Why Was Amazon's Tales From the Loop So Bad?
Tales From The Loop. Courtesy of Amazon Prime.
The Amazon Prime original series Tales From the Loop is a low-key sci-fi anthology based on book of illustrations and the creators went to great lengths to make it feel like you are stuck inside the pages of a book while watching it. It is, all in all, a pretty terrible series.
I’ll start with the positives, because there are many things this show does really, really well and indeed it is the fact that it excels in certain elements while being so utterly terrible at others that really upsets me because it squanders so much good work and potential. So, it’s based on an illustrated book by Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag and all the installments in the anthology take as their starting point a visual image from his work. So it starts with the visual and then back-fills the story, character and so on.
To wit, the visual look of almost every frame is fantastic. This show looks gorgeous, and it has big-time talent behind the lens with episodes directed by Dearbhla Walsh, Andrew Stanton and Jodie Foster. There are many gorgeous shot compositions and visual contrasts, and long, slow, languid takes that breathe in the scenery. And the talent doesn’t just stop there. It’s scored by Philip Glass. It has actors who we know are capable of good acting, such as Rebecca Hall and Jonathan Pryce.
The production design of this alternate reality version of Ohio populated by retro-future robots and technology is also done really well. Most of this technology is never explained; it just exists in this world and is part of the scenery. That’s great. That’s a nice touch, because it feels real and lived-in. We don’t go around explaining how airplanes work, so why would people in the 1980s living with robots? I liked all of that, I liked the approach and I liked the idea behind it. The show-runner and producers explicitly said this was the goal, not to get bogged down in exposition or to explain everything but for the world of the show to just feel real, as if the Loop was real, and for that to explain itself.
OK, so far so good. I’m totally on board with that approach. Unfortunately, all of that work, effort, talent and conceptualizing is let down by piss-poor writing. While each episode has a different director, they are all written by creator Nathaniel Halpern and I am very sorry but he is not good at it. Much like Michael Mann with Heat, Halpern has confused slow and boring with artistic and meaningful. Each episode of this anthology deals with a different person in this town, and how they interact with some piece of unexplained technology which is really just an excuse for a character study.
That’s fine, in principle. But in its execution, the characters are boring, they are badly written, the dialogue is awful, the acting is bad (across the board, and it’s all bad in the same way which suggests it’s not the actors but the direction they were getting). Everything is so flat and detached and emotionless. Establishing shots linger forever, for no reason. The writing comes from a world bereft of subtlety. Instead of showing us a character is lonely, he will simple say something like: “It must be nice coming home and the lights are on because someone loves you.” Characters speak words as if they have never used their mouths before. You could probably piece together 60 minutes of footage cobbled from these 8 episodes of people taking 10-15 seconds of wordlessly staring at nothing for no reason.
I get what he was trying to do. It’s a slice of life vignette approach, situated in this alternate reality. And they nailed the alternate reality part. But the slice of lifeness is like what you would expect from a high school freshman creative writing assignment in English class. The most positive thing to be said about this show is that it’s so stilted and lifeless that as you watch you do start to question the meaning of life, but not in the way intended. More like, how can we live in a world where shows can be invested with so much talent and look so good but be so completely ruined by the misfiring creative vision of the writer? You throw your hands up and beg the Loop for answer, but it says nothing and you merely find yourself back at the beginning.
