Horrific New Drama From Steven Moffat

I try not to be topical. And if I put thought into pop culture, I generally like to draw on multiple examples. But you know, because it's there, I want to talk about 2022 drama (?) Inside Man.

It's horrific not because of it's grisly subject matter, but because of the strong indication that Steven Moffat has learned nothing between the end of his tenure as showrunner on Dr. Who, Sherlock and now this, Inside Man. 

What is horrifying, is that he can keep getting money, talent and airtime to repeat the same mistakes. 

Was Inside Man a success? Probably, hence Moffat can continue to skip the lessons. I mean I watched all 4 episodes because while it dragged, it certainly fucking dragged in the third episode, it's still short enough to get through like a 6 inch shit sandwich as opposed to a footlong. So from Netflix's perspective, I watched it all, just like somebody who enjoyed it.

It also strikes me as cheap, relative to a show like Archive 81, which was good, people watched it, including myself but apparently didn't hit a number to justify its cost.

I'm also not going to reiterate what has been thoroughly analysed as bad about Steven Moffat as a showrunner and producer of television by youtuber hbomberguy:

This is all I will add, because I can't recall if it was covered or not - but one of the big drawbacks of Steven Moffat is his propensity to convince himself that he's created a really cool character who is in fact almost unswervingly the opposite of cool and are often standing in the way of what we actually want to see.

For your reference - Dr Rivers Song, Moriarty, to a lesser extent Sherlock himself and now Jefferson Grieff.

It's like I get the impression Moffat intends these characters to be the Fons, Omar Little, Mugen, Don Draper, Harley Quinn, Selena Kyle, Wednesday or whatever. It's just that he appears to miss the feedback that the effect is Poochy. And so we get Poochy, Poochy and more Poochy.

And I'm aware this is the dangerous realm of the subjective, these characters almost certainly will have their fans. These fans we might call 'nerds' and the crucial feedback is, do the fans of your characters gain or lose street cred when they put their fandom on display. Are they more or less likely to get bullied?

So let's spoil the shit out of inside man, because anybody who does is frankly doing someone a favor.

Jeffrson Grieff is Sherlock and Dillon Kempton is Watson and if taken in isolation there's pretty much no reason for them to be in the show, even and perhaps especially if the show is named after Grieff. I could almost imagine Moffat watching Guy Ritchie's Sherlock movie where Lestrade says to Sherlock 'In another life you would have made an excellent criminal.' and Moffat thinking 'I've just had a brilliant idea! What if Sherlock Holmes was also a criminal...'

In 4 episodes, Grieff solves 3 cases from his prison cell with minimal information, and they are all examples of the worst kinds of Sherlock depictions. Basically depictions of Sherlock where Sherlock is brilliant by virtue of the cases being written for him to demonstrate that he is brilliant. 

Case 1 - the nonsensical payments. A senator comes to Grieff with mysterious deposits in his account for the same amount of money. The senator himself has already done the hard work of deducing a pattern to the payments which is that they occur after every time he has sex with his wife. Grieff solves it by claiming it all makes sense if you think about it or some shit. Even though, as a viewer, thinking about it makes it into nonsense. There's an answer, but it is unsatisfying. The wife recently learned that years ago her husband the senator raped a woman, and she is having sex with a rapist which her feel icky. So rather than declining consensual sex with her husband that she can't look at the same, she continues to have periodic or intermittent sex but goes to a therapist. Automating reminders to "pay therapist" but on her small screen gets printed as "pay the-rapist" with the big word broken down into two lines so she absent mindedly pays the therapy cost to her husband, then double pays the therapist. Satisfying? No. Brilliant? Also no. Probably not since Arrested Development made the 'Anal-rapist' joke with Tobias Funke, the worlds first Analyst/Therapist or Analrapist. 

But from case 1 we have Grieff looking smart by making everyone else stupid. Namely the senator figuring out the payments were connected to his wife, but gee, never thinking that they might be from his wife. The only mystery to be solved was 'why?' and having an answer, it was like a stupid accidental hypnotic suggestion caused by a line break.

