Unsettling Futures: The Rise and Fall of Snark in Science Fiction
A Subjective History of Quirky Dialogue
How did we get here?
From eager anticipation at casting news, to trepidation as early clips were released, to a messy reception once it aired, the live-action Netflix adaptation of Cowboy Bebop had plenty of ups and downs.
Its biggest memetic legacy in fandom is likely to be "Welcome to the ouch, motherfuckers!"
It was a line that seemed to sum up complaints that had been circulating on social media for the past several years. Dialogue in genre shows and movies, especially in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, had become weirdly homogenous. It was all snark and quips, and all in the same register, with the same pacing. It was getting old even when done well, and when done badly… well, then you got stuff like "Welcome to the ouch," a not-terribly-clever person's idea of clever dialogue.
A lot of the blame was laid squarely at the feet of Joss Whedon, the theory being that his signature dialogue had been imitated over and over and over. It didn't help that Whedon's reputation had been in free fall for a while. (Cowboy Bebop premiered in November last year, Vulture's 'The Undoing of Joss Whedon,' in which he more than confirmed his status as a self-centered jackass and bully, came out in mid-January.)
Whedon and Buffy are a big part of this story, but I think it's bigger than that. It goes back to genre and non-genre TV, to indie movies and British sitcoms and Hunter S. Thompson.
This post is not meant to be a definitive history of snark and quirky dialogue in TV and film. It's a hypothesis in the form of an essay – my view, from my perspective, of how pop culture dialogue has transformed over the last 40 years. It's one possible story of how we got here.
The Rise of Prestige TV
When television is good, nothing—not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers—nothing is better.
But when television is bad, nothing is worse.
Newton N. Minow, "Television and the Public Interest," aka the "vast wasteland" speech
Stories about the Golden Age of Television often start with The Sopranos. But we're going to go back a little further, to the 1981 debut of Hill Street Blues, which is among the first universally acknowledged hour-long dramas that was actually trying to be, y'know, good. And not just good "for TV." It was trying to compete on a quality level with novels and film.
It won piles of Emmys. It was critically lauded to the skies. It had shaky ratings, especially in its first season.
But it showed that there was a core of viewers who would rather watch something that was complex and character driven rather than The Love Boat or The Dukes of Hazzard. After this, "prestige" dramas started popping up on network TV throughout the 1980s and 1990s. There were multiple variations in this period, from gritty cop dramas like NYPD Blue (complete with butts!) to the "quirky" trend that gave us Northern Exposure, Due South, and Picket Fences.
From the point of view of our story, the most important show of this era is Twin Peaks, created when some network executives lost their minds and decided to hand the guy who made Eraserhead and Blue Velvet an hour-long timeslot to tell us all about murder, affairs, talking logs, and two men vigorously eating French bread.
Twin Peaks wasn't just TV attempting to be good, it was weird as all get out. And yet, people watched it! More than that, it hit the cultural zeitgeist in a way few other shows could match, despite its short run, despite the fact that David Lynch left after the first season, despite the fact that it didn't wrap up its main storyline (on TV, anyway).
And it gave viewers early exposure to an actor named David Duchovny, playing a DEA agent.
Which brings us to…
The Genre TV explosion
If you weren't around for the immediate aftermath of the debut of The X-Files, you probably don't remember how much it shook up TV.
Before Chris Carter's paranoid little show arrived, the science fiction TV landscape was largely barren. There was Star Trek: The Next Generation, and a few other syndicated shows, stuff like Highlander. A lot of it was made on the cheap in places like (*derisive snort*) Canada, or wherever. Filler crud for low-rated cable channels and local stations without network affiliations.
But The X-Files was huge! Sci-fi wasn't just for nerdy Trekkies anymore! (Or, there were a lot more nerds than TV executives had ever believed existed. Tomato, tomah-to.)
So there was a tsunami of copycat attempts in the early to mid-1990s. Most of them were just godawful. (Remember VR.5? I recommend a few self-inflicted blows to the head with a hammer to ensure you forget.) But when anything is successful on the scale of The X-Files, it can force a permanent change in the TV landscape. From this point on, sci-fi would have a place in the network TV landscape, and increasingly, it would be considered a venue to tell potentially serious, well-crafted stories.
This would be picked up on by the newest networks that were emerging in the mid- to late-1990s, UPN and The WB. The WB in particular would consider concepts that were a little bit outside of the mainstream, including SFF shows.
Which would lead to Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1997 premiere. But before we get there, we're going on a detour away from TV. Because if we're telling the story of pop culture dialogue, we have to talk about indie movies.
