Skip to main content
Where to properly shelve The Librarians? For a pillar of TNT's prime-time line-up (Falling Skies, The Last Ship), cheery shenanigans poorly fit the accompanying red-state apocalyptica. There are plentiful gags and occasional chills, but neither comedy nor horror apply. Although shot around town, few locations seem familiar and the general ethos feels worlds apart from any recognizable Portland. While last year's premiere run ended up the second-most-watched new cable series and a third season's already been green-lit, we've yet to come across a fan.
Despite storylines about a Tesla-designed steampunk soulcatcher ane fairy tales come to life, episodes arent consistently fantasy or science fiction. If mysteries are solved or adventures undertaken, they're hardly the point. And no matter the supposed subjects, nobody would consider even a single moment educational.
Ostensibly based upon the trio of original features that introduced Noah Wyle as a career grad-student turned warrior-archivist Flynn Carsen, The Librarians more resembles the series that first branded Turner Network Television as normcore escapist hub and convinced Dean Devlin to begin building Clackamas County sound stages. As with Leverage, a 90s prime-time icon somehow convinces a ragtag group of misfit savants to combine talents for the betterment of mankind.
True, the Librarians' MacGuffins tend to hold more symbolic value than actual, their settings veer rustic and the guest stars (library officials Bob Newhart & Jane Curtin; Serpent Brotherhood chief Matt "Max Headroom" Frewer) hail from the comedy wing of TV's hall of fame. Faithful Leverage fans should find the base archetypes familiar nonetheless. There's the misplaced STEM whiz (Lindy Booth), the generational beauty working covert ops (Rebecca Romijn), the self-described thief (John Kim), the Christian Kane (Christian Kane). But in this telling they're less a precisely-headhunted A Team than an arbitrary collection of colorful quirks.
For all Kim's adorably antipodean 'I'm a criminal, me!' swagger, we never actually see him steal anything. Romijn's counter-terrorism background mostly reveals itself as control issues. From Beautiful Mind-styled computational visions to her oft-referenced tumorous "mind grape", Booth's genius is portrayed as a genuine curse. The show-runners go to increasingly ridiculous lengths to mine relevant usage out of Kane's bar-brawling art-history buff. Meanwhile, our putative leader stays, for the most part, absent.
With Noah Wyle is saving the world on the final season of Falling Skies, Flynn Carsen heads off to find his vanished inter-dimensional repository after leaving the team at a library annex evidently located at the foot of the St. John's Bridge, which neatly skirts two primary conceptual hurdles. Puddletown's saved from the need to pretend it's a metropolis capable of housing the show's Metropolitan Public Library. And since annex caretaker John Larroquette only been plays a fussily doddering Charlie to these addled angels, Romijn's two-fisted "guardian" has little challenge for leadership, whigh better fits the strengths of its producer.
Dean Devlin's entertainment empire (Independence Day, Stargate, the 1998 Godzilla) has traditionally viewed smarts as an outgrowth of social dysfunction only meaningful in service of expertise or ingenuity. It's presented as a quality of sidekicks and villains but rarely heroes. Flynn's eidetic memory and the synaesthesia of Booth's character are treated as freakish gifts independent of analytic reasoning or conceptual leaps while any wisdom granted older characters is colored by the sad fecklessness of age.
This isn't the deadening anti-elitism of Falling Skies, which forgives Wyle's former professor his academic background so long as he only relays lessons of military history (TNT: We Know Drama … and HATE knowledge), but it's far from a cheering endorsement of the supposed subject. More to the point, why bother making a show called The Librarians by, for and about people so clearly indifferent to book-learning?
In The Librarian movies, the first of which was broadcast a decade to the day before the series' premiere, Wyle imitated a familiar sort of bookish adventurer risking life and limb to rescue artifacts from dastardly misuse. Hair-raising exploits to reclaim overdue materials on behalf of a library may be no more inherently preposterous than insisting they belong in a museum, but the franchise spends rather too long admiring its daft conceit.
The show-runners appear to have re-watched Raiders Of The Lost Ark entranced by all the wrong questions its famous finale inspires. As the ark is tagged and discarded midst the depths of labyrinthine bureaucracy, the Librarians' creators were evidently lost in wonderment at the sheer scope of the operation. Who were these faceless heroes shelving away the treasures of lore? And what sort of filing system would they use?
Of course, simply tapping into the boundless goodwill associated with Raiders through similar tropes and plotlines has never really worked on television. Even coupled with the oversight of a still-sainted George Lucas, Young Indiana Jones felt destined for noble failure as a brand investment for the only entertainment leviathan willingness to absorb the astronomical costs of a globe-spanning production. The Librarians, shot in and around Clackamas with a cast of tens, wisely spends the bulk of its resources upon guest shots from beloved faces themselves quasi-relics plucked from collective memory.
