IP Picks🔎: Genre Stories with Depth
➕ a spy thriller about a CIA agent who suspects her father might be a Russian spy
Welcome to The Optionist. As always, thanks for reading along. I love how this week’s picks highlight the value of genre in storytelling.
One of the reasons I think The Wire works so well is the way it uses a genre spine — the police procedural — to hook viewers on the more complicated themes of racism, urban decline and structural inequality. If someone said, “Do you want to watch this show about urban decline?” many viewers would roll their eyes before changing the channel. But wrap it in the conventions of a familiar genre and suddenly you’ve got people opining on why the War on Drugs was a failure or how the white working class was decimated by the false promise of urban renewal.
I was thinking about that this week because several of today’s picks pull off that trick. For a long time (and you can maybe chalk this up to my having once been an academic), I thought ‘genre’ was a dirty word. Well, if not quite a dirty word, then one with a negative connotation — as in something genre is somehow inferior; that procedurals or superhero films or scary stories are just junky pop entertainment.
The Wire completely turned me around on that and taught me that a familiar genre spine can be crucial to hooking viewers on complicated storylines. With The Wire, for example, if you ever got lost in all the different characters or the sociological themes, you could always orient yourself with the core procedural plot.
Several of today’s picks do the same thing. One uses a procedural to explore Southern racism. Another uses horror as a metaphor for exploring the impact of war. A third uses a murder mystery to contemplate a second chance at love. In all these cases, rather than diminishing the story, genre is what makes the complicated digestible. Here’s this week’s full rundown:
A spy thriller about a CIA agent who suspects her father was a Soviet spy when he worked for the agency during the Cold War.
A horror story about American soldiers investigating an abandoned Soviet-era Afghan base.
A procedural set in a small Southern town where a protest over a Confederate statue sets off a violent chain of events connected to the town’s long history of racism.
A procedural mixed with romance about a woman who returns to her Florida hometown to finally solve the mystery of her mother’s decade-old death, and reconnects with her high-school sweetheart in the process.
A true crime mystery centered on a mother trying to prove her daughter’s death wasn’t a suicide, but murder at the hands of her abusive husband who used BDSM as a cover to hurt her.
