I haven't watched FALCON/WINTER SOLDIER 103 yet, but writing about the first two episodes this week has got me thinking about one of the classic conceits of serialized storytelling--The Replacement Boss. Someone from the outside suddenly gets brought in to take over the operation, sidelining the boss (who is usually the protector or enabler of our heroes), and conflict ensues.
Sitcoms, procedurals, super hero comic books, they all eventually turn to this conceit. And with reason: when someone new shows up they inevitably have their own way of
doing things, their own assumptions and prejudices, and that creates all kinds of conflicts
amongst everyone else. In the best cases it also reveals new and interesting sides to our characters, who are forced to adapt or suffer the consequences.
I just watched an episode like this from the British detective show FOYLE’S WAR. In episode 204 Foyle
gets stood down while a completely unbelievable accusation about him is investigated. The guy who takes over is slimy-nice and completely intolerable.
Smug, thy name is Chief Inspector James Collier
He almost immediately fires Foyle’s trusty sidekick Sam, and as result we get to see the job and boss she came from at the start of the series. It's absolutely awful, far beyond she let on. But she spends the episode dealing with it in this stiff upper lip, "It's the war" kind of acceptance that's enormously ennobling of her character.
The Replacement Boss generally creates a sense of expectation and catharsis for a show, too. He (it's almost always a he) becomes The Obstacle that has to be overcome. And no matter how strong or brilliant our heroes might be otherwise, before him they become underdogs whose eventual success is sweeter than normal because of how they've been brought low along the way. A Replacement Boss always hurts our characters where they live.
There’s a big problem with the Replacement Boss, though: they’re almost always incompetent. They don’t listen,
they make bad choices, they hurt people for no good reason. The new boss in FOYLE’S WAR is like a
catch all of these problems. In fact it becomes kind of a joke watching him work; whatever the clues point to, he will acknowledge their persuasiveness and then go the other way. He's "just that smart".
Making the Replacement Boss bad at his job can actually have value. It increases our passion to see them taken down. It creates a useful sense of anxiety, too. I don’t know about you, but for me the worst teachers in college were not the ones who were hard, but the ones who were capricious, whose choices I couldn’t anticipate. What is not predictable feels dangerous. And so we're that much more invested in getting rid of them.
The problem is, the bad boss act wears
thin so damn fast. It's the same note, played over and over.
In some ways the best solution I've seen is the counterintuitive one: Leave them in place for a while. Don't make it a one-off; keep them for the season. And the reason is, the longer they're around generally the more you're going to work to round them out as characters. They may start mustaches a'twirlin', but that presentation itself becomes an expectation to disrupt and undermine.
The power of that kind of journey can be really strong. Kerry Weaver is a lot of people’s favorite character from ER, and I think that's precisely because she started as a kind of villain.
But one thing that distinguishes her version of the Replacement Boss from a lot of others is that she's good at her job. Her skill doesn't necessarily make her more likable, but it does make her more interesting and less easy to dismiss. It's a lot harder to write off someone who does something well.
On FOYLE’S WAR, writer Anthony Horowitz seems well aware of the "dumb guy" problem of the Replacement Boss conceit, and tries to solve the issue by revealing in the end that instead of being incompetent, the new boss was actually trying to direct the investigation in certain ways so as to allow him to secretly kill someone.
After eighty minutes of being presented with someone who seems a mean spirited incompetent jerk, I found it next to impossible to accept this final turn that in fact he had a plan with its own rather poignant backstory behind it. But still I appreciate the experiment of trying to make the classic bad Replacement Boss work.
It'll be interesting to see how this all plays out with John Walker in SAM & BUCKY'S BIG ADVENTURE. (Am I the only one who has trouble remembering the actual name of the show?) 102 made a point of demonstrating Walker's capacity with the shield and in the field. But he's also clearly self-entitled, not as smart as he thinks he is, and eventually kind of an a-hole. He definitely has that "Pride Cometh before the Fall" Replacement Boss vibe.
Also whatever his own thoughts on race and justice may prove to be, his appointment was racist as #!%!, and every time he's on screen dressed like Captain America and holding the shield I feel deeply uncomfortable.
It's an intriguing way to build our desire for Sam should become Cap. ENDGAME sets up the idea really well, and I see some people complaining that the series seems like a backtrack. But the underlying writing idea seems to be, The shield is not something you can be handed. You have to earn it. Which means you have to suffer. And having the white supremacists' poster boy put in the job ahead of Sam is definitely a huge source of pain.
