A few episodes into Black Rabbit, it is doing two things I do not like about almost any contemporary tv drama:

First, it is doing the moralizing thing. We’re introduced to a character whose natural place in the narrative would traditionally have involved bringing them into the action a bit later. But the writers felt the need to insert a beat where they don’t do much but position him on a moral spectrum so we can know how to read him later, where he’d have been a more ambiguous character. Once upon a time, sussing out this sort of character was part of the fun; now we appear to need to be told he’s “bad” for a set of reasons that are orthogonal to his organic place in the story, so that when he naturally enters, we know how to read his behavior and motivations because we’ve already been told he’s bad.

I think this is part “spirit of the times.” There’s a little reaction to the troubled white male antihero trope, and there’s a little bit of plain old moralism under new rules. Everybody thinks they’re better than old ’50s and ’60s morality plays, but we’re not: There was a brief window where moralizing wasn’t cool, but that window has closed and mass-marketed entertainments understand they’d better make their Position on Matters clear. It’s a source of some family discord right now, in that two of us are having allergic reactions to the moralizing even if our values are aligned with the moralizer, and the third doesn’t understand how agreeing with someone while feeling condescended to by them can be a thing.

Another part of it is related to my second issue with Black Rabbit, which is that you can sense the way modern t.v. writers are reacting to binge streaming and competing with phones for attention:

The old saw about stage actors moving to screen was that they had to learn how to pull in a broad style of stage acting keyed to the physical characteristics of the performance space, and become more understated for screen.

Now writers are learning they have to be more overstated and broad, because they know people are only half watching, and for plot-driven narratives probably barely watching until whatever is happening on the screen gets loud enough to get them to look up. Just go read an average recap to understand how little of 50 minutes of a screenplay is even registering with people paid to watch.

One way that broadness plays out is uneven pacing in the takes. Sometimes a scene goes on a little long, or a reaction is held a few beats over its natural length, apparently to make sure it lands.

I just got through The Task and it did that several times. A director who trusted the actor, script, and audience wouldn’t hold some of those takes that long or make such a point to keep the camera on a reaction. Writers and editors are dealing with an audience that is both six feet away from “the stage,” but psychically up in the third row of the balcony.

It’s weird, because Black Rabbit screen editing is paced like any other fast-cutting t.v. thing in the 21st century, but there’s this weird sense of friction or slowness at key moments when it briefly feathers the brakes to make sure the reaction landed. It’s like start and stop rush hour traffic, but for your brain.

I feel weird even writing about television because it suggests I spend a lot of time on it. I really don’t relative to any national average I’ve read about recently, but I think that’s made me more sensitive to modern norms: I used to watch a lot more television and notice the difference.