© 2012 by Sarah Stegall.

We are fascinated by the breakdown of the old order, and the rise of the new. It’s in America’s DNA: the first European colonists moved from the high point of what the current technology was in their home culture, to a world where that technology was no longer easily accessible. They went from a busy world full of bustling populations to empty, forbidding landscapes where danger lurked around every corner. Those who survived the transition learned to live with reduced circumstances, learned to live by their wits, and learned to adapt. Their descendants (us) may live more comfortable lives, but the adventure and the challenge are still part of our cultural heritage, whether our ancestors braved North Atlantic storms in 1609 or border patrols last year. More recently, war and economic depression have reminded us that even here in the Golden Age, what we think of as “normal life” can vanish in the blink of an eye. So it is not much of a surprise to find ourselves drawn, over and over, to recapitulations of challenge and victory in our entertainment. For decades at the dawn of television, the pioneers we saw acting out the American experience were cowboys, settlers, wagoneers, and sheriffs. The Old West was the most recent experience of trial and triumph in our collective memory. Nowadays the utopian/dystopian vision is found in science fiction or fantasy.

This fall brings us a new television experiment in social collapse. Revolution is only the latest expedition into the land of dystopia. Obviously basing its appeal on The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, its crossbow-wielding female lead clearly echoes Katniss of those novels (and movie). The high-tech world we know ends before Revolution’s opening credits roll, in a dramatic image of darkness engulfing North and South America, as the world electrical grid fails. Fifteen years later, the United States has descended into chaos and survivalism, where our heroic central family has set down roots and thrown up walls to establish a small compound in central Illinois. “Charlie” Matheson (Tracy Spiridakos, Being Human) is an appealing heroine, feisty enough to hunt for game with a bow, but soft enough to weep when angry or sad. A militia stops by to take into custody her father, Ben Matheson (Tim Guinee, The Odd Life of Timothy Green), who may or may not know what caused the Blackout. Violence ensues, Ben is killed, and his family is divided by kidnapping and strife. (More than one trope plays out here; it was not lost on me that this crucial scene involves a black man essentially enslaving a white boy.)

The remaining minutes of the pilot follow the usual requirements of quest drama; the heroine and her band of followers are separated from whatever solid base they had, encounter danger, treachery, and possible allies on the search, and finally hook up with Ben’s brother Miles (Billy Burke, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn), who may or may not know what caused the Blackout, but who is a formidable fighter. Indeed, in a highly improbable fight scene, he takes out ten opponents with a cutlass, some of whom are armed with firearms. Having proved himself a better swordsman than Errol Flynn, Basil Rathbone, and Tyrone Power combined, Miles reluctantly agrees to join the search. We are now set up with the kernel of a drama: a family trying to rescue a family member. It’s about as basic and fundamental a unit of drama as one can get, and it’s effective despite — or perhaps because of — its age and familiarity.

The idea of survival in a post-apocalyptic world has been a minor but steady theme for several years on commercial television. Not too many years ago, Dark Angel (2000-2002) showed us a world in which terrorists have created an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) which shuts down the tech world as we know it. Jeremiah (2002-2004), Showtime’s outing in this field, used a worldwide plague to reduce mankind to a primitive struggle for survival, in which those who remain must decide whether to scavenge what’s left of the old world, or try to start fresh. Jericho (2006-2008) took place in a post-nuclear future. Dollhouse (2009-2010) ended twice with episodes set in a broken future. The Walking Dead (2010-2012) uses a zombie plague to plunge its characters into calamity. Terra Nova (2011) ran a variation on the dark-future theme by sending its protagonists from a dysfunctional future into an alternate past, where high technology was used to confront a primitive world. Usually, however, the grim world in which the scenes of post-apocalyptic drama are played out is a post-technological world. The current contender in that category is TNT’s Falling Skies (2011-2012), which uses an alien invasion as the explanation for the breakdown of the world. In all these stories, including Revolution, the backdrop is the same: loss of a golden past in which life was more comfortable, safe, and predictable.

