Notes on BBC Merlin
As a TV series, Merlin (BBC, 2008-2012) occupies a very interesting ecological niche. It’s the bottom feeder to Doctor Who (BBC, 2005-present), a show designed to scoop up anyone who isn’t watching the BBC’s flagship without, y’know, actually competing with it.
The BBC doesn’t need to compete with itself, but even for the non-BBC shows in this niche… Come on, you’re never going to successfully compete with Doctor Who. So you get this weird motley crew of low-budget fantasy/sci fi TV shows that are genuinely trying to make something watchable - but not trying all that hard. Other programs in this category include: Robin Hood (BBC, 2006-2009), Primeval (ITV, 2007-2011), and Atlantis (BBC, 2013-2015). A lot of these shows have interesting relationships with Doctor Who in their production history, as well: Robin Hood was designed to fill its Saturday evening slot between series, and Primeval was ITV’s attempt to replicate its success.
Speaking of Doctor Who: there’s an episode of fan podcast Pex Lives (I will seek out the exact one at some point!) where the guest talks about how a lot of modern television feels like it’s been writers-roomed to death. Everything is slick, co-ordinated. Everyone’s gotten together and sorted out their one cohesive vision for what this story is. There’s a lot to be said for this, yes, but it means you don’t get the strange, enchanting jaggedness of older programs. A dud here, a masterpiece there, something wildly off-tone around the bend. Merlin is jagged to its core - a brilliantly shot, intimate, heart-wrenching sword fight between father and son sits right next to 45 minutes of tepid fart jokes. How am I supposed to look away?
Merlin perfectly demonstrates Henry Jenkins’ point about fascination and frustration being the core motors of fandom: 'if media content didn't fascinate us, there would be no desire to engage with it; but if it didn't frustrate us on some level, there would be no drive to rewrite or remake it.' You need parts of the story to be good and parts of it to be fucking terrible. This, too, is a kind of jaggedness. High highs and low lows. A smooth surface is delightful to the touch, but it doesn’t give you any purchase. You can’t grab onto it, can’t make a mark without ruining what’s there.
It’s what John Fiske describes as ‘producerly’ media - combining the accessibility and easiness of the readerly text with the openness to multiple meanings of the writerly text (as originally theorised by Roland Barthes). To quote Fiske in more detail:
‘[a producerly work] offers itself up to popular production; it exposes, however reluctantly, the vulnerabilities, limitations, and weaknesses of its preferred meanings; it contains, while attempting to repress them, voices that contradict the ones it prefers; it has loose ends that escape its control, its meanings exceed its own power to discipline them, its gaps are wide enough for whole new texts to be produced in them—it is, in a very real sense, beyond its own control.’
I personally can’t think of a better example than BBC Merlin. Magic is homosexuality, except when it’s not. Morgana is a cartoon villain, but she also has a point. You can watch it without taking it too seriously, or you can spend entire hours thinking about its brilliant, tragically unrealised possibilities of character and setting (or quite how stunningly attractive Katie McGrath looks in her series 1 sword outfit). Is BBC Merlin good? Yes. No. It’s complicated - popular production, popular pleasures. The kind you only get when the story in question is amazing and shit in equal measure.
Also I’m obsessed with this Bradley James interview in which he compares having your sister go missing for a year to thinking you’ve lost your wallet. Thanks, Bradley.