Nice, but where's my f***ing profanity?

I was an early and unlikely fan of Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series. Normally I go in for hard-nosed crime fiction where at least five people die horribly before the denouement. In Smith's books, a very kind and overweight woman goes around solving mysteries of a less-menacing nature. People do occasionally die in these books, but never at the hands of depraved serial killers. If you like curling up with a writer like Thomas Harris, A.M. Smith takes some getting used to.

He has a finely tuned ear for West African English, which makes every character sound both simple and profound. Even the antagonists can be charming. This charm comes across very well in the HBO series of the same name, which we watched last night. The series is perfectly cast and perfectly written -- which is to say it matches the expectations of longtime readers like myself. As in the books, the pacing is pleasantly sedate, driven more by character than plot. If you have HBO, it's definitely worth a look. Smith now has 10 books in the series, each as good as the last, so we're assured of good writing for this debut season at least.

As an aside, during last night's show I was struck by another thing: This is an HBO series, but not one character referred to another as a m*****f****r. What's up with that? In fact, I'm pretty sure the writers didn't deploy any f-bombs at all, neither as verb, noun, adverb, adjective or interjection. Ditto the C-word. After years of shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Deadwood, this is a jarring omission. I predict a writers' strike at some point: Think how much harder you have to work when you can't pad the dialogue with obscenity. There were places in The Wire where the only words that didn't start with F were the conjunctions.

It's kind of refreshing, but this could be a risky route for HBO. After the suits fine-tune it we may yet see Precious Ramotswe beating up hookers and cursing like a drunken sailor with Tourette syndrome. What's the point of an HBO show if its scripts could pass muster on network TV?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sleuths are only as good as their sidekicks

Image
I recently read the much-lauded Wash This Blood Clean From My Hands , by French author Fred Vargas, and like many others found it quirky and engaging. Her deft writing left me happy to have found another series character to follow: Commissaire Adamsberg. But that's not what this post is about. I've decided that others do a lot better job with reviews than I do, and I hate laboring over my shallow insights only to find later that I've echoed what everybody else said a long time before. (And yes, I can hear you saying: "But that's never stopped you before." True enough. Nor will it now.) So, short version: Wash This Blood is a good book. Buy it. But for all the talk about it being "eccentric" or even "kooky," it does share one key device with nearly all other detective fiction: the sidekick. Adamsberg's reliance on gut instinct and intuition is sharply defined by the hard-nosed, scientific approach of his second in command, Capitaine
Read more

A farewell to copy

Image
On Friday I walked out of a newspaper building as an employee for the last time. During the stroll to the far end of the parking lot, I did a brief review of my career. Here's the high point: I've worked at newspapers that have won Pulitzer prizes. And the low point: None of those Pulitzers were won while I was working at the newspapers in question. Hey, I'm sure that's just bad timing. Of the half dozen papers I worked for, the best was the Philadelphia Inquirer. The worst was the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Mont. When you enter the cavernous newsroom of the Inquirer, you pass by a wall festooned with pictures of reporters and editors who have won Pulitzers. It is a measure of my love of journalism that when I looked at these pictures, I usually reflected not on the prize-winning stories they reported, but on the clothes they were wearing. Look at them: All these gifted journalists, photographed at the very apex of their careers, and most of them are dressed like t
Read more

Wall Street and Willa Cather

Image
I've been reading My Antonia , Willa Cather's 1918 novel about growing up on the Nebraska prairie. It's a beautiful book, poignant and uplifting, full of characters who reflect the truth of life in all its joy and pain. It's also an instructive portrait of the time in America when explicit toil was required for mere survival, never mind success. I've been reading it against the background noise of Wall Street's collapse, men and women on CNN droning gravely about the consequences of greed, and the need to ensure that the greediest of all do not, in the end, go broke. It's a complex issue. It takes someone like Yale business student David Bledin, writing an op-ed for the Washington Post, to put a human face on the unfolding tragedy. You think you have it tough; think what it's like for Masters of the Universe-in-training who now rue the rigors involved in chasing a seven-figure salary: "... once I could afford to splurge on a Zagat-rated "$$$
Read more