Royale With Cheese
The thing about dialogue with its own character, with verve, with a distinct authorial voice on TV in the 1980s and early 1990s was that… it didn't really exist.
Sure, you can point to a few exceptions here and there – the screwball high-speed talkfest of Moonlighting, the poetic interrogation monologues of Homicide: Life on the Street – but for the most part, dialogue was either bad, or it was pretty good, but that was kind of it for the range. It serviced the characters and the plot. Dialogue wasn't celebrated for its own sake.
If you wanted dialogue that was really out there, in the early 1990s, you still had to go to the movies, where the indie boom was in full swing.
In 1994, both Clerks and Pulp Fiction premiered, and those movies may not have a lot in common, but what they do share is that they are hyperverbal. They are about words, they are in love with words, they exist in their dialogue as much, if not more than, in their images. They are movies that jettison realism for a heightened form of speech. Who wants realism when you can have hit men talking about French fast food, or nerd diatribes about Revenge of the Jedi?
The indie boom of the 1990s saw a lot of these films get major distribution instead of being stuck on the film festival circuit, which meant there was an influx of new writers and directors into Hollywood's upper echelon.
One of those was Jon Favreau. Hey, remember Swingers? I saw it on VHS a few years after its 1996 premiere. I think I thought it was… okay, but not great? Mainly I remember how for years afterwards people would bray "Vegas, baby, Vegas!" and "You're so money!" Not at all annoying, nope.
Anyway. Favreau wrote and starred in the movie, which basically no one saw in theatres, but which was yet another indie that made its reputation on somewhat offbeat dialogue and characters, and launched several people, including comic book/D&D nerd Favreau, into more successful careers. This will, obviously, be important later.
Outside of indies, there was one key figure we should mention – Shane Black. A wunderkind scriptwriter, he cranked out screenplays for big action blockbusters in the 1980s and 1990s, filling them with profane, funny dialogue. He wasn't quite Tarantino, and he wasn't quite like the indie movie writers, but you could sort of see where they overlapped. This will also be important later.
The Snark Underground
The last element I want to talk about before we get back to shows about quippy teens is the background radiation of snark that was building up from the 1970s to the 1990s.
Obviously, no pop culture landscape is ever a monoculture. But if I had to pick a word to describe the landscape created and controlled by the Baby Boom generation, the word I would choose would be "earnest."
The 1960s, the formative Boomer decade, is steeped in earnestness. And television followed suit, as Boomers hit middle age and took full control of the pop cultural landscape by the 1980s. This was the era of the "very special episode," where even while watching a sitcom or a cartoon about laser-fighting robots, we were supposed to learn lessons about, I dunno, not wandering onto railroad tracks, or huffing paint, or biting the heads off of baby sea turtles.
Naturally, the generation that followed tried to flip the script. The word that was most commonly used to define Generation X early on was "ironic," (in close competition with "apathetic") but the verbal expression of irony is sarcasm, snark, and satire. You reject the earnest by undermining it.
So if the mainstream of network TV was showing fare that was either cotton candy fluff like Magnum P.I. or issues-based dramas like Hill Street Blues, what was out there for people who wanted to poke fun at this stuff?
Quite a lot, around the fringes.
From Britain, there were re-runs of Monty Python's Flying Circus, of irreverent, vicious sitcoms like Blackadder and Red Dwarf on PBS. There was The Simpsons, which was massively controversial in its first couple of seasons. There was Mystery Science Theatre 3000, which replicated the experience of watching a crappy movie with your friends and mocking it relentlessly.
Meanwhile, every medium-sized city in North America had a thick alt-weekly newspaper, which employed at least one to three writers who thought they were the second coming of Hunter S. Thompson, pumping out irreverent reviews and columns and news articles.
And, of course, there was the early internet. Speaking of places that were highly verbal, late 1990s chatrooms and forums and even email chains with friends were all about playing with words. Arguing, trolling, joking, trying to one up each other. Early TV recap site Television Without Pity even used "Spare the snark, spoil the networks" as part of its masthead.
This was the mulch of snark and humour from which the next wave of TV writing would grow.
The Dialogue Explosion
We now have the three necessary elements of what was to come next – prestige TV, films driven by dialogue with a strong voice, and a generation raised on sarcasm and irony and deconstructive humour.
In the late 1990s, a show emerged on a lesser network that featured hyperverbal, emotionally charged young leads. It was lauded in particular for its dialogue, which was like nothing anyone had heard before in a teen drama.
I'm speaking, of course, of Dawson's Creek.
