"...You Horrid Little Man!"

In response to my last post, somebody asked just what my thoughts were on why the second Blackadder series was better than the first one (which I think most people would probably agree that it was). Well, you guys should know better than to ask me questions like that unless you want me to start rambling on like... Well, like this, I suppose!

So, these are the thoughts I was having yesterday as I began making my way through my recently-purchased Blackadder DVDs. For the record, I'm currently four episodes into season one, but I've certainly seen all the rest of them enough times to have formed an opinion, and Blackadder I has always been far and away my least favorite of the series. Don't get me wrong. I enjoy it. It's entertaining and occasionally very funny, indeed. The jokes are good, the writing is fine, and Rowan Atkinson (who I personally believe is a comic/acting genius) gets to display both his amazing range of facial expressions and his impeccable sense of comic timing. So, why does it leave me comparatively unmoved?

I think there's one simple explanation for it: the main character is a jerk. An unmitigated, irredeemable, annoying, slimy git with absolutely no sympathetic qualities whatsoever. And to make it worse, he's a jerk with power. Oh, he might not think so, but if people walk all over him, it's only because he lets them, and frankly it's nothing more than he deserves. Now, OK, it may be more entertaining to watch somebody like this on TV than it would be to actually have to put up with him in real life, but the impulse to smack him silly is kind of hard to ignore. The second Edmund Blackadder, on the other hand, may be a thorough-going bastard -- that never does change -- but he's actually got some remarkably attractive characteristics: wit, intelligence, a certain roguish charm. More than that, he's a witty, intelligent, charming guy who's surrounded by idiots, and worse still, by idiots who have disturbing amounts of power over him. OK, seriously, who can't sympathize with that (secretly or otherwise)?

This trend is taken even further in the next two series, as Edmund's descendents fall even further down in the world (from prince to noble to butler to common solider). The third Blackadder is as intelligent and witty as his predecessor, is even lower in status, and is surrounded by even bigger idiots. In my view, though, he's not nearly as sympathetic as Number Two, in part because the idiots in question are generally very genial and accomodating idiots who don't really deserve the kind of treatment they get from him, and in part because his problems tend to come more from his own tendency to mess things up than from anything external. So whereas I'm generally rooting for Blackadder the Second, no matter how dastardly the deeds he may be perpetrating, I frequently find myself wanting to smack Number Three on the head, not unlike his medieval anscestor. I suspect this accounts for why Blackadder III is my second favorite of the series, well after Blackadder II.

As for Blackadder Goes Forth, the character (to some extent) and his situation (to a great extent) are easy to sympathize with. Here's a person who's not just surrounded by idiots, but by insane idiots against whom he is completely powerless and who are almost certain to eventually get him killed. The fact is, though, that this is so much the case that it almost ventures beyond the sympathetic and into the pathetic, making this series #3 in my Blackadder rankings. I mean, never mind smacking him on the head, sometimes you just want to shoot the poor guy and put him out of his misery. You never get the sense that his cleverness might, under the right circumstances, lead him to triumph. He's just doomed, and he knows it, too, poor bastard.

I hasten to note, by the way, that I think all four series are brilliant. I also want to point out that I don't think (as Americans, or at least American TV producers are often accused of doing) that a totally likeable protagonist is essential for a TV show to be enjoyable. Personally, I like anti-heroes (and Edmund Blackadder, in any incarnation, surely qualifies). But any story is more fun, I think, if the main character is someone you actually enjoy spending time with, and if there's at least something in the character or story that strikes a sympatheic chord and lets you enter into the story at (or on) the protagonist's side.

Or, then again, maybe it's just that Atkinson looks astonishingly dashing in that beard...