But there was one thing I think was missed. Is the show terrible because it’s about cross-dressing heterosexual men? Does that sort of storyline not work any more?

Most of the news coverage pointed out that the show is a lot like Bosom Buddies, the ABC sit-com from the early Eighties. There’s also the movie Tootsie (1982) and Some Like It Hot (1959). What’s different about Work It?

Let’s also thrown in Monty Python, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in some of the Road pictures, Victor/Victoria, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Birdcage, Dame Edna Everage, and Divine. With that large sample size, what stands out to me is that there are different forms of cross-dressing. In something like the play Charley’s Aunt, the main character dresses as a woman, but the story has nothing to do with gender roles. It’s simply a costume. Other times, it’s simply a man playing a female character (we’re meant to focus on the character, not the man playing her). Still other occasions, it’s about a drag queen practicing her craft.

But in certain works, it’s about a man stepping into the role of a woman. In the best of these, like Tootsie and Some Like It Hot, the character is really required to submerge themselves into the role. This results in them learning things about themselves as men and about what it’s like to be a woman.

But in Work It, the two lead characters are forced to pass as woman because they’re unable to live as productive men. They can’t get jobs, part of their identity as men. They’ve been marginalized by the women of the world. And even though they’re disguised, the show wants to make it really clear that they’re still men – dammit!

A lot of transgender groups have complained about the show and it’s clear why. Take a look at the promotional photo above. That’s not an image of two women, that nobody suspects are secretly men. That’s two dudes in dresses, using the men’s urinal.

To do the story, and do it properly, you’d have to have the character commit. He would have to submerge himself into life as a woman. He would have to look and act as feminine as possible, in order to make his scheme work.

Work It seems to want to stay as far away from that as possible.

The term “mythology” seems to have sprung up in the mid Nineties and is only used in reference to television shows. We generally don’t speak of movies or books having a “mythology,” even if they’re part of a continuing series.

Serialized Stories

As I’ve already said, TV shows used to do only self-contained stories that wrapped up everything in a single episode. It was in 1981 that Hill Street Blues became the first American prime-time drama to tell stories that continued over time, over a series of episodes or a number of seasons.

I think it was The X-Files (1993 – 2002) and Babylon 5 (1994 – 1998) that first started the idea of a show having a “mythology.” This lead to episodes being separated into “stand-alone” or “mythology.”

A Bigger Idea

On a related note, I think mythology has to be separated from serialized narrative. Just having a story that carries from one episode to the next is not enough. I discuss the difference at length in this post, but to put it succinctly, you can regard it as a wide spectrum, with something resembling a novel at one end and a soap opera at the other.

The mythology of a TV show has to be a big idea, one that we’ll think of as a self-contained concept when the series is complete.

Fantasy and Science Fiction

This usually means that shows with a mythology fall in to the fantasy and science fiction genre. We don’t think of The Wire as having a mythology, even though it was definitely about big ideas (an attempt to examine a major city and show “how institutions have an effect on individuals.” ). ER had things to say about our medical system, but was closer to soap. The Sopranos was novelistic, but wouldn’t be described as being mythological.

I think Battlestar Galactica and Lost are better examples.

The Characteristics of Myths

I think I can back up my argument by trying to briefly describe the characteristics of myths, outside of the television environment.

Myths differ from legends, in that they’re not concerned with factual events (we have science and history to grapple with those things). They try to describe that which can’t be known or named, such as the nature of God or the origin of life. They rely on symbols and metaphors. Often, they communicate ethical laws and moral codes.

Of course, some TV shows’ idea of “mythology” is quite small. For example, the 1974 series Kolchak: The Night Stalker consisted of stand-alone episodes. The 2005 remake, called Night Stalker, had a mythology, with the lead character trying to solve the mystery of who murdered his wife. Series creator Frank Spotnitz later explained that his intention was to explore “the nature of evil.”

In this interview, Spotnitz describes mythologies in more detail, based on Night Stalker and his experience working on The X-Files.