Oh, yeah, I guess Buffy premiered the year before Dawson's Creek? But frankly, no one but nerds cared about its mid-season-filler, 12 episode first season, and a lot of them didn't even get The WB on their cable package. Buffy was a cult hit for its entire run, remember? Low ratings, jumped networks mid-stream, dedicated but smallish fanbase.
The point is, both of them were early examples of the explosion in dialogue-driven programming that hit hard in the late 1990s, across multiple TV networks.
In the major network prestige category, there was The West Wing. Creator Aaron Sorkin brought his dialogue chops from the world of theatre and a stint writing/adapting movies like A Few Good Men and a previous dramedy, Sports Night. The signature walk-and-talk and the pacing came from ER.
Over on HBO, you had The Sopranos, kicking off a decade-and-a-half long boom in sympathetic anti-heroes, and standing on the shoulders of gangster movies, crime novels, and TV predecessors like Homicide.
In the teen world, you had both Buffy and Dawson's Creek, with Dawson taking up the lion's share of media attention for its early years, and making stars of several of its actors.
Finally, there was Gilmore Girls, a teen-family drama-comedy hybrid that combined rapid-fire pop culture references with rapid-fire… everything. They talked fast, okay? Maybe it was the coffee.
Several of these shows, in very different ways, did something that previous teen-oriented dramas (like My So Called Life) had failed to do: they had dialogue that felt like the experience of shooting the shit with your friends over lunch hour at high school. It turned the feeling of being eloquent and witty (which was mostly illusory for actual teenagers) into a reality on the screen. It was aspirational dialogue.
Every single one of these shows debuted in a four-year period, between 1997 and 2000.
Collectively, they gave the prestige TV ship, both on cable and network TV, a course correction. It was no longer enough to tell a story well via high quality acting and production values. Now you had to have some flair with the written word, too.
But what kind of flair?
Not every kind of specialized dialogue could be replicated. The Sopranos was embedded in a world of Jersey accents and gangster slang. The West Wing was for Slate-reading policy wonks. It was the teen shows that proved most amenable to imitation – the pop-culture-reference heavy and playful dialogue of Buffy and Gilmore Girls, with a dash of the emotional monologues of Dawson, would be copied across dozens of other shows. Sometimes you got something interesting out of that, like Veronica Mars. Sometimes, you got pale copies, quickly forgotten.
But just as The X-Files opened up a space for sci-fi TV, the dialogue explosion of the late 1990s opened space for other shows that could express themselves in ways not seen before. Deadwood wove pseudo-western cowboy talk, reams of profanity, and Shakespearean flights of fancy into inimitable patterns of speech. Justified would have a lot of fun letting Walton Goggins play the most eloquent criminal hick in TV history.
This was the point where every cultural pundit with a keyboard started blathering on about how TV was now better than film. The Golden Age of Television had landed.
Meanwhile, the film studios had finally figured out how to do superheroes right, more or less, and Marvel was about to take a leap on a character that nobody but nerds cared about.
But it turns out there's a lot more nerds than everyone thinks, right?
Iron Man is so money, baby!
When the MCU was just a glimmer in the eye of Kevin Feige, Robert Downey Jr., highly acclaimed actor, was climbing out of a pit. Serious addiction issues had landed him in jail multiple times and cost him role after role between the mid 1990s and early 2000s. Downey needed projects that would accept him as an actor, despite the fact that he was hard to insure. So they couldn't be anything big, no blockbusters for him. Little films, like The Singing Detective. Guest roles. Supporting parts.
As it happened, there was another guy looking for a comeback after a career slump. Shane Black, the funny/sweary action screenwriter, was making his directorial debut, with 2005's Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Downey had managed a couple of other roles without mishap, and he stepped into Black's neo-noir comedy. Good reviews, barely made back its budget. But it's not bad, dark humour and gory slapstick punctuated with just enough seriousness to give it some weight. It showed that Downey could quip and do action in the same scene!
He'd be cast for his first superhero movie in 2006.
So when a snarky, ad libbing version of Tony Stark arrived in 2008 in Iron Man, it felt like PG version of a Shane Black movie as much as it felt like something that came from the world of quippy teen supernatural dramas. Undoubtedly, it owed something to both, and to the indie movie roots of director Jon Favreau, and to the more generalized irreverence that had infected basically everything starting in the 1990s, see above re: earnestness, rejection of.
I think it's important to note that whatever influence Whedon/Buffy/Angel/Firefly had on the early MCU scripts, there were those other elements in the mix as well. One of the reasons Buffy became a cult hit was because of the movies and TV shows and YA novels and comic books that had laid the groundwork for a show like that to find a fanbase. Iron Man was planted firmly on the same foundations.