The cycle of history may not, however, fit the needs of television. In history, cultures moved to new frontiers, lost much of the old culture, built a new one, and prospered. An episodic series depends on one test succeeding another. If Falling Skies finds a way to defeat the aliens, or Revolution finds a way to get the lights back on, the intensity of the drama, and the interest of the audience, will plummet. That’s one reason Wagon Train was on the air for nine years, but never actually reached California: achieving the series’ stated goal would be anticlimactic. We are far more interested in watching the way people struggle to adapt to a new way of life, find ways to duplicate or compensate for lost technology, and most of all we love to see them meet the unpredictable. No one could have foreseen that the European model of the imperial state, based on land scarcity, would utterly fail in the New World, where disgruntled settlers could simply pack up and move over the horizon. Shifting values led to the rise of democracy which, despite some ties to the ancient Greek model, was really a new social construct.

Television, however, thrives on the familiar, so none of the TV shows that deal with dystopia really address serious issues of scarcity or culture loss. In Revolution, people have “regressed” to using flintlocks and swords, apparently because electricity no longer works. The producers seem to think that losing electricity would regress American society to the 17th century — the fights in the pilot are conducted mainly with crossbows, bows, flintlocks, and swords. This is ridiculous; the cartridge was invented well before the widespread adoption of electricity. We should see a society regressed to, say, the era of Wagon Train, not the 1600s. There are plenty of people walking around today who can make bullets, load cartridges, and build firearms; there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Just because ammo may not be factory-made anymore does not mean it won’t be possible to make it. The real American Revolution was fought with muskets, and the soldiers cast their own lead bullets.

Shows like Falling Skies handle the loss of history a little better, possibly because its protagonist, Tom Mason (Noah Wyle, the Librarian series) is actually a history teacher who can at least remember some of these lessons. He’s not smart enough to keep his troops from wasting ammunition at an alarming rate, but he at least knows which social structures will work in the long run, and which ones will not. He supports military authoritarianism when it’s appropriate, and democracy when it’s appropriate. Terra Nova, which failed on other grounds, made a feeble attempt to introduce political conflict between an authoritarian dictator and a cop, but those two figures are too much on the same side to make good antagonists. All too often, producers are baffled at how to actually portray how a technological society might fare when its base has been yanked out from under it; frequently, as in Terra Nova, they fall back on soap operas to engage the viewer. This turns an otherwise intriguing premise into pablum, and loses viewers by the millions. I remember when Lost, a quintessential loss-of-technology drama, lost me: it was when the castaways discovered an underground warehouse, thereby eliminating any struggle for survival. After that, the show became a soap opera with flashbacks, more concerned with the relationships among the characters than with where tomorrow’s next meal was coming from.

Dystopias also function as commentary on current cultures, from George Orwell’s 1984 to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, both of which have been made into significant movies or television. Readers (and viewers) are seldom fooled by the camouflage, and recognize controversial themes. Television, dependent as it is on advertising and government sanction (the FCC controls some content), avoids controversy, and so we usually get a broken-future story in which most energy is expended on figuring out who is sleeping with whom. Revolution and Falling Skies both go down that road, but for now, both are showing faint signs of addressing political issues (dictatorship, martial law). Falling Skies has even focused on developing new technology (the alien-busting bullets), rather than scavenging the old. As such, it is more in the American tradition of make-do, make-new than Revolution, which after one episode is showing us only a search-and-rescue scenario with crossbows (a high-maintenance weapon made with carbon-fiber materials), married to a whodunit mystery. I don’t really care who turned off the lights, or why. I really don’t want to see the lights get turned back on in Revolution. I want to see something new, not a return to the past. I want to see human ingenuity tested, not a scavenger hunt among the ruins.

The fall-from-grace scenario harks back not just to our earliest literature (the fall from Eden in Genesis comes to mind), but to a universal human experience: birth. We leave a place where we are safe and all needs are met, and are thrust into a harsh and uncompromising world. All humans have to face this, one way or the other, and dystopian future stories are an externalized version of that experience. The only way to resolve them, however, is to go forward into a future we make with our own hands, not to go back to the one we left. I hope Revolution turns into a challenging show about a brave new world, and the struggle to accommodate it. Alas, I fear it will only recycle old fears, old conflicts, and old tropes. Our brave new world still awaits us.