The Steps Review
The Thirty-Nine Steps was written by John Buchan in 1914. Raymond Chandler, meanwhile, published his first full-length work, The Big Sleep, in 1939. Together, these two novels laid the blueprint for the spy-thriller and mystery-noir genres that remain popular to this day. The Chattanooga, Tennessee-based webseries The Steps is the latest entry to follow in the footsteps of Buchan and Chandler, as well as a demonstration that good drama can indeed be done in the emerging webseries medium.
While The Thirty-Nine Steps is still an enjoyable read almost one-hundred years after its initial publication, it is the film adaptation by Alfred Hitchcock that is arguably more famous and influential. The film established Hitchcock as a budding director, and the narrative of an ordinary person suddenly being plunged into a world of danger and intrigue continued to be a source of inspiration throughout his career. The Steps, meanwhile, is not a spy thriller per say but draws heavily on the Hitchcockian style nonetheless. The title alone invites comparisons—although the “steps” in each are of an entirely different nature—and the promotional artwork for The Steps is obviously influenced by the film posters of such Alfred Hitchcock masterpieces as Vertigo, Psycho and Rear Window.
In The Steps, private investigator Charlie Madison (Dylan Kussman) is forced to flee his homebase of Los Angeles when his employer, Dante Pelinsano (John Hammons), is convicted of extortion and racketeering. Since Madison is the one who gathered the dirty details on various Hollywood hotshots via illegal bugs and wiretaps, he can feel the noose closing in around his own neck and thus seeks refuge under an alias in small town Tennessee. Like Richard Hannay in The Thirty-Nine Steps, however, Charlie Madison is drawn into a different world than he imagined when he reluctantly takes a job involving pre-marital infidelity and finds a dead body instead.
The title of the webseries is more than just homage to the works of John Buchan and Alfred Hitchcock, as Charlie Madison has a drinking problem and is seeking help via the Twelve-Step Program of Alcoholics Anonymous. Although he attends meetings, however, his drinking has not stopped. A week after receiving a cake in honor of one-year of sobriety, for instance, Madison asks for a chip representing ninety days while denying there had been a celebration the week before. The alcohol consumption only gets worse when a Los Angeles assistant district attorney comes to town looking for him, a local homicide detective suspects him of murder and Madison becomes entangled in an elaborate drug-smuggling ring.
“As far as I’m concerned, I’m in hell,” he states at the beginning of the webseries. “Like the seventh level of hell, whatever it is. The worse level there is, that’s where I am.”
While The Steps has a Hitchcockian undertone regarding the anxiety and fear that a man pushed to the brink encounters, the webseries also shares a connection with the noir style of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett that was personified on screen by Humphrey Bogart. Bogart gave rise to the term “hard-boiled” with his portrayals of Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon and Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep, and Charlie Madison is cut from the same cloth as those classic roles. Wikipedia defines “hard-boiled” as an attitude that exhibits “cool, cocky, flippant,” and in many scenes within The Steps—especially those involving the femme fatale of the webseries, Tamara (Kim Jackson)—Madison definitely fits the bill.
“Thanks for the drinks,” he tells Tamara in episode six. When she replies that she never offered to pay, Madison counters, “You are anyway.”
Creator Dylan Kussman—who also directed and stars in The Steps—moved from Los Angeles to Tennessee after having appeared in such Hollywood fare as Dead Poets Society and Leatherheads, and in turn found inspiration from the change of scenery. “As a writer, my eyes and ears are always open,” he told the Chattanooga Pulse in August 2009. Still, he is cautious in regards to his creation. “Series that are produced over the Internet are really a fledgling industry whose time hasn’t come yet, so The Steps has been designed to fit a paradigm that doesn’t exist yet,” Kussman explains. “The goal (of the project) is to achieve good writing and acting in a dramatic story—most of short-form content on the Web is comedic—in six minute increments.”
The Steps is indeed a well-crafted, well-executed webseries that likewise effectively utilizes its Chattanooga, Tennessee, surroundings. Dylan Kussman, meanwhile, has added plenty of bells-and-whistles to the official website for The Steps, including a video blog for Charlie Madison that enhances the psychological make-up of the alcoholic, criminally-minded “anti-hero” of the narrative. In the end, The Steps is a much needed shot of original drama for the webseries medium—with a little Hitchcock and Bogart on the side for good measure.
Anthony Letizia (August 19, 2011)
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