ABC actually required that I tell them what the mythology was. I had to write a top secret, five-page document, before they would order the series. It explained what was in the pilot, where the series was going to go, and what the last episode would be.

[The X-Files] had the benefit and the curse of being the first to devise the mythology series. As it was happening, we didn’t realize what we were doing until we were well into it that we were in fact creating this mythology that wove in and out of the series. I remember hearing the word “mythology” and thought what a pretentious word that was to apply to a TV series, but now it’s sort of accepted.

What Makes It Myth?

I’ve kind of backed myself into a corner here. Is a TV mythology just a big story told over a number of episodes? Does it have to say something about the nature of life, as traditional myths do?

We’re also veering close to the difference between genre fiction and literature. I like to think that any great work of art, even television, tries to say something about the human condition.

But it seem like the proper definition of “mythology” in television terms refers to the over-arching story that each episode is part of, isolated to fantasy and science fiction.

I will close by quoting from Alan Moore’s introduction to the collected graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns, published in 1987.

Beyond the imagery, themes, and essential romance of Dark Knight, Miller has also managed to shape The Batman into a true legend by introducing that element without which all true legends are incomplete and yet which for some reason hardly seems to exist in the world depicted in the average comic book, and that element is time.

All of our best and oldest legends recognize that time passes and that people grow old and die. The legend of Robin Hood would not be complete without the final blind arrow shot to determine the site of his grave. The Norse Legends would lose much of their power were it not for the knowledge of an eventual Ragnarek, as would the story of Davy Crockett without the existence of an Alamo. In comic books, however, given the commercial fact that a given character will still have to sell to a given audience in ten years’ time, these elements are missing. The characters remain in the perpetual limbo of their mid-to-late twenties, and the presence of death in their world is at best a temporary and reversible phenomenon.

This goes to the heart of stories. They have a beginning, middle and an end. I think where this applies to TV series, is that there’s a difference when the idea of a story – a myth – applies to the series as whole, not just individual episodes.

UPDATE: Here’s an interesting post on the difference between science fiction and fantasy. Tod Kelly argues that fantasy works are mythic in nature: “…their stories are a way of tweaking and putting new spin on classic archetypes.”

FOOTNOTE: It’s fairly typical for a TV series to have what’s called a “bible.” A Pitch Bible is written to sell the series to the studio or network. A Production Bible is a reference work for writers and the production staff to refer to; it establishes the canon of the series.

The show bible will outline the concept of the series, describe the characters, the setting, episodes, and so on. Another possible way of describing mythology of a television could be when the show bible resembles an actual religious bible, in the way that it tells stories for a purpose.

For example, Joseph Campbell, one of the great experts on the power and use of myths, described the mythic power of religion this way:

…the imagery that has to be used in order to tell what can’t be told, symbolic imagery, is then understood or interpreted not symbolically but factually, empirically. It’s a natural thing, but that’s the whole problem with Western religion. All of the symbols are interpreted as if they were historical references. They’re not. And if they are, then so what?

As a kid, I loved reading Walter R. Brooks’ Freddy the Pig series (This blog post covers other old works of fiction I enjoyed). Thanks to Dr. Demento’s radio show, I knew about Spike Jones and Noel Coward. As a voracious fan of the Looney Tunes cartoons, I absorbed all sorts of reference from the Forties.

Part of this was driven by instinct, but part of it was driven by the fact that so much older pop culture was readily available. I used to buy old paperback books by the stack, for maybe 50 cents each. Old movies and TV shows played all the time. I started going to used record stories in college.

In today’s digital age, more of that content is available and yet less of it seems to be consumed, at least by the generations that followed me. I don’t know if this is empirically true, but it feels like it is, particularly over the last decade.

