Torchwood: where does the series go from here?

Miracle Day is over. For me, it wasn't a day, and it wasn't that miraculous.

I took a break from watching it after episode four. Not because I wasn't enjoying it, though. Episode three aside (Gwen has apparently never heard that Americans have different words for things, the poor, parochial thing), it was alright, I thought – a bit dawdling at times, but basically solid.

However, I made no conscious decision to stop watching – I simply stopped, because I felt no pressing need to. Torchwood had become that most familiar of things: just a bit average.

I've worked in a cinema and a bookshop. I've seen hundreds of films and read dozens of books that were, despite all the time and attention laboured on them by hard working and talented people, just there. Slightly average. Bog-standard. A tad meh. This, basically, is the norm. You don't need to work in a cinema or a bookshop to know this, but it does give you cheaper access to a wider testing pool. The reason I find it sad that Torchwood is now in this category is that, simply, when it was bad before, it was never averagely bad.

Let's be honest here: the first series of Torchwood wasn't very good. Its tone was uneven and uncertain, it was relentlessly immature when it so badly wanted to be adult. It was essentially a teenager in the form of a telly programme. Children Of Earth is rightly held up as being the best series of Torchwood thus far, but this is at the expense of the second series being sometimes unfairly bracketed into the same, low-quality category as its predecessor.

Fixing all the problems of tone and dislikeable characters is good show-running. Turning those solutions into the crux of the drama is brilliant show-running. Frankly, I think Tosh and Owen's deaths were more gutting than Ianto's, helped in no small measure by a flashback episode, which made you feel even more sorry for those characters before they were killed.

Then we have Chris Chibnall's best ever script: a small scale, but incredibly upsetting tale of people getting caught up in a temporal anomaly; plus James Moran writing what was described as the best template episodes of the series in Sleeper. Tellingly, the writers who wrote the standout stories from series one seem lesser here by comparison, with everyone else raising their game.

Oh, but series one. What feasts did it bring to our incredulous senses. The DVD commentary on Day One sees Chibnall admit that the tone is completely uneven, and that they weren't entirely sure how to write the series at that point. By this time, the characters have been established, sadly, as Meek-Geek, Deviant Jeeves, Gung-ho Moral Compass/Hypocrite, Rapist, and John Barrowman.

It's what makes the writing in series two even more impressive, where we're actually in a position to even consider liking Owen, and we can only properly accuse Gwen of hideous double standards once. Swearing, sex and violence seems less jarring, less like an attempt to show off, and by making the threat in the series finale more personal, it works much better than series one's easily solvable and not entirely convincing Big Bad Demon, who wasn't even as scary as the wiry old man who summoned him.

This is before we begin to discuss the travesty of logic and common sense that is Cyberwoman, and the fact that even quite good episodes feature dialogue that, as it was broadcast, became etched in flame onto the side of a mountain in hell. Has anyone ever actually come so hard and so fast that they forgot where they were? If you have, I suspect you're in the minority.

Then, Chibnall was whisked off to the States to make that version of Merlin starring Amanda Seyfried. Russell T Davies stepped into the breach, and things turned out quite well. Credit to him, he's long been a genius at character writing, but I suspect that a minor reason for Children Of Earth turning out so well was because bringing writers like John Fay on board made him raise his game.

Also, as we’ve seen, even a central conceit as good as Miracle Day’s can strain to fill a ten-hour story-length. Five hours, by contrast, was just about right, and even then had a slight lull. Its beginning and end, though, contained stunning moments of television, and was impressive enough to garner the creative team a US production slot.

Some of the criticisms of Miracle Day - and we should remember that the show was still popular with the viewing public, achieving good to excellent Audience Index Ratings (between 81 and 85) - came from fans who found the pace slow (necessary, one could argue, due to the length of the series) and the Americanisms clichéd. By this, I mean that staples of US drama found themselves in the series, its uniqueness punctured by its increased resemblance to generic US procedural drama, of which it was slightly guilty.

Miracle Day’s aim was to win an audience in America and consolidate one in Britain, and yet it contained bits that patronised the Welsh characters, sometimes significantly.

Crucially, this wasn't always funny. If something is funny it’s a lot easier to forgive its transgressions, but the feeling has been arrived at that the American audience is of more importance than the UK viewers who stuck by the show despite its sex-gas-nobbing-monsters, or sometimes because of them. Murray Gold’s score came in for some criticism too, although it must be noted that Gold has always composed in different styles according to directions from the show runner, even on Doctor Who.

The show is now backed and co-produced by Starz, and the aim of a TV show is to entertain people. In order to do that, it has to continue to be commissioned, and so it is hardly surprising that the emphasis has been more on gaining new American viewers. The ideal, of course, would be to entertain both so that the dispute never arose. In fact, what might have happened is that Torchwood gained new viewers in Britain, as the new format entertained people who might not previously have enjoyed the show.

It might have lost some folk who still long for the days of borderline parody, ineptitude and colossal sociopathic tendencies amongst our heroes, but if it has done its job in America, we may well have another Starz-financed adventure to witness, and with one series behind its writers, it may well see another similar leap in quality that we mere Brits witnessed between the first two series, entertaining every audience that the show has.

If we're really lucky, they might even get a new pterodactyl. Stranger things have definitely happened. Certainly in Torchwood, anyway.

Read more about Torchwood: Miracle Day here.

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