ONE aspect of the Streaming Age that gets overlooked is how it has affected The Bar. You know, the level of interest and perceived quality that a visual entertainment has to hit before you’ll consider watching it1. The Bar hasn’t necessarily lowered, it’s just changed—because the metrics of deciding what to watch have changed. Where once we had weekly episodes and three major networks, today we have all kinds of deliveries and all kinds of options2. Most importantly, since we’re paying for streaming services but not for specific programs, there’s a kind of mental state we slip into where we’ll give anything a shot since we’ve already “paid” for it.
Thus, I found myself watching Cruel Summer earlier this year. On the face of it, not a show I should be paying any attention to. I’m definitely not the show’s target demographic, but I firmly believe that genre or target audience should never dissuade you from checking out a piece of art. Some of the best books ever written were aimed at children or teenagers, or were concerned with teenagers and their problems. I figured I’d give Cruel Summer a shot.
And I was delighted to discover it is the full package: Wooden acting, bad wigs, lazy writing, and, most enjoyably, a plot that could have filled about two hours nicely streeeeeetttttcccchhhhed out to seven. damn. hours.
Play Bananarama, You Cowards
The structure is established in the first episode: We flash back and forth between the summers of 1993, 1994, and 1995. In the earliest part of the story, Jeanette Turner (Chiara Aurelia) is a sweet, dorky 14-year old and Kate Wallis (Olivia Holt) is the popular rich girl. Then Kate goes missing, Jeanette kind of totally takes over her life, stealing her friends and boyfriend and becoming a popular girl herself3. Then Kate is back, Jeanette is universally hated, and someone is dead.
The first episode is pretty effective. The flashing between timelines is disorienting in a good way, and while the wigs and other cosmetic changes meant to indicate the time period you’re in (aided by different lighting) are a little sad, it does succeed in setting up the central mystery: What happened to Kate Wallis4, and why is Jeanette Public Enemy Number One in the future5?
I won’t dig too deep into spoilers. The ultimate explanation for what’s going on isn’t a bad hook for a thriller, honestly. The flashing between timelines goes a little haywire and becomes tediously repetitive, but even that’s not the main problem. The main problem is the Stretch.
Every writer has hit that moment when they run out of runway. Some stories just aren’t meant to be novel-length, and you look down at the bottom of your word processing screen and see something like 10K words and you’re pretty much done telling your story, so you face a choice: You can type THE END and console yourself with having a good short story, or you can start stretching. You can add flashbacks. You can add side adventures that don’t add to the overall plot. You can add new characters who also have side adventures. You can remove the resolution of various conflicts and have characters circle back to those confrontations a few times before resolving them. You can remove obvious information and pretend your characters are stupid as hell, necessitating a lot of extra plot6.
All of these things, Cruel Summer ends up doing. And all of these things are bad ideas. This would have made for a gloriously trashy two hours with commercials. As a ten-episode series it’s a mess, and it’s a mess solely because of all the dancing the producers and writers engage in to stretch it out7.
The Algo
It’s worth noting that writers stretch their projects mainly due to the artificial and usually counter-productive demands of an algorithm. This has always been true, but the algorithm used to be more organic and less defined. One reason the modern novel looks the way it does is due to the assumed best practices people bought into—that you needed a certain bulk to ensure your book’s spine stood out on a shelf, that people would reject books over or under a certain length (too long, they’d be intimidated or exhausted; too short and they’d feel cheated)8. Some of these conventions were accidents—we’re stuck with the concept of the epic fantasy trilogy in large part because J.R.R. Tolkien’s publishers didn’t think they could print, much less sell, a 1,500-page novel9—but none of them were particularly necessary.
As a result, writers worry that we can’t sell a 40,000-word novel, or that a 12,000 word short story is a weird length no one will buy. Publishing a standalone sci-fi or fantasy book is almost unheard of because publishers like series, prompting many a writer to desperately come up with extensions to a story that probably wasn’t crying out for them.
Today, the algo has grown up and gotten a sheen of Silicon Valley-esque importance. And so you get things like Cruel Summer, which is most likely ten episodes long because SkyNet calculated that this was the ideal length for a series of this type. Watching this slog of a show you definitely get the feel the producers were told to come up with seven hours of TV and then worked backwards from there10.
The result is a story that sprawls way too much. It takes that relatively sharp premise and lards it up with too many moving parts—a duplicitious friend, mistaken identities, a school prank gone wrong, and broken marriages. Characters decide not to speak simple sentences that would resolve large chunks of misunderstanding solely because it would shorten the story, and make inexplicable decisions. In fact, the most inexplicable decision of all is the decision at the heart of the reveal. I’m going to put my thoughts on that twist in a footnote, so if you want to AVOID SPOILERS you can skip this11.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go write a whole separate essay on how terrible the wigs are in this show. I mean, like, terrible.
Next week: Squid Game’s masterful visuals.
Currently, The Bar in the Somers household is so low I am standing on it as I write this.
When I was a small child I recall watching The Dukes of Hazzard with zero ironic detachment. That’s it. That’s the footnote.
It’s always curious how fictions depict popularity in high school as a) essential to happiness and b) a commodity that can be acquired instead of a gormless aura that simply bubles up around certain people. This goes hand-in-hand with the ruthless caste system we’re told 100% totally definitely exists in every American high school where cool kids can basically murder people for fun, when in reality teenagers are all pulsing quasars of insecurity and pimples.
Ollivia Holt plays Kate as if she swallowed a bottle full of painkillers for lunch and they’re always juuuuust about to kick in. Which, hey, maybe is Method Accurate for the character.
Ignore the obvious answer, which is her heinous haircut.
Actually, pretending your characters are stupid is not a bad way to write a story.
This is a show where a mystery person spotted outside a house is teased as a major mystery and then later revealed to be a minor character who happened to be standing there for reasons unrelated to the mystery, a revelation that for some reason required like 135 flashback sequences. I’m not 100% sure about that number; I was drinking pretty heavily after hour 3.
The idea that “good” literature is super long is bolstered by books like War and Peace, which just goes to prove that Leo Tolstoy continues to reach from beyond the grave to screw us all over.
When I was like nine years old I wrote a fantasy story that was 90 pages total, but I still divided it into thirds because that’s what I thought you had to do. Here’s the cover I drew for book one:
I’m surprised they didn’t pull a David Lynch and just insert several hours of Chiara Aureliastaring into a mirror while cutting her wig into increasingly disturbing shapes.
SPOILERS, HO!
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The big twist is that Kate Wallis not only enters the home of Assistant Principal Martin Harris (Blake Lee) voluntarily, but stays there voluntarily ... for weeks. While the entire town freaks out and a massive investigation goes on. And it’s heavily implied that Harris enters into a creepy sexual relationship with the teenager, which is never fully addressed (although, to be fair, Kate is quite traumatized by her experience). She actually enjoys complete freedom for a long time, and it’s only when their relationship sours that Harris—worried that he will end up in jail—imprisons her. The idea that a smart, wealthy young girl would want to leave her home is fine. The idea that she had been groomed to think of an older man as her only safe space is sadly believable. It’s the length of time she remains there that feels completely unbelievable. Of course, this is a show that has its main character repeatedly break into someone’s home without offering even a faint gesture at an explanation for her behavior, just because it’s necessary to the plot.