I’ve recently had a very interesting conversation with a few friends about the difficulty of maintaining quality, when it comes to television. We’ve come to the conclusion, that maintaining a consistent level of quality is incredibly difficult, and in longer running shows it becomes basically impossible. We’ve agreed, that none of us have ever seen a show with more than about 50-60 episodes, that didn’t start to decline at some point. Whether it is the sharp nose dive of the last two Game of Thrones’s seasons or the slowly wavering quality of Star Gate, the rule still stands. That’s not to say, that a show can only get worse, as it progresses. Shows like BoJack Horseman, HunterXHunter or The Simpson have gotten drastically worse from season to season, story arc to story arc, or even episode to episode, and than climbed back to the heights of their success, but that doesn’t exclude them. They still hadn’t maintained a consistent level of quality.
I personally believe, this is very closely linked to the creator’s vision, and whether they know the ending (and the progression), when they’re starting to make the show. Clear vision of the road ahead is incredibly important for the show’s success in my view. Obviously impossible for episodic shows, that reset the status quo every episode, like The Simpsons, but classical serial shows with one connected time-line benefit greatly from having the major events, that need to happen, laid out, before the show begins its filming/writing process. It assures, that all the proper set-ups and reminders are in place for their pay-offs, helps with correct foreshadowing, eliminates useless plot threads, that might otherwise get in, and allows the creators to reach a cathartic ending. It’s very easy to notice, when the show runners don’t really know, where they’re taking the story. The obvious example is GoT (where the show runners knew, where they were taking the story, they just had zero idea how to get there), but it happens all over the place with shows like The Lost, where the lack of clear direction led to an ending, that’s criticised a decade later, or Stranger Things, that had a major plot line in its second season, that reached a wildly unsatisfying conclusion, and than got dropped all together, and was never spoken about again.
That’s, why I’m always happy to hear, that a show is first off – finished, and second off – short. The habit to let popular shows run longer, than they maybe should, is very natural. The fans always want more entertainment and the creators are more than happy to give it to them, since their making tonnes of money in the process, but this often comes at the cost of the quality of the show, which is a shame. That’s, why I was intrigued, when I started hearing good things about a smaller German TV series, that’s only three seasons long. Enter Dark.
It’s extremely difficult to describe, what exactly Dark even is. It dips into mystery, thriller, horror, sci-fi, fantasy and drama all at once, while not committing to any of them. The first few episodes reminded me of Twin Peeks and Stranger Things mashed together (a small kid dissapears in a little town near a nuclear power plant), but than the show got completely nuts, went entirely off the rails and became its own thing.
As stated previously, we start in the little town of Winden. Everything appears to be in order, apart from a young boy who went missing, but he was a drug dealer, and he ran away from home before soooo…. not a big deal, right? Well, a bunch of other kids go looking for his drugs. Into the woods. In the middle of the night (classic horror move). As you might guess, things don’t exactly go smoothly, as the youngest of them disappears as well, and another unknown kid is found dead in the woods. That was a good set up. We were introduced to the main characters, and now we’re going to watch them figure out what happened. Or so I thought. But Dark went in a slightly different way. Well in an extremely different way. So different in fact, that when we saw the kids from the first episode again in the middle of the season, I was like: „Oh yeah, those kids! I totally forgot they exist.“ Dark is extremely good at getting you hooked on an idea or a story line, and than showing you something so much more interesting, that you’ll almost entirely stop caring, about what was going on before.
Dark is fascinating, because it works on multiple levels. You will very quickly become invested in the characters and their struggles (and they have quite the struggles, I don’t think there’s a single happy character in this show), but more importantly you’ll be just biting at the bit to find out, what the hell is actually happening. Dark works like a river, running from the mountain. The beginning is just a little stream beautiful but easy to understand, but than it very quickly starts to put on more and more stuff. New characters, new plot lines, even new settings get added, and suddenly you’re drowning in huge river during a flood, trying desperately to figure out, what the hell is going on. I hope the creators know what they’re doing, and they’ll start giving us some answers soon, because at this point, I still understand pretty much nothing, but I do have faith, they’re just planting the set-ups, to have awesome cathartic pay-offs later.
I’m honestly incredibly impressed with the show as a whole. The acting and the writing are the two things, that stand out the most. The actors’s performances are incredible all around, and some of the casting choices are the works of pure genius (If you’ve watched the series, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, it’s basically impossible to describe it without spoiling the entire thing.), while the writing is gripping and engaging the whole way through, which is quite the feat, since explaining the incredibly complicated plot and lore, without loosing all sense of forward momentum, couldn’t have been an easy thing to do. The soundtrack is also a big positive. The original score is great, though it can get a bit repetitive, with the same string flourishes occuring in every dramatic, tension filled scene, and the most of the songs picked for the series fit the mood and atmoshere magnificently, but they’re basically always placed near the end of an episode as backdrop for a non-verbal dramatic montage. This doesn’t take anything away from the excellent music choices, I just think they could have been used slightly more creatively.
That’s not to say, I don’t have some criticisms. From what I could find, the show was made on a lower than awerage budget for a big streaming series (which makes sense, since it’s the first ever German original show on Netflix, and was probably sort of an experiment for the company), and it shows sometimes. Most shots look just fine, some even stellar, but few of the CGI shots could have used a little more work, and I wasn’t a big fan of the weird way, in which they’ve decided to capture action, but that isn’t luckily a big part of the show. Lastly I am a bit disappointed with the show’s ham-fisted foreshadowing. It doesn’t make a huge difference, since the show is laden with twists upon twists, but having a character talk about going to meet a drug supplier in the middle of the night, while a video game loudly screams: „IT’S A TRAP!“, feels like a slight insult to the viewer’s inteligence. This is not the only instance of similarly clumsy foreshadowing, but surprisingly it’s only the spoken passages. Dark is actually very good at visual foreshadowing, and guessing something, that might happen, and being right in a show as complicated as this, feels amazing.
Overall, Dark is a thrilling series with great character work, enthralling plot and terrific atmosphere. It challenges viewer’s expectations, and subsequently shatters them on Eine Reise durch die Zeit, that leaves us on a giant cliffhanger, craving to see season two.
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