In other words, Iron Man and the MCU are not entirely a descendant of Buffy. They both share common ancestors.
Which was why a couple years later, it made sense to the MCU machine, now fully in gear, to bring in Whedon to direct two Avengers movies back to back. They had a franchise that was driven by action and quips! Here was a guy who had made a career out of action and quips! It's like chocolate and peanut butter, right?
The same thinking brought in Taika Waititi to make a Thor movie, and Shane Black to helm Iron Man 3, and Anthony and Joe Russo of Community to take the reins of the main storyline from Civil War on. There was a world out there of people experienced with various combinations of comedy, drama, action, and ensemble casts. The MCU was snapping them up because they might be able to work within the formula that was already established.
The tyranny of success
Popularity is not a universal constant. In 1999, if you had asked a critic or reviewer or even a casual fan of television whether Dawson's Creek or Buffy the Vampire Slayer would be the better remembered show in 20 years, almost everyone would have picked Dawson.
Sure, Dawson is fondly remembered. But genre fans are, well, dedicated. A genre property has an afterlife that a regular drama doesn't. For example, there aren't any Hill Street Blues comic books, tie-in novels, or annual fan conventions.
This has given Buffy, until recently, the ability to punch well above its weight in terms of pop cultural influence. There are reams of fanfic, of online commentary, piles of books and comics and several tons of merch.
That has meant tendrils of the show's influence have spread, long after the show was cancelled, through other areas of the nerd ecosystem.
As I've argued, the background radiation of sarcasm and snark were as foundational to the origins of the MCU and the current wave of sci fi media as any specific show was. But genre is a snake that eats its own tail.
Buffy has become more influential as time has gone on. As with The X-Files, which spun off writers who created everything from Space: Above and Beyond to Breaking Bad, Whedon's writing rooms spun off talented writers who worked on shows from Lost to Daredevil. More writers who grew up as fans have tried to pick up on the rhythms of Whedon's signature dialogue as they've entered the industry.
In other words, if in 2008 the sci-fi snarkiverse was a child with many parents, now, post-Avengers, post-25 years of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the share of Buffy's DNA in certain forms of SFF screenwriting has only increased.
There is also the inevitable secondary influence factor. People who cut their teeth writing Buffy fanfiction have gone on to become traditionally published authors. A whole generation of YA fiction is seen (rightly or wrongly) as owing a debt to the "strong female characters" of the late 1990s, including Xena and, of course, Buffy. The sarcastic-first-person-YA-protagonist in an urban fantasy setting is a cliché at this point, but how many of those characters could have been described as "kinda like Buffy"?
Where there's less money and more room for experimentation, in book publishing and even TV, these trends are waning or will fade away in time. That goes double if there are more failures like Cowboy Bebop.
But at the blockbuster level, well, when you make $200 million movies that need to make more than a quarter billion to turn a profit after marketing costs, you tend to be a bit conservative with the recipe. So the MCU/Whedon formula gets minor variations here and there, but it's unlikely to go away. It is, in fact, only going to become more entrenched, until something breaks down completely. The fact that it crept into Star Wars and Star Trek (oddly, J.J. Abrams' first show, Felicity, wasn't a big part of the Dialogue Explosion) shows that Hollywood will keep trying to apply what they think works to more Extruded Movie Franchise Product.
Some of these shows and movies will manage to come up with a good enough spin on the merger of action and quips to be pretty good. Some of them may manage to break out of the formula and do something interesting. Most of them will be sort of meh, a blurry copy of a copy of a thing that was interesting and cool a quarter century ago.
Where do we go from here?
Between Whedon's self-destruction and general boredom with the formula, it feels like there's room for something new here, but what?
I don't know how you rebel against irreverence and snark in sci-fi TV and movies. With a renewed commitment to earnest storytelling, maybe?
The other way forward is to go back to the basics, which are always more complex than we choose to remember. Cut out the middle influences and go back to Hunter S. Thompson, Jack Kirby, and indie movies. That would make for an interesting set of sources for a superhero or sci fi show!
Or, as with most pop cultural revolutions, it'll come from a direction most of us won't foresee at all. Some confluence of trends from TikTok and Twitter, from video games and the next big YA novel series, will blow up and reformat how we see film and TV sci fi for another generation.
I hope I like it. If it's like this last wave, it'll last at least 20 years.
Obligatory Self Promotion
Well, if you were willing to read this far, maybe you'd be interested in some science fiction I hand-made, just for you? My latest story was out at Escape Pod at the end of January, and it's called Payday Weather, a little story about gig worker firefighters facing the burning edge of the climate crisis. It's cynical, but relatively low on snark.
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