Of the A Team, he writes:
In the 1980s, heroism only came from the barrel of guns aimed by incompetent men at similarly scattershot adversaries—because for all the gunplay, no one was ever shot. When these world-historically poor shots grew tired of wasting ammunition, they would chase each in vans until one of them found a wall in need of Kool-Aid, then someone would punch someone, everyone would laugh, and the day would somehow have been saved.
This contrasts with Leverage:
We want to believe that simpleminded evils are not, in fact, simpleminded, but that we've been duped by highly competent con artists whose methods are so arcane they can only be countered by other, more highly competent con artists. We enjoy the show despite the con because we want to believe such cons can't be understood and really just want some vicarious vengeance.
SEK does an enviable job of staking out and arguing a position about pop culture about which I think he's mostly serious. I'm naturally sympathetic to arguments that take the form of "x, if you think about it, is really a remake of y for a new generation" (I'll go to my grave convinced Good Will Hunting was a Gen X remake of Real Genius) and Scott makes his case extremely well. There's a very bright line between the people who do this sort of thing well, and people who giggle and "Aw shucks" their way through similar arguments and only succeed in making a pig's breakfast of the whole thing.* SEK always seems to be one of the former.
At this point, of course, I'm just waiting for some clever television writer to write the pilot for Hardcastle & McCormick in the Sitra Ahra.
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* Sad to say I'm frequently in the latter group. Boethius's admonition Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses is a phrase that's often on my mind.
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