Month: May 2025

Form, Function, and Fiction

/ JD Byrne / 1 Comment

All art is driven by form, to a certain extent. Deciding to tell a story by writing a novel means a different form, with different strengths and weaknesses, than telling the same story by making a movie (which is why it’s often fruitless to compare adaptations to the source material). But sometimes creators will intentionally confine themselves even more, prioritizing form over traditional storytelling techniques. There’s recently been a couple of really interesting examples of this on TV.

The first to debut (although we came to it late), is The Pitt, the Max medical drama that is absolutely not a reboot of/sequel to ER.

Set in a takes-all-comers trauma center ER in Pittsburgh, the show’s catchy gimmick is that the 15-episode first season follows a single shift in the ER in real time (if you’re thinking such a shift couldn’t really be 15 hours long – it’s not an average day!). Noah Wyle (yes, of ER fame) plays the head doc as he rides herd over a bunch of residents, med students, and other medical professionals through the day.

The second to premier, which it did with a blast, was Adolescence, a British Netflix limited series about the investigation of a teenager’s murder of a teenaged girl.

As with The Pitt, Adolescence has a structural gimmick, too – each of the four episodes is done in one shot, so that it not only plays out in real time (for the hour – the series actually covers months of time in the end) but pretty much in one location. The first episode starts when police raid the suspect’s home, then follows him and others to the police station and the eventual reveal that he did, in fact, kill the girl. Other episodes feel a little more contained, particularly the third, which is basically a pas de deux with the killer and the psychologist trying to understand him.

In both cases, the format of the shows put limitations on how those stories were told. With The Pitt that began early, as they had to build the labyrinthine ER set before they could actually write anything. Given the “real time” framing, they had to know how long it took for people to get from place to place and what would be visible in the background of shots to know how all the pieces fit together. Likewise, in Adolescence the one-shot conceit meant there were no quick cutaways to other locations and other characters. That led to a tight focus on the killer and his family, to the exclusion of the victim or her family. As a public defender I found that focus refreshing, as often not enough attention is paid to the toll that crime takes on the perpetrator’s family. Nonetheless, it did lead to some criticism of the show for that focus.

What does that mean for how the form of these shows impact the viewing experience? I think the one-shot conceit for Adolescence makes a bigger, and more powerful, impact. The first episode expertly hands off from character to character, setting the scene at the station leading up to the killer’s interrogation and eventually admission. There are times when he disappears as the camera follows other characters around, reinforcing his isolation. The final episode, which includes a drive to the UK version of Home Depot after kids vandalize the killer’s father’s van, uses the drive time to supreme effect, giving us genuine human moments that, in other formats, might not land as well. The third episode, which is just the killer and the psychologist, is the least flashy but is intense. Only the second episode, where cops go to the school where the killer and victim went, feels a little hard done by the format, mostly because it’s a pretty big campus and there’s a lot of walking to be done.

The conceit feels less present in The Pitt. The most notable thing about it is that it avoids the typical medical drama pattern of wrapping up particular patients at the end of the hour. Some patients linger (and linger) for several “hours,” giving a better sense of how long ER visits tend to be. That said, aside from the slowly ratcheting up of tension over the hours there wasn’t one point where I was like “and that’s why they did it this way!” And the “one shift” idea drags down the reality of it a bit as no such horrible ER shift has ever existed in the history of the world. I would have liked to have seen a down hour where nothing major happens, people get a chance to breathe, and such. In the end the format works, and it doesn’t get in the way, but I’m not sure how essentially it is to the end result.

Art isn’t created in a vacuum. It’s shaped by the times in which it’s made and by the people who make it (who, themselves, are products of the times in which they’re made). Sometimes, artists will add additional barriers that shape their work and it can produce something really cool.

Music for Its Own Sake

/ JD Byrne / Leave a comment

Information is not knowledge.

Knowledge is not wisdom.

Wisdom is not truth.

Truth is not beauty.

Beauty is not love.

Love is not music.

