TV

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 ]

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 ]

WIG&TSSIP: Slick vs. Quality Fiction

June 7, 2011 By Mark Leave a 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 complete title of this section is Slick Fiction, as against Quality Fiction.. In it Hills presents a historical timeline, describing how slick, serialized fiction moved from magazines to television in order to follow the migrating mainstream market. And he’s not shy about characterizing that market:

What the magazine readers wanted from it was entertainment and escape, and television can do that now more mindlessly than magazine fiction ever could. As is well known, you can’t beat a skunk in a contest that involves smelling bad.

Hills’ dismissive critique seems all the more snobbish given the passage of time. But Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular was originally written in 1977, and at that time many of the complaints Hills levels against television were broadly valid. Formulaic plots and cliche characters abounded, even as some writers tried to buck the creative and cultural constraints imposed by the networks.

I’ll have more to say about TV and storytelling in response to another section of Hills’ book, but for now I want to focus on the crux of his observations and complaints:

The writers of slick fiction went along, with the audience, to television. For unlike serious fiction, which has always been written whether there was any demand for it or not, the whole point and purpose of slick fiction was that it was written to order for a market, and once the market was gone the writing ceased.

If you think about storytelling in terms of gross tonnage, there’s no question more writing is done in the service of established commercial markets than is done in the service of art. That’s neither a surprise nor a pejorative observation. I don’t know what the ratio is of visits to amusement parks and museums, but I’m fairly confident that in most locales amusement parks beat the stuffing out of museums.

It doesn’t take a fiction editor to note that much of commercial storytelling is derivative, redundant, formulaic and, too often, just plain bad. Like anything that’s mass produced — and here you should be thinking of the corporate hot dog — the emphasis in commercial works is generally on satisfying demand as cheaply and efficiently as possible. Great writing is as necessary to the average commercial story in any medium as great cuts of meat are to commercial hot dogs. The difference might be noticeable, but neither the manufacturer nor the customer is willing to pay for that difference. [ Read more ]