Case 2 - A mother and daughter come to Grieff with a cold case of the missing husband and father. All the information necessary for Grieff to solve the case is contained in the video capture of his last appearance in public. Leaving an awards ceremony being the only attendee wearing a tuxedo, which is necessary for there to be any mystery for Grieff to solve - why no witnesses were able to account for where he went. The solution, rather than there just being a lot of people wearing tuxedos at the awards ceremony, to have him blend into a flock of penguins, there now has to be a Rube Goldberg orchestra playing next door that gets out and sends its orchestra members in tuxedos into a train station so the missing husband can blend in. Then Grieff deduces that one of the trains he could have caught at the only place he wouldn't be noticed was a train home, and so it was likely the wife killed him, which he bluffs having evidence and she tries to lamb it. 

So the whole case is a Rube Goldberg case where we have to assume that the police detectives wouldn't have done what they routinely do which is fixate on the spouse as a suspect. A suspect that managed to avoid being convicted in the preliminary investigation yet panics when presented with a photo of an award with dirt on it and basically confesses by attempting to flee.

Case 3 - is the main case, another missing person's case where we the audience know what happened because we are shown everything. Here is Grieff's brilliant insight, that if she is missing and has been abducted that a) she's probably still at the last place she was known to be, and b) her abductors will probably be confident they can enter her apartment. Woahhhh Woahhhhhhhh Woahhhhh Woah!

The expression 'no shit Sherlock' is not a fond memory of my youth. It's up there with remarks like 'Ah DERRRRRRRRR' and 'Run Forrest Run!' where they are pejoratives that say more about the mean spiritedness and over-confidence of the person expressing them, than they do of the targets. Like, stating the obvious or in the case of 'run Forrest run!' breaking into a run are perfectly understandable and legitimate behaviour. Like sooner or later, someone has to state the obvious, in a lot of situations for communication to advance.

But I don't think any show I've ever seen has so deservedly walked straight into 'No shit Sherlock' as Inside Man. Eliminate the whole Mr Grieff character and subplot, and you could replace it with the entirely plausible progression of events:

1. Woman goes missing.

2. Woman's friend gets concerned.

3. Friend reports it to the police.

4. The police ask the friend if she has checked her home or knows her last known whereabouts. 

As in, Jefferson Grieff's approach to solving "the mystery of the missing woman" does exactly what the police would do - call in on her house, and try and track down the last people to see her alive. The only thing impressive is that he manages to do basic policework from a cell across the Atlantic with a combination of criminal connections and, by the conclusion of the first season, truly pointless subterfuge.

The United Kingdom, where the woman goes missing, does not have any mandatory wait period before filing a missing persons report.

What is plausible, is that the police may not stake out the missing person's home, which Grieff employs friend to do with the help of a burgler. But as it plays out in the series, the abductor only alerts the friend to her presence through the coincidence of badly needing to pee. Without this circumstance, she would have dumped the missing woman's electronics in the apartment, and left without detection. (Except for the UK's ample CCTV surveillance).

There's one other thing about shitty Sherlock and that is his Watson - Dillon Kempton who like the original Watson has the near solitary function of being impressed by Sherlock come Grieff. But the most perplexing and stupid thing about this Watson is the roles embodiment of Tell-Don't-Show.

So not only does this miniseries positively, completely validate the sarcasm of 'No shit Sherlock' but mindblowingly gets past every person in the productions the question: 'Why do we dedicate valuable screen time to expositing that Dillon Kempton has a photographic memory, when it never ever contributes anything ever to the forward progression of the show.'

I will concede, it serves as a pretext for Watson to accompany Sherlock in a prison setting to meetings with Sherlock's pseudo clients so that he can fulfill Watson's main function of being impressed by Sherlock's conscious decision to not just explain shit but reveal it to Watson in dramatic fashion.

But it's just. so. fucking. stupid. to justify the character's existence in the script with his photographic memory (that does not work the way it is described) especially, ESPECIALLY given the way Grieff solves his cases - which is depicted as seeing something once like a photo, a video, or being told a story and figuring it all out on the spot before parsing out information.

All of which is to say, you can just cut the whole "Inside Man" out of Inside Man and just call it "Wokingham" a la "Broadchurch".

Rejecting the Premise for the Bones

The bones of the show is the 3rd case, and most of the shows intrinsic interest. Having someone solve a case for which the audience knows what happened can be super interesting - I'm thinking of the detective work in Misery, Deathnote with its ridiculous premise is also captivating reading.

