As is my wont, I’ll try to make a point, circling around it repeatedly, unable to just kill the thing.
And thus it is, again, that I have to once again revisit my point on movement and progression in television storytelling in order to make a point I forgot to make.
This review of a Hung episode by the always magnificent Todd VanDerWerff says it exactly right:
The characters’ situations change, but they keep repeating the same thematic beats over and over and over. This is sort of like the pay cable equivalent of a crime procedural where the characters just solve the same cases over and over and over.
Yes!
Chuck – a show I often love – really wore me out last season with the way it would clumsily hit some theme over and over.
“Chuck wants to be a spy!” Characters would actually say it out loud that bluntly. And then the next episode, they’d say it again: “I know you really want to be a spy, Chuck.”
Two rules are revealed here. One, the old writing adage to Show Not Tell. If a character is frustrated, find some way to show that frustration. Don’t have him say, “I’m so frustrated.” Two, at some point, he’s going to have to do something about that frustration (This is my Movement and Progression argument). He shouldn’t just say every episode that he’s frustrated and then when we all get bored with that, just change the situation because it’s been milked dry.
A show can do the same thing over and over. For many years, Law & Order was very successful at it. But that approach isn’t going to work for every show.
One Response
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The Pop View Says:
…it’s not inconceivable that some or all of this episode’s moments could pay off further down the line. “Mad Men” has a memory like an elephant, often staging callbacks to moments you thought were throwaways.
That’s the thing. You don’t have to continue a story from week to week, but the show should at least remember what happened before.