Sample Artifact-Comparison Essay
Note to reader: This draft is re-printed here with the author's permission. These student drafts are provided for a couple of reasons: first, to give you a taste of the variety of topics and approaches students have taken, and second, to provide instructors with readings that might be used in class discussions and activities. These samples are not perfect and represent final grades from across the grade scale (A through F), so please be forgiving, understanding, and respectful if you find errors or problems.
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Of Cops and Robots
by Paul Whittaker
When Almost Human aired its pilot last year, one of my coworkers moaned that “they just can’t think of anything new, can they?” He told me about the show that Fox executives were now apparently trying to rip-off and rebrand: a short-lived drama from 1977 called Future Cop. At the conceptual level, they sounded the same: a veteran police officer, hardened around the edges, would be begrudgingly assigned a new partner, an android, and together they would learn, amidst their many crime-fighting exploits, not just what it means to be friends, but what it really means to be human.
I had to admit that he was right—it didn’t sound particularly new: artificial intelligence, androids learning the quirks of humanity, crusty police detectives, the odd-couple partnerships, hard-won friendships, and procedural crime dramas. But then I watched the pilot of Almost Human and quickly discovered that even though the show might riff off the same tropes and elements as Future Cop, and even though they would both ultimately fail after only half a season, it could hardly be called a “rip-off.”
Launched just months before Star Wars, when America couldn’t seem to get enough sci-fi action—but hadn’t quite yet been introduced to sci-fi as a source of mythology and philosophy—Future Cop seemed to have a sure-fire recipe for success—namely, robot-humans taking on the bad guys. Unfortunately, there was a specific brand of sci-fi television viewers were after, all laser beams and space ships and interstellar travel. What they got, instead, was a bumbling police officer who constantly acted befuddled by the intangibles and perplexities of human nature, failing to grasp simple concepts and emotions. The show might have been able to save face among its viewers if Haven, the robot cop, could have gotten beyond his awkwardness long enough to be awesome, taking on aliens and super-villains and rocking the streets with his x-ray vision and superhuman strength. Instead, he used his super-strength to pose as a semi-adequate boxer to take on a corrupt boxing ring, his super-computer brain to count cards and bring down a criminal gambler, and his lack of smell to stay in the police station when a stink bomb was thrown into the locker room as a diversion during a robbery. As the odor of the bomb faded away, so did any hopes of the show finishing a full-season run.
Since then, sci-fi television has proven time and again to be a fickle mistress, with the arbitrary cancellation of highly-rated shows such as Firefly, Doll House, Caprica, and The Sarah Connor Chronicles. TV executives have been quick to pick up pilots of shows about time travel and androids and space ships, but they have been just as quick to abandon them despite rave reviews and consumer ratings. In the thirty-seven years between the demise of Future Cop and the rise of Almost Human, the popularity of sci-fi television has grown astronomically. So why did Almost Human fair just as poorly as its cheesy, low-tech predecessor, Future Cop?
Backed by J.J. Abrams after his rousing success with the new Star Trek movies, Almost Human was launched with high hopes and even higher critical praise. It continued the themes forwarded by Future Cop, and producers gambled that America would finally be ready for an android-cop show that focused less on robot hardware and more on the existential question of what it means to be human. There were no stink bombs or fixed boxing matches, but there were just as many protracted scenes of great dialogue between the partners about humanity, mental health, individual rights, and the co-existence of humans and sentient machines—all wedged, of course, between high-speed chases and shoot outs and epic explosions. Where the 1977 sci-fi viewer seemed to only want rocket ships and laser pistols, the 2014 viewer seemed hungry for these deeper philosophical questions (and those who weren’t could still feast on the CGI mayhem).
The things that seemed to tank Future Cop were the things that should have guaranteed the success of Almost Human. Dorian, the android cop, was not a bumbling robot like Haven from Future Cop. In fact, he was, in many ways, even more human than Detective Kennex, his partner. Designed to have the full array of human emotions, Dorian’s android brothers had proven to be unstable and volatile. They were decommissioned and replaced by non-emotional androids—those who would be more akin to Haven. Detective Kennex, who couldn’t stand the robot-like demeanor of the non-emotional androids, threw his android out of a moving car and resurrected, so to speak, the decommissioned Dorian, knowing that despite his volatility, an android with real human emotions would be a better decision maker and a more capable detective. But as the show weaved through beautiful CGI landscapes and amid all the high-tech gadgetry you would expect, and as Dorian and Kennex’s complex relationship become something resembling friendship—everything, it seemed, hitting the perfect sci-fi notes—Fox executives panicked at the slightest dips in numbers, and despite having higher ratings than Glee, Bones, and The Following, they weren’t willing to hedge their bets that the viewership would grow fast enough to exceed the costs of production. Assuming the fan base would turn on them just as quickly as Dorian’s overly-emotional counterparts turned on their partners, Fox pulled the plug and killed the series before it could even discover what it really was.
Future Cop and Almost Human were both victims of America’s unclear expectations of sci-fi television. While both had a fan base who accepted the show for what it was, each also had many would-be fans who just couldn’t decide what to make of it: some thought it should be a cop show and ditch the android premise; some thought it should be more sci-fi and less police work; some thought it should be more action and less philosophy; and some thought it should be more technology and gadgets and less emotions and relationships. It’s trite to say, “You can’t please them all,” but sci-fi television seems to suffer particularly from this sentiment. Needing to please a varied fan base and viewership, all with competing expectations, it’s likely that even in another thirty-seven years, a show about an android-cop and his crusty partner won’t be able to survive the sci-fi television gauntlet. Special effects and technology and CGI might improve, and so might America’s desire for great stories and mythology and philosophy, but we’ll always be plagued with the reality that few can agree on what sci-fi should be. We all, it seems, have a notion of what it could be, and then we feel let down when we’re given something else. Television executives sense this, and their biggest failure ultimately isn’t the creation of a bad show—a show that disappoints its viewers—but giving up on a show before viewers can accept it for what it is. With sci-fi, it takes viewers a little bit longer to do this, which requires a little more time and patience than with other television genres.
My advice to future network executives in 2052 deciding if they should pull the plug on their new android-cop show: give it a couple seasons. Be patient as viewers figure out that it’s both a cop show and a robot show—and probably a pretty good one. They might be wary at first, wanting more of this or that, but they’ll get there eventually. They're only human.