It doesn't work in Wokingham though because the central crime is a comedy of errors. One thing goes wrong and everything unravels from there. Again this can be compelling drama watching incompetent people react badly as situations get progressively worse. Avenue 5 is a great example. 

Again, can you really spoil a turd? First we have the perfect storm necessary for an incredibly unlikely premise - basically a friend asks a friend to 'hold a package for them' to which it's hard to make a sympathetic victim for a substantial audience that know the trope of holding something for a friend. So we need a Vicar with an at risk parishioner, like a poor guy who has a psycho mum and a history of suicide attempts. 

Then once the Vicar agrees to hold a flash drive of pornography for his parishioner the comedy of errors can begin, or escalating commitment. Creating two points of potential interest that the show never capitalizes on.

The Vicar drops the flash drive in the key bowl in the front of his house. Then his son's math tutor needs a flash drive for some shit, and the son pulls out the flash drive and says 'here use this' 1. The son suggests the flash drive to the tutor. The maths tutor plugs it into her computer as the Vicar realizes the flash drive full of porn is about to be opened and charges in. His son, decides to do his dad a solid and take the fall for it. 2. The son confesses that the porn is his, feeling it is no big deal. The maths tutor says 'it just opened' which, you know, doesn't happen, but in the very fact that plugging in a flash drive with media files generally does not auto-open, though it might open up a menu, could in itself be a source of intrigue. But it isn't. The premise just requires that the flash drive plug-and-play its content.

The tutor asks to speak to the Vicar privately, and reveals that the pornography is child pornography. The Vicar tries to explain that the child pornography is that of an at risk parishioner. She doesn't believe it, believing it to belong to the Vicar's son - you know the son that as the bold above indicates: offered the flash drive filled with child pornography to the tutor, and flippantly claimed ownership of the material, without arousing the suspicion of the tutor that these two behaviours are incongruous with the content of the flash drive. 

This is important, because shitty Sherlock that we've already excised from this show, later characterizes the tutor as being a good judge of people because she has no friends, something we as the audience know to not be true.

The tutor panics, the Vicar panics, the tutor tries to leave, the Vicar tries to detain her and through clumsiness and fear, the tutor winds up falling down a flight of stairs into the cellar/basement, where the Vicar detains her.

It's not great, but at this stage its forgivable as an elaborate, implausible, set up to an 'in too deep' scenario. Escalation of commitment.

Moffat misses the first big opportunity

The next thing that happens in the bones of the show, is that the Vicar reenters the cellar to talk to the trapped woman. 

She exposits the situation - that whatever the Vicar and his son's guilt or innocence, now he has assaulted and detained a woman in his basement, serious crimes. So there's no way he can let her go, because she would have too much leverage over him. He basically has to kill her, and she knows it, and she also knows there's a ticking clock, because sooner or later she'll be noticed as missing and the inevitable investigation will inevitably bring the police to the Vicar.

This is kind of the 'checkmate in 7' scene where murderer actually is motivated by self, and family preservation but has no real desire to kill trapped woman. 

Skipping forward ahead, he is googling symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning. Basically his method of attempted murder, and anybody who actually has an interest in crime, should be familiar in cases leading to convictions where people have googled 'how to dispose of a body' and 'how to create alibi' etc. Which is all to say, any question that the Vicar was eventually going to get caught has this obvious answer. His wife, an accomplice, actually points this out several times mentioning how the police investigate thousands of murders but they have to get murder right on their first time.

What would have been interesting, is if this calculus was accepted, both victim and perpetrator worked together to reign the situation back in. Unfortunately, Janice the victim has to remain adamant in her conclusion that the child pornography belongs to her student that willingly handed her the disk and then near unabashedly claimed it as his own. 

And when the son winds up in the basement with Janice asking her directly what was on the disk that changed everything, Janice refuses to answer. 

Many dramas hinge on this irrational behaviour - virtually every episode of 'Death In Paradise' relies on someone eventually confessing 'the reason I didn't say anything earlier was I was worried you'd find out I had overdue videos governor!' Basically people not divulging what they know, because if they did, the drama would resolve.

