Recently I watched Endeavor, the prequel to Inspector Morse. (The whole series is on Amazon Prime.) Unlike the original Inspector Morse, which is set in the time it’s made (1987-2000), the show’s time period is both 2012-2023 and 1965-1972.
You can see that best in series 5, released in 2018 and set in 1968. You can sense the shift that writer and creator Russell Lewis takes as a reaction to both the #metoo era and Trump’s first year in office. Suddenly the stories of people of color and women become more prominent, more visible. Was it the same in the 1960s? I don’t know enough (anything) about British history during that time, but American history says yes. Even the show references American history more than it does British: the show relies twice on the radio to end episodes, with news of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr and Bobby Kennedy.
But the biggest element of the show being made in the 2010s and 2020s is that it doesn’t entirely want to be a prequel. It enjoys the characters’ good points, but it avoids the flaws. It doesn’t want to watch as a depressed, lonely character becomes doomed by his regrets. Instead of seeing how those constant mistakes become an intractable kind of regret, the show bows out before it has to do that kind of dirty work. I felt like they don’t actually want to go there, go to the dark place where the character ends up, because then the story becomes too dark and scary, too real. It becomes a suggestion that his problems were not preventable, as they seem on the show, but par for the course for someone in his time and place.
Like Morse’s descent into alcoholism in series 8. He literally goes to rehab on the suggestion of multiple friends! Which, from my preliminary glances to the Inspector Morse TV Tropes site, does not hold. He talks about being worried he’ll die alone with a crappy liver like a murder victim in another episode, and his mentor reassures him this won’t be the case…when it will. There’s even a brief fantasy sequence in the last episode that belies how much the show has pretzeled itself into a romantic plot — all for a character that, in his initial iteration, can be described as a “skirt-chaser.”
Because really, it’s about a character wo has to make sense in 2023, in 1972, and in 1987, and the truth is, not even a time traveler can get away with that kind of nonsense.
The problem with a prequel is that the character’s fates are sealed. Why do we want to see a character make mistakes that we’ve already seen him make? Why do we care about seeing him make that initial mistake when we know he won’t ever learn from it? Unlike the Star Wars sequels, which let these mistakes leak into the next generations to be either rewritten or redone, Endeavor Morse becomes a character that’s not allowed to grow. Who is supposed to suffer because it’s his fate to suffer.
It makes every episode a little boring, unfortunately — because, after a while, what happens to the character doesn’t matter. It can’t matter. At one point Morse is trapped in an abandoned hotel that was the home of multiple murders, trapped in the middle of a snowstorm with a bunch of bus passengers who are increasingly frightened and confused, while he’s so drunk he can barely function, and all I could think was: I’m bored. I wished, suddenly, that I was watching a different show, a show where something new or exciting was allowed to happen, where I was actually worried about the main character’s life and soul, where I saw these characters again and they became deeper than cogs in the plot machine.
Instead, I believe the element of Endeavor that will date it the most is the fact that it exists at all. The writers’ and actors’ strike is partly to push back on the use of AI to reuse old stories, ideas, and performances, something that actor Justine Bateman points out in her interview with the Hollywood Reporter today:
“Is generative AI coming in the entertainment business to make better films? No. It’s to more cheaply regurgitate the past. And frankly, audiences have been conditioned for this; look at all the sequels, reboots and remakes.”
Bateman goes deeper into the systematic problems of streaming, and how the strike is happening at a key moment. Because the flip side is, after three years’ worth of sequels, reboots, remakes, prequels — and, further, spinoffs of spinoffs of spinoffs of reality shows, true crime documentaries, and so on — regurgitating the past isn’t working anymore. I mean, people are striking not just because conditions are unfair, but because the studios and streamers are running scared on the fact that they’re not making as much money as they hoped or needed to. People aren’t watching that shit. The pandemic made us captive audiences to the point that we know what to expect. We got stuck in an abandoned hotel, trapped in the middle of a snowstorm, with a bunch of confused and scared bus passengers, and we got bored.
One thing a friend told me about this year, which feels like a universal truth this year, is that 2023 is the year to expect the unexpected but also that things will take a lot longer than you expect. What I feel is that this is a key moment for society, just like with the strike, with so many jobs nowadays. This is moment where you don’t know what’s going to happen. For the first time in a long time, the moment feels totally unprecedented, and after years of rehashing and feeling trapped in one timeline, one forever loop, we’re ready for something new.
I wrote this on Wednesday morning, and more and more I keep knowing that it’s the truth of the matter, that it’s true for me and you and others:
“I think this is the thing that I’m getting used to. I’m no longer thinking the worst, but I’m not completely used to an uncertainty where things will be fine without me driving myself into the ground to make it so. I think that’s what really gets me…the fact that I can let things fall into place.”
Unlike Endeavor, we are not stuck in one timeline, hoisted by our would-be plotlines. Instead, I’d argue the past ten years are exactly what the next ten years won’t be, because of how many times we’ve learned our lesson. Because the reason we don’t have to drive ourselves into the ground for things to change is that we’ve already done the work. I’ve done the work and I’m not going back. The writers’ strike and the actors’ strike is not going to happen…it’s happening right now, and it’s continuing, and they’re not backing down. It’s not a question of waiting for change. It’s a question of changing, and waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.