Titanic

My god, talk about a goddamn snooze fest.

Julian Fellowes, he of Gosford Park and Downton Abbey fame, takes his obsession with upstairs/downstairs struggles and shoves it onto the Titanic. Not the worst idea I’ve ever heard, but it suffers from the same things that Downton Abbey’s later seasons have: too many characters, none of which are developed, redundancy in storytelling devices/choices, and strained soap opera-level melodramatics.

The first three episodes replay the same events over and over and over again, but follow around a different group of characters to see them played out from different perspectives. It’s not a bad choice, but it becomes dully repetitive by episode two, and we never truly get to know any of them, so we don’t care much what happens to them. We know going into this series that most of them probably won’t make it to the very end, but trying to develop about twenty characters in four short (are they even an hour?) episodes isn’t a smart choice.

Since we can only get to know and care about so many characters in just four episodes, and the fourth one is the payoff, some of these disparate characters must merge their journeys and fights for survival with others, and it can feel incredibly forced. Titanic feels like the penultimate example of elephantine entertainment. Handsome to look at, well acted for the (too) large ensemble, but incredibly safe, stale even, in its storytelling, Titanic is like all of the problems of the burn-victim-amnesic episode, and the following seasons, of Downton thrown onto a sinking boat.

Contrived as this series may be, you’d have to be made of stone not to feel even the tiniest of emotions when the fourth episode plays out before you. Some of the circumstances cause an eye-roll as the lazy writing essentially comes down to the lower your economic/social standing = the more noble you are, it still doesn’t dilute the impact of a father telling his daughter that they’ll just hold on to each other tightly as water fills the sinking ship. It’s a pity then that the series didn’t scale back and instead focus only on a smaller number of characters, dropped the lazy classist shorthand, and focused instead on developing strong characters with logical actions. You’d have to be pretty inept at your job to screw up a story as tragic as the Titanic, but Fellowes and company only come just shy of delivering a total disaster.