The Zero-Asset God and the broken mini dramas

I apologise for starting with Eno but he's like a stopped clock with extra hands; quite often right.

He once wrote this:

"Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them."

And once said this:

"Because with all music technology, it’s always very interesting that stuff is designed for one reason, and then people start to find new things they could do that are completely beyond what the designer was thinking about. He points to distortion as a perfect example of this phenomenon: “Distortion is, in a way, the sound of popular music,” Eno explains. “A lot of the things that we find uniquely exciting has to do with equipment kind of going wrong. That’s quite a bizarre thought, isn’t it? That you design equipment to do this. Then, you start using it to do something else, which it doesn’t do very well, and you get to like the sound of the not very wellness.”

And this is what I'm starting to love about mini dramas. They break and fail in fascinating ways. Some examples (one of which might not actually be a mini drama)

This is The Smart Repairer (also known as other things apparently). It's, basically, about the power of a union, whereas most mini dramas ae about the power of being sexy.

The way this newspaper unfolds:

Imagine if something like that happened in a regular movie. It would be so interestingly unsettling. Somehow quotidian, somehow bizarre. It would make you question everything else you'd seen, just enough. I bet Christopher Nolan wishes he'd had that for Inception. BWWWWAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH.

What's happening to the dialogue here?

Where has this broken? Was the script weird to start with? Is the text-to-speech wrong? Is it, in fact, deliberate? Art?

I love Zero-Asset God for the title alone. Every line of this first episode is now stuck in my head.

I wish some Netflix dramas had this ambition. Look at those dashboards. Obviously most situation rooms are just some monitors on desks. And the actual Situation Room is very modest. I bet Trump was very disappointed. I imagine he's sharing AI situation room designs with the Pentagon even as we speak.

So if you're going to do a ludicrously big screen for your finance or spy drama at least make it LU-DEE-CROUS. Well done Zer0-Asset God.

But the one I can't stop watching is Learn English, which isn't a drama, it's an English language course. Maybe? But it's got more drama, tragedy, comedy and life in it than a thousand Plays For Today. I'm not sure why exactly. It's mostly the same banal scenarios; at the airport, ordering a meal, getting a taxi but

a) it's brought to life a sort of 50s-ish illustrative style

b) it bases it's scenarios (at the airport for instance) random periods of history (ie Mrs Smith's trip to the butcher occurs in a medieval castle)

c) the performances are weirdly off-kilter in that brilliant AI way - I love the way they get angry - Look and Learn meets Manga meets Nancy Drew

d) every now and then the scripts are slyly subversive. It's possible the whole thing is a brilliant deadpan parody. There's double-entendre, couples making out behind medieval curtains, all sorts of romance.

All this, plus AI's inability to keep objects and people where they're supposed to be makes them hypnotic and hilarious.

And it's possible to read it as an extended drama. The same characters dropped into different scenarios and timescapes, with the same voices and expressions, discovering each other again but with only vague memories of their previous encounter. Very Christopher Nolan. If he only he was this funny.

Anyway