While the effects are never nearly so cheap (nor the compensatory framework so ingenious), the resulting compromise between the highest of concepts and budgetary restraint inevitably borrows the tricks utilized to capture a quite different breed of academically-oriented swashbuckler, but Flynn would make a poor Doctor Who. His librarian wields a particularly new money sort of intelligence – relishing the textures of each two-dollar-word like a cellular upgrade, parceling out bits of information like proprietary software. He dresses poorly, like an awkward tweener raiding his grandparents wardrobe for anything vaguely-sniffing Edwardian, and affects a mannered preening that conflates aristocrat and trophy wife.
It's a very American imagining of the cultured fop who can't help but find the process of undirected self-education faintly ridiculous. The movies undercut Flynn's worst tendencies through heightened awkwardness and a deference to authority guided by the requisite overbearing mother. Outside her influence and in full possession of his powers, The Librarians' Librarian combines the unconflicted entitlement of late-empire nobility with Yankee imperialists' blinkered arrogance, and the show suffers from his presence.
As happen, there does exist an alternative version of The Librarians that blends the least offensive attributes of Great Britain and the United States. Part of the Syfy network's late-oughts embrace of family-friendly niche whimsy, Warehouse 13 was filmed in Toronto and arrived as Canadian as bags of milk. Despite devising a near-identical premise – a pair of comely government agents (intuitive guy and by-the-books gal, natch) rescue magical trinkets stolen from a shadowy archive – and attempting a similarly lighthearted tone, the earlier series' rendering couldn't have felt more dreary. It was smarter, sure, and itching to display every inch of its research, but explaining away impossible notions through rigorous pedantry only compounds the core foolishness while dulling down flights of fancy.
The Librarians aims so much lower but finds that sweet spot between idiocy and laziness in which the easiest answer feels right. Should the legends of haunted houses turn out to be true, each one must obviously have been possessed by the same sentient, troubled dwelling. Might not all spirits of Christmas be derived from an anthropomorphized entity collecting the stray goodwill of mankind for an annual late-December dispersal? THIS is why folks are so cranky just before the holidays. OF COURSE, Bruce Campbell would play the Yuletide incarnate? And, if he inexplicably adopts the character of Odin while flitting between Kris Kringle and St. Nicholas, are any among us willing to deny Campbell's cries for mead and combat?
Almost no television characters share the wardrobes of their real world equivalents, but these librarians and their foes dress as no one ever has or ever will. The fuchsia sweatshirt with beret and torn Dickies, the floral-patterned plasticine pantsuits simultaneously dowdy and martial, Flynn's ascots & cotlets garb – outfits aren't this wrong by accident. The daft costume design, like the brisk editing or showily-playful score hinting familiar tropes within each orchestral flourish, suggests some degree of inventive craft utterly at odds with the flattened imagery and simplified storytelling.
We used to call this sort of show cartoonish, but that seems the wrong term – in part because The Librarians' jokes are so slight and in part because we now parse cartoons for evidence of disjointed subversion. For tone and pacing, the series really hearkens back to the dayglo sitcoms of the late '60s. (The Monkees seems a reasonable corollary, even if John Kim didn't so resemble an Asiatic Peter Tork) Due to limitations of format, the broadest comedies then encouraged the gently surreal and incorporated a steady stream of non-sequiturs and in-jokes as grist for the laughtrack mills of programs designed to take nothing too seriously.
There's an innate silliness, as to delight a child (or, the child-like of all ages), and, the end of the day, The Librariansprovides that rarest thing: a show for children. Not the docile accessories their parents would like nor the inchoate fantasists that Alpha creatives once were, but actual children – lazy, greedy, simple-minded, and, above all else, easily pleased and quickly bored. They crave the familiar, which means the trappings of genre, but they despair over every effort at arguing that the loves and loss of stock characters deserve our emotional investment.
A pre-schooler could glean romance from Romijn and Wyle's flustered combativeness in a matter of moments. A kindergärtner, noting two leads of opposite gender but similar height/age/attractiveness, might guess fated canoodling from the credits. Why string out flirtations when an unprompted round of kissyface midst HR talks indulges the narrative apotheosis so much more readily? Above all else, children are profoundly, defiantly superficial, and, however dearly most series fight to flesh out their boilerplate scenarios through dim obeisance to the prestige model, it's a quality that TV captures exquisitely. If a character defines himself as a thief, if all others agree he's a thief, he's probably a thief, but, so long as he looks adorable under flouncy hats, the audience knows the real story.
When so simply rendered, there's a sort of truth to superficiality unencumbered by extraneous demands upon mood or motive or underlying ethos. It's odd enough a 21st century show be allowed the opportunity, and it's more than a little refreshing to see a starrish-studded series celebrate the surface absent the slightest pretense of digging any deeper. Our heroes, after all, are not theoreticians. They are not authors. They are not teachers. They are, as will be repeatedly intoned with bonkers profundity … librarians. They judge books by covers, amuse kids, indulge the under-socialized, and ensure glimpses of artistry remain brightly-lit. A thankless job, really, but the world would be a little darker without them.
Watch it: The Librarians Season 1 is available for streaming via Hulu or download from Amazon, iTunes, and Google Play.
Willamette Week