Re: Telling, edited by William Walsh

The premise and promise of Re: Telling are maybe more exciting than the execution could ever quite fulfill. Writers repurpose the plots, characters and settings of various in-the-ether cultural touchstones. The ever-playful Walsh (his 2009 book, Questionstruck, was written entirely of questions taken from Calvin Trillin’s New Yorker pieces) has assembled a slew of experimental authors to have at the source material, and for the most part, create something shiny and new.

In particular, one standout contribution comes from Chicago’s Tim Jones-Yelvington. In “Law & Order: Viewers Like Us,” Dick Wolf attempts to save his flagging flagship shows by crafting a program about the people who watch the various Law & Order iterations, based on the idea that millennials are “more engaged by their own television-watching habits than by television itself.” The story then walks the reader through treatments of the first few episodes, in which we watch Simon Smith watch Law & Order. Though the piece is filled with very funny social satire, Jones-Yelvington also manages to craft a well-told story about Simon.

Several of the stories seem content simply to ape the source material for a gag, or vaguely gesture at it. The success of “Viewers Like Us” depends on a cultural critique of the actual show, and the most fully realized pieces present here (like Roxane Gay’s “Alias: The Complete Series,” and Jim Ruland’s “Jack and Jill”) multitask beautifully: telling their own story while bringing new meaning to an old tale.