The easiest place to start discussing Red Band Society is to look back (all the way to June) to The Fault in our Stars. You may recall The Fault in our Stars as the insanely popular young adult novel by John Green that was adapted into the very popular film of the same name. Although Red Band is the second attempt at adapting the Spanish show Polseres Vermelles for American audiences, there is no doubt that its arrival is meant to capture the much devoted fan-base created by The Fault in our Stars. At some point in the past year someone at Fox movies crossed the hall to Fox TV and spread the news that kids with cancer was in vogue, and here we are.
The story of TFIOS is one of young love and imminent death shared between 16-year-old Hazel Grace Lancaster (thyroid cancer) and 17-year-old Augustus Waters (osteosarcoma). The two meet, fall in love, fly to Amsterdam, visit Anne Frank’s house, weather the storm of families and sex and cancer. You know, young love.
Hazel is smart and observant; her narration is the guide for the audience through group sessions and overbearing looks from hard-worn parents. She is not cynical so much as defensive: she has cancer and one day it will kill her. Hazel’s story is not about cancer but perhaps about living around it. Augustus says he fears more than anything not death but oblivion. In statements like this we see both his charm as a teenage boy (which is palpable) and the sadness of a man living with cancer. The weight of the film is carried by inevitability of death and the drive of teenagers towards life.
Needless to say The Fault in our Stars is a weeper. My wife and I saw in the theater and we both left in sobs. Not because it is a great film (it is good, but certainly not great), but because children with cancer is a desperate and heart-breaking setting for stories of young love. The movie could have been trash and we’ve had left in sobs. I doubt we’ll ever watch the film again.
Which brings us to the new Fox teen drama about sick teenagers living in a hospital, Red Band Society. I admit here that I didn’t care much for the pilot episode of this show, but still I teared up at the conclusion. It is one of those shows. You know the ones, that are designed to make you feel sad at the moment the music hits and the kid runs down the hall on his way to the operating room to have his leg amputated?
For the millions of John Green and TFIOS fans, rest assured that Red Band Society makes no secret of its TFIOS inspiration. (A fact advertisers understand: ads for the Fox Studios DVD released just this week appeared twice during the hour). Replace “fear of oblivion” with “life is full of black holes” and things start to look pretty derivative.
Still, in the 42 minutes of its pilot episode, Red Band Society hit all the beats needed for a kids with cancer show. The story is told in “edgy” narration by Charlie who sees everything (omniscient because he is in a coma) in the hospital and tells us all about the regulars in the ward. There’s a sensitive boy named Leo who lost his leg to cancer; a scared new kid named Jordi who also will lose his leg tomorrow to cancer. A new arrival named Kara, a mean cheerleader who collapses in the show’s opening moments and constantly berates everyone. There’s a girl with an eating disorder named Emma who formerly dated the sensitive boy who lost his leg but they split and now banter like Benedick and Beatirce. There’s also the cool guy named Dash who gets beer and pot and throws parties and tries to get the new hot young nurse to screw him.
All these kids are overseen by Nurse Jackson (played delightfully by Olivia Spencer) and Dr. Jack McAndrew (played a bit too handsomely by Dave Annable). The plot of the pilot revolves around the introduction of those teens who will become the titular Red Band Society and the party the sensitive kid and the cool kid decide to throw for the soon-to-be-amputated leg of the new kid.
That’s pretty much the show. A bunch of kids running around a hospital and the adults who oversee them. A few surrounding characters come up, including a couple nurses, Britanny (the hot new young nurse) and Kenji (Wilson Cruz, who is great) and a rich hypochondriac who has an outrageously fancy apartment in the hospital. You could move these pieces almost anywhere and get a workable show: the distance between Red Band Society and Glee is very very small. Remove glee club and add illnesses, basically.
Red Band Society isn’t terrible like some have said, but it faces a great challenge that could ultimately be a fatal flaw. It is this: teenagers with cancer (or other life-threatening diseases) is a desperate and heart-breaking setting for stories. Getting audiences to engage in that every week will require extreme sanitization from the creators and extreme emotional capitulation from the audience.
The problem is that sanitizing cancer makes everything around it, like this show, seem at best shallow and trivial. I imagine each of these characters is worthy of a story as moving as Hazel and Augustus’, but the need to serialize and sanitize leaves us with a hospital that is so far beyond the realm of real world experience (at least for us in the middle states) full of kids who make for a depressingly average TV show about the same kids we just watched in Glee.
TFIOS faced this problem. One criticism of The Fault in our Stars was that the film was just too clean. Everything was glossed and beautiful and perfectly soft-focused. For a cancer-love-story there just wasn’t any rough edges. Even in the depths of the emotional dives Augustus and Hazel managed to stay just too clean.
TFIOS, though, seems downright filthy compared to the antiseptic Red Band Society. Everything about the show, from the camera angles and the close-ups to the names of these kids is designed to be as clean and unobtrusive as possible. Leo Emma Charlie Jordi Kara Dash. Might as well start a pop-music act. The ultra-handsome and ultra-sensitive Dr. Jack McAndrew is the kind of boring network TV creation that makes viewers long for cable.
At one point in the pilot the cheerleader/mean girl tells a volunteer who plays music for the comatose Charlie: “Your taste in music is so average it hurts me. Scoop some vanilla ice cream on your white bread will you.” Later in the show, when a doctor tells Kara’s parents that she needs a heart transplant and is on the bottom of the list because of her rebellious drug-use, the lesson is so average that it hurts me. And it’s so saccharine as to be nearly offensive.
In the opening narration of The Fault in our Stars, Hazel Grace Lancaster describes the choices we make in telling cancer stories. In one version of those stories (the false one) she says, “Villains are vanquished and heroes are born and beautiful people learn beautiful lessons.” This is the line that ran through my head every time the mean cheerleader appeared on-screen. The beautiful mean girl must learn her lesson. She is heartless; she needs a heart. Your metaphor is obvious; the danger is all wiped away. And that’s not even the most obvious bit of metaphorizing.
Say what you will about creative cleanliness of The Fault in our Stars, the film is not built around a lesson, other than perhaps teens dying from cancer is really fucking sad. It may be over-directed in its craft but it does not sanitize cancer. Perhaps Red Band Society will learn to walk that line, perhaps it will infuse surprise and life and danger into its premise, but the pilot is not encouraging.
If you sanitize too much then you’re left with just a bunch of handsome looking kids listening to motivational speeches and teasing each other. But if you don’t sanitize it at all, then what? TFIOS every week? No thank you.
