Ticking the boxes

Abstract

www.thelancet.com/psychiatry Vol 1 June 2014 e1 It’s offi cial: jazz is the soundtrack of bipolar disorder. The opening credits of ABC’s plodding new medical drama Black Box roll to a jazz score, and the musical motif repeatedly revisits during the pilot episode. The choice is bold, since jazz is a prominent theme in that other show featuring a brilliant, big-career woman who secretly suff ers from bipolar disorder—Showtime’s Homeland. But it’s hardly the only derivative element of Black Box. The show is an accretion of cliches; strip them away, and there would be nothing left. The series stars Kelly Riley as Dr Catherine Black, a beautiful, world-famous neurologist who works inside a glass-walled neuroscience centre known as “the Cube”. Catherine is a whiz with tough patients, whom, she insists, she views as individuals, rather than mere examples of normal or abnormal. Catherine is in an “it’s complicated” relationship with normality, herself. She takes medication for bipolar disorder, but is prone to going off her meds when she “needs a shot of inspiration”, according to her therapist (played by Vanessa Redgrave, whose prodigious talent is nearly spoiled by stiff writing). Apparently, Catherine needs inspiration often—she ditches her medication twice in the pilot episode, a decision that quickly leaves her writhing on fl oors like a teenager, trying to have sex with anyone in arm’s reach, and dancing, erratically, to the jazz that plays in her head. Black Box does have ambitions: it wants to refl ect the power and mystery of the brain with its “100 billion neurons with 100 trillion connections among them”, and to explore the border between mental illness and creativity. What do you do when, as Catherine believes, what’s wrong with you is also the key to your success, and a deep part of who you are? Unfortunately, these are questions that the awkwardlyconstructed Black Box seems unable to answer with insight. Its characters are fl at, its devices clunky (which grates more: the overwrought fl ashbacks, or the hallucination in which Catherine fl ies through a three-dimensional version of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”?), and its dialogue lacks either veracity or wit. Worst, though, is the way in which Black Box fails at its stated mission. Despite its portentous tone, the show doesn’t have anything new, or even especially coherent, to say about the mind or bipolar disorder. Viewers searching for insight about these matters on the small screen would do better to watch Homeland. That show never billed itself as a treatise on mental illness, but its writers don’t confuse giving a character an affl iction with making him deep or believable, the acting is high-quality, and the jazz is just as good.