Music is THE BEST

– Mary, from the bus (via Frank Zappa, “Packard Goose”)

Even before the current administration’s crackdown on education, it wasn’t unusual to see band directors or other music educators arguing for, if not more funding for school music programs, then at least no more cuts. Often, music education supporters trot out a graphic like this in support of such arguments:

That’s great and it’s important that the public knows that stuff, but whenever I see it I feel like it risks turning music – and art in general – into something transactional that we do, or teach kids about, only because its boosts the bottom line down the line. Isn’t it enough to make and embrace music for its own sake?

This all came back up when I saw this article by Emily MacGregor in The Guardian:

MacGregor talks about a recent rush of books about the healing powers of music and focuses on a new BBC station called “Radio 3 Unwind”:

Programming on Unwind is light on chat, but heavy on second (i.e. slow) movements and, er, birdsong. The schedule consists mostly of playlist-type shows with names such as Mindful Mix and Classical Wind Down and features plenty of recognizable choral, piano and instrumental classics from big hitters such as Chopin, Purcell and Mozart, alongside an emphasis on new music and composers from diverse backgrounds.

Unwind’s presenters often have psychology or mindfulness credentials – and above all soothing voices. When I tune in, I find myself being encouraged to consider “the grandness of the natural world” by an authoritative baritone against strains of undulating woodwind, majestic strings, sonorous horns. “You breathe, as nature would have you breathe. You are alive.” Hmmm. A Shostakovich symphony this is not. I can’t quite shake the feeling that I’m settling in for a spa treatment.

I’m not here to poo-poo the healing power of music. Many a frustrating days at work have been made right by a drive home with the windows down, tunes blaring, and me singing along so enthusiastically I start losing my voice. Without a doubt, music can make you feel better. But isn’t it so much more?

Back to MacGregor:

The anxiety is that Unwind devalues music, so that we start thinking that it is only of value insofar as it’s useful for something else. Mightn’t Unwind encourage listeners to think classical music is little more than bland background muzak, with nothing to say? Criticism has come from all directions: the BBC has been accused of selling out, of dumbing down, of anaesthetizing listeners and of relegating classical music to the awful category of “ambient”. There’s been a rallying cry for the intrinsic value of music, music for music’s sake.

Hey, now, let’s not take shots at a foundational part of electronic music, shall we?

Anyway, I agree with MacGregor’s statement that she’s “allergic to the suggestion that music needs to be attached to claims about something else to be worthwhile,” I don’t necessarily see research about the benefits of music as problematic. The problem is more with a society that views anything that isn’t “productive” (where “productive” probably means economic gain) has to justify itself in some way. It should be enough to listen to a symphony or a Marillion song because it brings you pleasure, on some level.

Thus, I’ll join fully in MacGregor’s conclusion:

Where the art-for-art’s-sakers and the music-for-healing camps find common ground is in the idea that as a society we’ve lost sight of how important music is. Over the past decade, there’s been a sharp decline in UK sixth-formers studying the arts, following the government’s “strategic priority” emphasizing Stem subjects. But music is not the icing on the cake of an existence dominated by science, technology and economics; it’s (to push a metaphor too far) the rich butter whipped right through the mix. We are aural creatures, reverberating together.

Listen to Mary – music is the best.

“Bone Valley” and the Crushing Weight of Finality

/ JD Byrne / Leave a comment

I occasionally get appointed to what are called “cold record” appeals, so called because the lawyer handling the case on appeal (that’s me) is not the same person, or from the same office, who handled the case at trial, plea, or sentencing. In those cases I have a letter I send that explains just what a direct appeal is and what it isn’t. Part of that spiel is that in the United States courts of appeals generally don’t review the facts of cases. They’re looking for legal error (for which the facts may be relevant), but generally the question of “did this person actually do it?” has already been answered and the court of appeals isn’t going to revisit that.

It’s called “finality” and it is, in many ways, the hobgoblin of our criminal justice system. It’s the idea that once someone is convicted of a crime it becomes really difficult to even get a court to look at the question of guilt/innocence, much less in a way that might actually result in a conviction being reversed. It’s something that a lot of lay people don’t understand and find frustrating – which I do, too!

