopranos, it's a product of times that felt more materially comfortable and secure, the sort of times in which fictions about humanity's darker side can be more easily borne – Generation X's time. But now, here comes Generation Y. In a recent Grantland podcast, the head of the US network Comedy Central suggested that the success of perky shows such as Parks And Recreation was due to Generation Y's more optimistic outlook on life. However, every indicator is that in terms of job security and rising living costs they'll have less to be optimistic about than their predecessors. Small wonder they might wish to step away from the gloom, into simple, light escapism, perhaps, or maybe to embrace a new form of drama that is less grandly, self-indulgently despondent, more life-affirming.

Are there any hints of a sea change? The commissioning of the US series Gotham, about the early life of Batman's Commissioner Gordon, is not promising. Elsewhere, however, there are green shoots. In film, Marvel's franchises rely as much on their humour and badinage as they do their action. TV's Orange Is The New Black, meanwhile, about a bisexual woman imprisoned on a drugs felony, sees the heroine use the setback as a means to re-evaluate her life. Its title alone suggests the shift in tone urgently required. Then there is The Good Wife, an ongoing example of fine, female-led drama (see also the much underrated Nurse Jackie) providing an antidote to the overwhelmingly morbid maleness of longform drama (that said, lead character Alicia Florrick has been compared to Walter White). There's a great scene in the series, as yet unbroadcast in the UK – an ongoing joke about an intense cable drama Alicia occasionally watches. It features a soliloquising male, naked torso lit only by a flickering strobe, about to enjoy some action with a scantily clad female but existentially disdainful of it. "Sex… is a chimera," he intones. "I saw a crack whore eat her own arm. I saw a baby drown like a cat. Sex… keeps us occupied because reality can't be endured. Even this will end in smoke." There is Dark in a nutshell, in all its ball-aching, sexist prattishness. 

This hilarious programme-within-a-programme has been regarded as a rapid satirical response to True Detective. Yet even that show offered a change in approach. With its southern gothic setting and Rust's bleak, atheistic speechifying, the series looked set to descend into a bayou of supernatural intrigue, dark literary allusion and horror from which there is no return. Instead – spoiler alert – to the disdain of many, it opted for a more satisfying, upbeat conclusion. Rust sees a vision of the eternal struggle between darkness and light and finds himself, for the first time, touched by the light. This, TV dramatists, is the way to go. It's time to throw off the stifling, cliched, banal covers of dark drama and step confidently into the light.

The Good Wife continues in the UK on Thursdays, 9pm, More4; Orange Is The New Black season two is on Netflix from 6 Jun