Conspiracy Theories and Unlimited Info: The Fall Season’s New Crop of Literal Know-It-Alls

As we were working our way through the first week of TV premieres, my wife sighed and asked what she always does this time of year: “Why do we need to watch them all? They’re all the same.” She’s not wrong. In a general sense, that’s just how television works — producers ride whatever popular wave is out there for just as long as they can: Mad Men begets Pan Am, which begets Masters of Sex, which begets Astronaut Wives. When I was about 12, I remember telling my father his generation must have been idiots to have both The Addams Family and The Munsters on air at the same time. Why would anybody need two of the same show? He only smiled indulgently at me.

But my wife was right in another sense as well: we had just watched the pilots to Minority Report and Blindspot the night before and now we were sitting down to watch Limitless. All three begin on a downtown street; all three involve someone in a very big hurry to do something important; all three involve police departments who struggle to make sense of unusual characters.

Most importantly, though, all three of these characters are gifted in a similar way. Dash (Stark Sands) in Minority Report is clairvoyant, capable of seeing crimes before they occur. Brian Finch (Jake McDorman) in Limitless has taken a pill that allows him to access his entire brain, to remember and make sense of every piece of information he’s ever encountered. Jane Doe (Jaimie Alexander) in Blindspot is less obviously brilliant in these ways, but her body is covered in tattoos that apparently hold the keys to future crimes, and although her memory has been wiped, she retains functional memories that suggest she is a highly trained special ops Navy seal. That is, she has access to information she doesn’t realize she knows. Like all the “waves” of television shows that come along, these shows tell us something about us, about who we are as a culture and what we seem to be craving.

While these are the first shows out this year that focus on such characters, they aren’t the first of their kind. Recent seasons have seen the premieres of Scorpion and Mr. Robot, with the first of this particular crop of shows perhaps being Chuck. All of these shows involve characters who, for one reason or another, know more than the normal human should and who, importantly, seem capable of making connections between information far better than the rest of us.

To a certain extent, these characters represent versions of the Sherlock Holmes character, whom we’ve seen in characters from Monk (Tony Shaloub) in Monk and Shawn Spencer (James Roday) in Psych, to Robert Goren (Vincent Donofrio) (Law and Order: Criminal Intent) and Gregory House (Hugh Laurie). It’s no surprise that Holmes himself seems to be a hot commodity these days, with incarnations including the BBC version (Sherlock), the CBS version (Elementary), and the Robert Downey Jr. films all appearing in the past decade.

Minority Report

The new crop of smarty-pants, though, is of a slightly different breed from the Holmes model. These characters aren’t “brilliant” detectives who happen to be , for one reason or another, especially observant. Rather, they are literally capable of knowing everything. Where the Holmes character (in all his incarnations) must spend some time working out how the pieces fit together in order to solve the crime, these characters seem to know everything up front, with no need for puzzling it out. This doesn’t mean they don’t struggle with limitations. In Minority Report, for example, Dash doesn’t get all the details of the crime — he needs his siblings for that. Even so, he knows ahead of time what’s coming: he knows what no one else knows.

These shows seem particularly tied to an important element of what is sometimes referred to as the “postmodern condition”. The advent of the personal computer, and more importantly, the Internet, has provided us access to literally infinite amounts of information at essentially instantaneous speeds. I use the word “literally” here not in its figurative sense. The store of human knowledge we have accumulated goes on forever. But what are the consequences of this new information-heavy reality?

First, it constantly reminds us that we can never possibly know it all. It overwhelms us, demonstrates our relative smallness in relation to the universe. Second, and as a result, it makes us desperate to overcome this situation, to somehow make sense of all this information so that we don’t feel quite so lost, quite so small. Third, despite the infinite amounts of information, we can put the pieces together into some sort of sensible pattern. That becomes both a blessing and a curse. More often than not, we want to make sense of the information so badly that we wind up constructing a reality that may not necessarily exist.

This is one explanation for the rise of conspiracy theories over the last 30 years. It has become entirely possible to prove JFK was killed by Oswald acting alone; it has also become entirely possible to prove JFK was killed as part of a conspiracy. Seemingly infinite information means everything suddenly becomes true: ancient aliens, the aquatic ape theory, false flag operations — these all carry the illusion of “reality” because they rely on some of that abundant information.

We desperately crave “reality”, and “meaning” and we have the information to create it. The success of The Da Vinci Code for example, is at least partly the result of the fact that Dan Brown found meaning in chaos. The novel managed to tie a series of threads together in order to create a web that suggested a reality. At the same time, though, we have the cautionary tale of A Beautiful Mind, in which we discover halfway through the film that, in fact, John Nash has fabricated his conspiracy theory.

These new characters — Dash, Finch, Elliot Anderson (Rami Malek) in Mr. Robot are a sort of new breed of superhero. They fulfill our fantasy of what would happen if we could somehow attach a consciousness to all this free-floating information, if a mind large enough could work on this information and generate meaning from it. (That meaning, of course, is far less grandiose than that of the The Da Vinci Code.) In the space of an hour-long TV show, meaning comes neatly packaged in the form of solving a crime.

But the rules of the crime show have changed along with the nature of these characters. Before the hero was observant: it often took him the course of the episode to work out the complete picture, and that working out became the plot of the episode. In these new shows, the problems are more personal than logical. Dash must work out his relationship to his siblings, Arthur (Nick Zano) and Agatha (Laura Regan), if he is to solve crimes consistently and successfully. Finch must work out how to navigate the knowledge the pill allows him while preventing the pill’s negative side effects. Jane Doe has all the information, but lacks access to it.

In short, we must seek the solutions within in order to generate a human answer. The result is a kind of inside-out version of Holmes and House. In those characters, we find human beings who have managed to transform themselves from human to machine, of sorts, and we as the audience come to appreciate them for their machine-like abilities. We forgive House his unkind exterior because he serves an important function — he cures the incurable. We forgive Dexter (Michael C. Hall) his serial-killer nature and his lack of emotion, because he so efficiently kills those who deserve it.

More and more, however, we crave humanity; we value it over simply solving the puzzle. These new characters have the answer when the show begins; it’s learning how to navigate the human aspect of their personalities that occupies the hour we spend watching.

My wife was right to note that all these new shows seem the same. There’s a practical side to her observation: it really doesn’t make any sense to watch them all. Of the new shows out this Fall, I recommend Limitless. Blindspot is certainly intriguing, but it’s too reminiscent of its NBC mate, The Blacklist, without the benefit of James Spader’s brilliant acting.

The real question, though, is what this shift in television tides tells us about ourselves. We want sense out of chaos, but we seem to have recognized that real meaning — as opposed to the manufactured meaning of a conspiracy theory — involves coming to terms with the human component within us.