There was a juicy challenge their Moffat backed away from, likely because a) he was trying to make some profound point about how anyone in the wrong circumstances could become a murderer, even a nice lovely Vicar. and b) he was obsessed with Janice being another Fonz character.

Bringing me to...

Moffat misses the second big opportunity

Why did I finish the 4 episodes if it was so bad? A brief perusal of Rotten Tomatoes audience reviews reveal many testimonials as to when viewers tuned out. Mostly after the first episode.

Now, there's a conundrum when somebody incompetent tries to write a badass. And Moffat created in hindsight, an unintentional mystery box. At face value, there is no tension. The Vicar and his wife are trying to get away with a crime they are not going to get away with. Police are already sniffing around, that their lives are destroyed is a given. The only question is when, with some effective ticking clock elements like Ben being trapped in the basement being carbon monoxide poisoned with the lady, and is his Vicar dad just upstairs going to figure it out in time. Will he turn himself in before or after she is dead?

And keeping in mind, shitty sherlock is an entirely redundant waste of space character if the show plays out as it indicates it will.

But around episode 3, I started to wonder if Janice was in fact a super-villain that had created the whole situation. The question becomes 'is this potentially really good, or as actually bad as it appears' odds are, after Sherlock and Dr Who, Moffat is not playing 3 dimensional chess, he just is more conceptually ambitious than he can actually execute.

But the non-sensical elements were all seeming to align in an actual intriguing question - was Janice a misanthropic psychopath seeking to destroy a family, possibly to steal a child for herself?

It could explain her ignoring the behavioural evidence that the child pornography did not belong to the Vicar's son. It could explain her attempts to turn the Vicar and his wife against each other to no end that resolved in her being freed. It could explain why she basically denied the Vicar and his wife any resolution that didn't involve killing her. Most importantly it could explain why shitty Sherlock was in the show at all.

The Vicar is highly sympathetic as cast, performed and written, even if he does make illogical choices. So probably by accident, we have this situatin where the Vicar seems like a good guy in a bad situation, and Janice through her adamant unwillingness to hear the Vicar out, and her manipulative behaviour directed at the Vicar, his wife and his son, she doesn't come across as a Catherine Martin from silence of the lambs. 

So I'm waiting, I'm waiting for the big reveal where evil Janice's plan to corner the Vicar in a horrendous crime implicating his wife as an accessory and turning the son against the parents. Where it is revealed possibly that there was no child pornography (which didn't really work since Edgar refused to claim it was his when the Vicar tried to record him retaking possession) or that upon seeing the child pornography and being almost as brilliant as shitty sherlock in prison, saw an opportunity to get the son away from the parents, situation escalated but Janice saw an even better opportunity to get what she wants or something and how did Grieff deduce all this from a blurry photo sent via messenger to a friend that happened to be interviewing him at the time.

But no. Moffat missed that, and I suspect, Janice is just meant to come across as Catherine Martin, a complete victim just trying her best to survive. She is bashed to death by a delirious Vicar's son with a hammer, and to some degree - her irrational conclusion that the child pornography belonged to her student is the cause of the whole predicaments escalation - with the Vicar's agreeing to 'hold onto a package for a friend' becoming just a moronic 'not even once' style morality play.

One Good Interesting Thing

"Man Inside" is fully compliant with diversity, despite the two leads being beloved straight white men. As such, we get a strange scene where two police investigators turn up at the Vicars house to discuss the contents of his parishioner's suicide note which mentions him by name. 

It's a black woman and a white person of indeterminate gender.

The plot requires the scene to be tense, because despite their being at least another 1 hour episode, it would be far more interesting if the suicide note claimed ownership of the child pornography, Janice admitted she jumped to a potentially life destroying conclusion about the Vicar's son. And then they have to negotiate a way out of this potentially deadly misunderstanding, all because Janice is incredibly bad at reading people - much like shitty sherlock.

The suicide note actually says 'Don't believe the Vicar about the child pornography, he is covering for someone' further escalating the situation because now the Vicar doesn't have the out of taking the fall for his son.

Because of the degree to which the police investigators read as queer, like a fem-butch couple, and their role in the plot of ratcheting up the pressure on the Vicar by jumping to their own conclusions, they come across as a kind of role-reversed queer gestapo. 

