Harper’s Island: Ways of Learning
Education frequently looks to how students learn what they want to learn for clues on how to teach them what we want them to learn. How do students learn to navigate new video game worlds, or follow complex movie plotlines or engage in television narratives?
A few months ago, I decided to watch CBS’s limited-run series Harper’s Island. The premise seemed simple: a group of people are stuck on an island and a serial killer picks them off one at a time, Agatha Christie-style. A definitive 13-episode arc, with all questions resolved in the final episode. I should state upfront that I have degree in American Studies, with an emphasis in popular culture. I love this stuff. As I settled in, I decided to see what I could learn about how to draw in my young audience.
The premise: A girl attends the wedding of her best friend, returning to the island where she grew up and her mother was one of the victims of a serial seven years before. Filmed on lush Bowen Island, British Columbia, the setting becomes an important part of both plot and mood. While the series starts out with a campy vibe, it turns darker as more people die.
I explained it to my students as Scream-meets-Agatha Christie and encouraged them to tune in. What has happened since then has made me question what I know about teaching literacy. My students provided no useful information about this; instead, the information came from an unexpected source: the critics.
I knew things had started to go awry when the critics’ comments made no sense in terms of what the story was about. One misguided critic wrote a review saying he didn’t understand how the wedding was still going on with all the dead bodies. Which would have been a fine observation to make had the wedding, in fact, still been expected to go on. Unfortunately, the wedding was cancelled for sure when the bride’s father was dismembered during the rehearsal.
So what happened here? Where did understanding break down?
I was fortunate enough to get some insight from co-executive producer Karim Zreik via Twitter. To engage the reviewers, the studio provided them the first nine of the thirteen episodes. While Zreik isn’t saying it, I’ll make the obvious judgement: the critics didn’t watch them.
I know the feeling of assigning some reading and having students not do it. It’s frustrating.
As an English teacher, then, I question why they didn’t do the watching. Perhaps the critics felt pressed for time, a common excuse from students. In this instance, though, it seems that maybe one or two may have taken a shortcut because of time constraints. The confounding part of this is that more than a few reviewers made observations that didn’t fit with the storyline, like when students make up answers about books they didn’t read.
When I step back to analyze why these reviewers would have “faked” watching, I thought about the assumptions that were made, both about the mystery genre and the limited-run series. Statements about what happened seemed to be based on what had happened in similar stories they had seen, and they made predictions based upon that. For example, one critic said it was easy to determine who would stay and who would be killed off early by how big a “star” they were. A look through their credits on IMDB.com shows that this didn’t hold up at all: one big name only made it a few episodes. This shows that the idea of a limited-run series was not, perhaps, understood. This is not unlike the way students make assumptions based on past reading experiences, although attentive English teachers usually find a way to challenge those assumptions and get the students to question those assumptions themselves.
A limited-run series has a predetermined storyline, with a clear conclusion planned in advance. This is a departure from traditional television shows where the scripts are written as the show continues. Because the premise of Harper’s Island required most characters to be killed off, there was no real hope of a second season. A few characters who I had guessed would be killed off fairly early had been given contracts guaranteeing them a certain number of episodes, something I found out late in the run.
Zreik nicknamed himself “The Assassin” because it was his job each week to let the actors know who was going to be killed in that episode. If the actors themselves were uncertain of the outcome, it is intriguing that the reviewers felt secure in their assumptions.
For me, the limited-episode series seems similar to a novel, which also has a large number of characters and takes hours to unfold. Both ask a significant commitment of time from the reader or viewer in exchange for a definite endpoint where the plot will be resolved.
It would seem, however, that the producers, unlike English teachers shepherding their students through a novel, did not anticipate the possible points of confusion from the reviewers or the home audience.
If I were teaching this in a classroom, I can think of several activities I would have implemented to help engage students and reinforce understanding. I would have pre-taught major themes, made predictions based on key lines from the text, and had students guess what each episode was about based on the title (all titles are onomatopoeic of a manner of death for that episode, such as “Splash,” “Seep,” and “Thwack”). I probably would have introduced characters beforehand because there are so many, and as the story unfolded I would have had students create visual maps of the relationships between characters. I would have set the mood, as the producers did, using clips from the show (the creepy “One by one…” for example) and had students make predictions that we revisited and revised regularly.
I could have a) made certain the students understood the entire series, and b) potentially destroyed any flow or enthusiasm students may have had for the series.
In fact, this is what the producers were up against, it seems. Anyone who is a fan of the mystery genre knows that the reader/viewer isn’t as attached to the first few victims, one of the critics’ complaints. The website for the show had photos of all the possible suspects/victims with cute nicknames to help viewers keep track (for example, “The Single Girl,” “The Old Flame,” and “The Good Girl“) and a prediction game to keep viewers engaged [in addition, there was an interactive narrative website, Harper’s Globe, that also told stories from the island, but this proved too complicated for me to figure out—another blog post in there, I suppose]. This allows viewers who are eager for greater engagement to find it online and extend the experience.
Of course, we all know that there are few viewers who thought, “I’m not sure I understood who that character was. I wonder where I can get more information.” Indeed, those who most need support resources are often the last to seek them out, imagining that it is too much work. What surprises me is that the critics, the ones who are not supposed to need a guide through the narrative structure, are the ones who took ill-advised short cuts and then spoke as if from a position of knowledge.
Some may argue that television should not be so mentally demanding, that it should be simple and mindless. I reject that all popular culture needs to be oversimplified. At the same time, this wasn’t the Byzantine plot of a Russian novel, either. While some critics dismissed it, many others touted it as a great guilty pleasure, intriguing summer fare that kept the audience guessing. At the end of the school year, I’m not sure a limited-run series based on a Russian novel would have held my attention, but I was up for some popcorn-worthy entertainment.
So what does this mean? I certainly learned a lot about how perhaps teaching literacy isn’t as simple for television studios as I had previously thought. An argument could be made that this is a sign that Americans are lazier than ever, but that is too cynical for me. I’m not ready to dismiss an entire culture based on a few lazy critics.
I’m not sure what the ramifications are for producers or for English teachers, but I’m getting ready to watch the Harper’s Island finale. I have a suspicion that this may have all been the work of Henry…