I was thinking about this while listening to season one of the podcast Bone Valley.

The subject is Leo Schofield, who was convicted of the 1987 murder of his wife, Michelle. The podcast covers not only the initial investigation and Schofield’s trial (for which the evidence presented is pretty slight), but also his attempts to get a new trial after evidence turns up pointing to another man, Jeremy Scott, as the killer. Scott eventually confesses, but even that’s not good enough for Florida courts, who denied Schofield’s requests for relief (he was eventually released on parole in 2023).

Bone Valley does a pretty good job as a “whodunnit,” but there’s a gaping hole in the middle of it when it comes to the law. Nobody ever comes out and says just what Schofield has to show to get a new trial. What is the standard of review? Is it enough to show newly discovered evidence or does he have to show it’s of a kind that it completely undermines his conviction? Does it matter that Scott tells a half dozen different stories and isn’t particularly reliable as a witness, but appears to get some details right that only the killer would know? The show presents its case as if courts now are looking at the question of guilt anew, but they aren’t.

Let me give you an example. The state, of course, has a theory as to how Schofield killed his wife and can marshal some facts to back it up (not enough, in my opinion, but a jury disagreed). A couple of times Bone Valley dings courts for taking the state’s gloss on the facts as gospel truth, as if they’re just gullible doofuses.

Only that’s how review of facts in criminal cases generally work. On appeal I can technically challenge the sufficiency of evidence supporting a conviction, but in doing so the court of appeals has to take the facts of the case in the light most favorable to the prosecution. In particular, that means if a witness whose credibility was sketchy testified to X and X supports conviction, the court of appeals has to accept X as true.

For example, there’s a witness in Schofield’s trial who testified that she saw him loading something heavy, perhaps a body, in the back of his car the night his wife disappeared. Damning if true! Only her sister’s testimony suggested she had her dates wrong and that was really a couple of weeks before the murder (when, Schofield says, he was loading an amp into his car to go play a gig). You can choose to believe that witness or not, but courts of appeal can’t – her testimony supports the verdict and so, taking things in the light most favorable to the prosecution, her testimony is reliable.

Finality is, like all the various procedural hurdles inmates have to jump through to get back to court, about prioritizing an answer already gotten over making sure it’s the right answer. Antonin Scalia famously wrote in an opinion that there’s nothing in the Constitution that “forbids the exe­cu­tion of a con­vict­ed defen­dant who has had a full and fair tri­al but is lat­er able to con­vince a habeas court that he is ​’actu­al­ly’ innocent.” He wasn’t wrong – our system is designed to produce a winner and a loser, rather than struggle to get to the “right” answer (the same’s true in civil cases, too).

This is not how it has to be. Lots of other countries, usually working in variants of the civil/Napoleonic system, review the factual bases of convictions fresh on appeal. I honestly don’t know if those systems work out any better, on average, than ours when there are genuine questions of guilt, but at least the system isn’t structured to entrench mistakes in the name of not upsetting the status quo. What’s for certain is that any system that allows Alford and nolo contender guilty pleas (where a defendant pleads guilty even though they maintain they didn’t do it) or excludes reliable evidence because it was found or seized in the wrong way has other priorities than getting the ultimate question of guilt “right.”

All this is important if you really care about legal outcomes, not just the factual issues around the case. It’s one thing to ask, as a factual question, “did Leo Schofield kill his wife?” You can weigh the evidence however you want and make your best case. It’s an entirely different thing to ask, as a legal matter, “should Leo Schofield get a new trial based on newly discovered evidence that somebody else killed his wife?” The judges who will make the decision have law that constrains them in terms of how they view the facts of a case.

It’s surely not the best system the world has ever known. I’m not even certain it is (to borrow a phrase) “the worst . . . except for all the others.” But it is the one we’ve got, so know what it is you’re working with. Still and all, sometimes Dickens was right.