It can't be said to be good, because this is what a lot of alt-right conspiracy theorists are afraid of with the whole 'grooming' take on Drag story time hour or whatever. In this sense, Moffat's big idea of 'everyone's a potential murderer, even this nice caring Vicar...' kind of backfires, because the straight white male comes across often as a sympathetic victim of circumstance, because that's precisely what the series suggests we are supposed to feel.

But that makes everyone else on the periphery the Vicar's antagonist, and so they all come across as mean and threatening, and that's how you paint yourself into queer gestapo.

There's an opportunity to empathise, say, with the Sydney homosexual community who were routinely murdered in the 60s and 70s and the police refused to investigate having prejudged them as less than human. The role reversal or reversal of power-dynamic where instead of the clergy threatening gays and lesbians with eternal damnation, it was queer-reading police turning the thumbscrews on the Vicar.

Now, I just say it was again probably unintentionally visually interesting, likely highly unrealistic (because the whole show is unrealistic) scene. Keeping in mind, that role reversal exercises often make intuitive sense, but have not been demonstrated to be effective like Jane Elliot's improvised 'blue eyes/brown eyes' experiment.

So the scene is merely interesting, one of the only scenes that remains interesting after the conclusion of the season.

Why does it matter that Inside Man is shit?

Okay, well let me just throw out a hyperbolic controversial statement:

You can't be a nerd, and progressive.

Definitions - nerds are characterized by a lack of imagination. They are easily impressed. Get a bunch of nerds into a focus group and you've wasted your time. We know what nerds want, they want more.

Progressive is more difficult to define. Like slave-owner Thomas Jefferson is a progressive, in the technical sense, and if you are reading this and consider yourself a progressive, know that Jefferson was a progressive waaaaaaaay before you got to it.

But I will proffer a partial definition that covers in entirety the relevance to Inside man and nerds. A progressive is concerned about growing wealth and income inequality, and views shrinking income inequality as progress.

Why does HBO release House of the Dragon? Why does the MCU pump out films about fan favourites like Shang Chi and the Ten Rings, the Eternals, Hawkeye, Moon Knight, Wandavision, Ms Marvel and She Hulk? Why does Amazon drop a bajillion dollars on Rings of Power? Why Solo: A Star Wars Story? Why Fantastic Beasts: The Wizards were too busy to prevent the Holocaust? 

Because. Nerds. Want. More.

They don't broadly speaking, try new things, and when they do they don't appraise them as good or bad. So nerds, the vast majority of whom are relatively poor, give to the rich. If you create an IP that can get the attention of nerds, you are basically set for life.

And Moffat got the attention of Dr Who nerds, and then made Sherlock. And there's a place that is perfect for a man of Moffat's talents, a safe haven for nerds called the CW, makers of fine Moffat standard programming like the Arrowverse. Where people tune in season after season to speculate on who can run faster than the flash this season - Reverse Flash, Zoom, Savitar... at which point I said 'no more' but sufficient people said 'more' and there's like 9 seasons, you know, like Seinfeld.

The true horror of 'Inside Man' is that Moffat doesn't have to learn anything, he isn't growing. If anything he is decaying. Resurrecting Sherlock and Watson, River Song into a new shittier show. 

Youtube is near saturated with critics of Moffat, that have picked apart his projects with varying degrees of validity. Many of them wind up becoming professional youtube critics, forced to watch the crappy legless products nerds demand because they can make a living reviewing nerd culture, even if it is only to complain. 

Some big players like Red Letter Media can declare they've had enough and stop reviewing nerd shit, but others like the Critical Drinker, Nerdrotic who hate everything Disney and Amazon have rehashed force themselves to watch all this shit because their business model depends on it. Shadenfreude of nerd shit has become its own genre of entertainment.

Some of these critics, particularly less angry ones and even progressive ones like George Rockall-Schmidt, Dan Olsen, Patrick H Willems come from a film-making background. If it was viable for movie studios to give them say a $35,000,000 budget and say 'you don't have to make anything nerds already know they like.' (as opposed to Disney's current practice of offering a $200,000,000 budget to some indy director and telling them they have to make some nerd shit and probably do as they are told.) Patrick would probably make some derivative piece of shit, and we know the Doug Walker would make a piece of shit, but some of them might make something good, something we didn't know we didn't have.

