television

Storytelling and the Evolution of Mediums

February 14, 2013 By Mark Leave a Comment

Following up on several previous posts about mediums and how mediums affect storytelling, I recently ran across an article that illustrates my claim that stories exist apart from the mediums we use to communicate them. From PCMag:

Just like soap opera characters wake up from years-long comas or return from beyond the grave, two cancelled daytime dramas are getting revived.

Prospect Park today announced that All My Children and One Life To Live will in fact get a second chance as the anchor programs on The Online Network (TOLN).

In a sense this development probably doesn’t even seem evolutionary, let alone revolutionary. And from the point of view of the end user it’s probably neither. You fire up whatever glowing screen you want to look at, you input a few commands, and voila: content. But consider what this means for television itself. [ Read more ]

Character Movement and Preparation

July 3, 2011 By Mark Leave a Comment

In the previous post I agreed with an observation by Rust Hills that series television in the 1970’s (and earlier) leaned heavily on static leading characters. More often than not, the series lead was the same paternalistic hero made famous in film by actors like John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart. From a narrative point of view this was not without benefits: the audience developed familiarity with the main characters and knew what to expect each week, in the same way you know what you’re going to get when you eat at a fast-food restaurant.

A show like the long-running and wildly popular Gunsmoke (1955-1975) is an iconic example of this storytelling style. Even a fantastic, medium-altering show like the original Star Trek (1966-1969) followed the same tried-and-true formula. No matter what happened the week before — no matter how close to death the cast came, and no matter how many people died along the way — everything was hunky-dory the following week.

Presenting series regulars as fixed characters had two additional advantages. First, there was no need to waste precious air time preparing for change because the regular characters weren’t going to change. They might squeal or grimace each week, but by the next episode they were ready for another go, none the worse for the wear. Second, every drama could be explored through conveniently disposable guest stars, meaning there would be no need to clean up after them or carry any dramatic impact forward. Each new episode was a familiar and clean (if not sterile) slate.

The downside, as Hills pointed out, is that change is the essence of drama. By splitting the impetus and effect of dramatic change between the regulars and guest stars respectively, television dramas inherently muted the potential of the stories they had to tell. It was safe, it was familiar, it was predictable, and the net result was absurd. How many gunfights did Sheriff Matt Dillon have in Gunsmoke? How many crew members did Captain Kirk lose over the course of his five year journey? Did these cumulative body counts weigh on either character week after week, or on other characters?

To be sure there were always attempts to expand the television norm. Writers wanted to do more, actors wanted to do more, but television was a corporate medium first. Brand identification, both in the star power of the actors playing the series leads and in the audience’s familiarity with the weekly narrative was rigorously maintained because it worked. It delivered an audience to advertisers each week, and that audience was never disappointed. Bored, perhaps, but if a viewer wanted more they could always turn off the tube and read a book. [ Read more ]

WIG&TSSIP: Series Regulars vs. Guest Stars

June 22, 2011 By Mark 1 Comment

The Ditchwalk Book Club is reading and discussing Rust Hills’ seminal work, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. Announcement here. Overview here. Tag here.

The full title of this section is The Series Regulars, as against the Guest Stars. As you might suspect, the title references television drama, and advances the assault Hills began two sections earlier. Continuing the discussion of characterization forward from the previous section, Hills states:

You can perhaps see better how it ought to work by looking at television series dramas, which have got it all just exactly backwards.

As I said in response to the aforementioned section on slick fiction, it’s important to remember that Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular was originally written in 1977. Television has changed a lot since then, but at the time Hills’ criticisms were accurate. Continuing from the above quote:

The regulars in the classic TV series never change. They are the fixed characters. The doctors, sheriffs, private detectives and police chiefs, who are the central figures of these programs, always remain the same. If they are shown falling in love, you know the girl’s got to be done away with….

Hills goes on to explain how guest stars in circa-1977 television dramas were the characters who ended up changing or being moved by the story, and as a first-hand witness to television of that era I can tell you he’s right. That’s pretty much what TV was like, and I’ll have more to say about that in the next post. [ Read more ]