No television pilots here

I think I have some more things to say about my Black History Month reading for the year, if I can come up with the right order and words.

One of the books I read was Black Gun, Silver Star: The Life and Legend of Frontier Marshal Bass Reeves by Art T. Burton.

I had added it to my reading list as soon as I found out that the book existed. It sounded interesting, but also I had this idea that maybe there could be a television series in there. Reeves sounded heroic and fascinating. It could fill a need for providing some diversity and undoing some of the historical whitewashing of the past. Also, there has been some success with shows set in the West - "Deadwood", "Hell on Wheels" - it just seemed like there could be some potential there. Once I was reading the book I felt differently.

It's not that Reeves was not heroic or fascinating. He was pretty cool, and while the book was pretty dry as it brought out every bit of source material imaginable, there was still some cool information. There was also a lot that was depressing.

The article about the book had mentioned a large family, but not how much his travel for the job would have kept him away from them. It didn't mention him being away when his first wife died, or some of his children getting in trouble with the law. It didn't mention the frequent slander that newspapers printed. He got praise too, and had loyal friends, including Belle Star, but there were some downsides. The article didn't mention that he found the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling demoralizing, though that shouldn't have been surprising at all if I had been thinking about dates.

Also, things ended up sounding somewhat less interesting in the book. While the commitment to accuracy was honorable, it made for a more boring tale, because often there are records of the people arrested during a certain run, but not how the cases resolved, or often that they were acquitted. The result is that often it feels like even being a remarkably successful lawman didn't do much good, and that can be totally valid, but there are already plenty of shows like that.

I'd had similar thoughts about Chang Apana, a Hawaiian detective who was closely associated with the Charlie Chan character, so I read Yunte Huang's Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History as well.

It was pretty similar. There are more successfully resolved cases. He took down an opium den full of forty people with a crack of his bullwhip. Yes, the reputation he already had helped, but it's still pretty impressive.

And as impressive as he was, and respected, his chief of police still decided to try and get everyone of color to take early retirement, and despite Chang Apana's determination to fight it, illness ended up making retirement necessary. Also, the reason they wanted to force people out is that some white people were convicted of manslaughter for what was really the murder of a brown person, and even though higher ups voided the sentence after an hour in jail, you can't have things like that happening.

Basically, nothing felt the way I thought it would. There were amazing people with adventures, and they did defy stereotypes, but it wasn't this exultant thing, maybe because the stereotypes remained so deeply rooted.

It may simply be that I got into a darker frame of mind, and so nothing seemed promising anymore. That being said, I never really thought I would be the person developing those materials, so maybe there is someone out there who can do it right, and they will know when they read it. Maybe I will draw some short comics. Right now I am still in a learning phase, and I feel like something interesting is going to develop in my own life soon, but I do not yet know what that is going to be.