Like the sad reality of adaptations themselves. A Song of Ice And Fire was one of the best selling books across all genres long before HBO adapted it into Game of Thrones. Then its popularity exploded. There are more people I am confident, that have seen the Harry Potter Movies but never read the books, than have read the books but never seen the movies.

This isn't to say that books are superior to film adaptations, this is certainly not true of the Lord of the Rings, for example. Long boring tedious reads compressed into long boring tedious movies that are nevertheless the books on meth amphetamines, and look good too.

Kubrick too, I sense could take a book and extract some concept he liked about it and make something new. Unafraid to go "the hotel burns down? fuck that, he dies in the snow."

It more reflects that the entrepreneurial spirit is so sparse in the general population, that most people are not willing to invest in reading a book. But unlike a venture capitalist that sees something in Facebook or Uber and it blows up. The people that take a risk on a book, tell their friends and form a fandom are often punished by the eventual adaptations.

I think of horse races. Another of Melbourne's big ones has just gone by, the Melbourne Cup, which has its own public holiday in the city of Melbourne. Billed as 'The Race that Stops the Nation' it is the most heavily institutionalized gambling event in Australia. In primary school the teachers to celebrate gambling would run a sweep stakes were every kid could bring in a dollar, and they would get to pick a random horse out of the hate.

Having never won on my draw, I can't recall if the actual prizes for first second and third were a share of the kitty, or whether the gold coin donation was to finance smaller prizes and treats for all, like potato chips. Anyway, the thing was everyone wanted to draw the favorite. That or they didn't care at all.

People want to bet on the sure thing. They don't think, that longer odds might yield greater profits. This is a big unacknowledged driver of income inequality - the average persons behaviour that makes true 'to those that have much, much will be given.' 

If I slaved away on a screenplay, or album or whatever for twenty years and it was a big success, the capital generally doesn't say 'good job, let's look for the next diamond in the rough' they say 'good job, do it again, here's a mazillion clams.' 

Moffat should have already failed. He isn't the complete package. He has interesting concepts but too many times now, hasn't stuck the landing. He'll take a thoroughbred like the weeping angels that propelled him to fan favorite, and keep beating it long after it is dead.

I didn't watch Coupling to its conclusion, I can't even recall where the show lost my interest. 

Inside Man is short enough to get down. Like a mediocre sausage roll. Just as the possibility that it could subvert itself and be interesting kept me watching until the unthrilling conclusion that it was exactly as it appeared. 

And herein lies the problem. The show leaves us with the Vicar in jail, perplexingly on a video call to shitty Sherlock in his prison cell, having used subterfuge to get his own execution delayed at the same time sending some goons to the Vicars house after the Vicar had called the police and informed them he'd murdered the missing woman. 

In this sense, the whole of season 1 could be viewed as mere preamble, to a redemption arc of the shitty sherlock, now we have this Vicar character that we the audience are supposedly persuaded is only a murderer as a victim of circumstance, and presumably season 2 will give us backstory on shitty Sherlock proving he had some justifiable reason to strangle and dismember her.

Just as the conclusion of Lost, Game of Thrones and not sure if it's the consensus yet but Ozark I also nominate etc. can actually retroactively make the series preceding the finale shit, the reverse seems possible too.

Except it's Moffat we are talking about, I don't have confidence that he's even aware that he might have set up a season 2 like this. Based on what happened with Sherlock and Dr Who I wouldn't be surprised if he just gets obsessed with a short fat rockabilly character with synaesthesia that allows them to see the future (because why bother researching how synaesthesia really works) he thinks is really cool and writes every scene around them.

That's why nerds cannot be progressive. They lack vision. A simple exercise - who should play the next Joker in the Robert Patrick Batman movies/tv series? 

Nerds will name famous people. People they have heard of. The consensus of nerds will never be 'some unknown who is perfect for the role.' Some actor that has been busting their hump auditioning and awaiting their big break. 

The fact that the Inside Man got Stanley Tucci and David Tennant to sign on and fulfil their contracts and do a press junket, it got thru every possible quality control with all its mechanical problems and released, distributed, promoted. That's horrifying. Moffat is basically unaccountable, and just a high-profile example of a much larger problem.