Victor Morton recently wrote about a new list of top documentaries (purportedly of all time), which doesn’t contain a single one made before 1988. This recent piece by Bill Mesce goes into further details about why the focus seems to have shifted. Some of the changes in content distribution that he notes are:

• Today, movies spend less time playing in movie theaters. In the past, they were released in a smaller number of theaters at a given time, but over a much longer time period. They were also re-released periodically. Now, as we know, a movie can be gone from theaters in weeks and out on DVD in months.
• Starting in the mid Fifties, old movies became a major part of programming television stations. Mesce doesn’t get into television, but old TV shows got recycled too. I used to watch I Love Lucy and My Little Margie long after their original airings.
• Cable television was another form of distribution, but it’s become more specialized and divided into niches. Aside from TCM, when it comes to movies, cable channels want “titles they know are instantly recognizable to the mass audience.”

Those three points are quite clear and are demonstrably true. Now we get into the grey area of people’s appetite for old stuff.

Mesce has this quote:

A writer who’d worked for Saturday Night Live in the mid-90s tells me that even then writers were being instructed not to reference anything more than three years prior because “a lot of viewers won’t get it.” Compare that to SNLs from the show’s debut years in the 70s when the show riffed on decades of old TV shows and movies, its writers knowing that they and we all shared the same pop culture touchstones.

When I was a kid, you would see this play out on TV. For example, in 1976, The Carol Burnett Show did a parody of Gone with the Wind (1939) called “Went with the Wind.” This was a sketch that was easily understood by everybody, even though the movie was 37 years old. Carol Burnett was six when that movie came out, but she loved it as a classic and so did her viewers, young and old.

In the Eighties, I recall Allan Bloom and Harold Bloom (no relation) arguing for the importance of the Western canon, a common set of important works of art – books, plays, music, etc. – that represented the highest cultural achievements of Western civilization and that gave us a common experience to draw from. That importance of commonality has eroded, as has the existence of a kind of “pop canon.”

I would add two more factors: the shift towards a domination by young consumers and the rise of on-demand entertainment.

There was a time when old people ruled the world. They controlled everything. They controlled the entertainment world. Young people were supposed to be seen and not heard. (You can see some of this at work here and here.)

If you look at the Fifties, you see the importance of young people take off, especially as consumers. If you listen to changes over time in popular music or film or television, you can slowly see the media growing younger. TV networks are primarily interested in 18-24 year olds. A popular show that is popular with old people is not considered a good thing.

A media world that is interested in appealing to young consumers is not going to do Gone with the Wind parodies.

The other big factor is personalization thanks to media-on-demand. I wrote about the shift here in 2008, and the trend has only continued. (You’ll also want to read this post on the differences between “mass” and “niche.”)

There are two key effects I want to point out: 1) When things are made available on a “push” basis by appearing “on the airwaves, “people are more likely to consume them, than when they have to order them on a “pull” basis from a library; 2) Lots of old content is falling off the map as we shift into the new digital age (a point made at some length in this post).

I read all sort of anecdotes about how young people aren’t interested in old movies, let alone other older works. I’m not sure how you could prove this. But there are plenty of facts to suggest that this would be a natural result of changes in the media. And it certainly “feels” true, as an element of the current zeitgeist.

FOOTNOTE: It is possible to argue to this passing of the old, replaced by the new, is a natural phenomenon, as I once discussed here. I think I recall Jaime Weinman once arguing that having older stuff around to freely consume was the aberration. In addition to movies on TV, there was a period of movie revival houses and college campus screenings that may have extended the popularity of older movie stars, such as Humphrey Bogart, longer than it would have lasted otherwise.

From Kathryn VanArendonk, here are some thoughts on realism in TV narratives. She argues that the Uncanny Valley effect – a phenomenon in which computer rendering of humans hits a gap the closer it gets to realism – can also apply to TV shows. In essence, we accept gaps in logic in unrealistic shows, and we also accept a certain amount of unrealistic actions in procedurals, if those elements are essentially clichés of the genre. But the more realistic a show is, the less likely we are to accept implausible events.

So VanArendonk concludes the following:

In my proposed Uncanny Valley of Narrative Plausibility, a movement toward reality maps onto the increasing role of chance in narrative, and the closer one moves toward the valley, the higher the likelihood that meetings between characters or important turning points in the plot appear to happen by accident. The idea is the same as that of the visual uncanny valley: there comes a point where we find plausibility in narrative less persuasive (and maybe just less interesting) than circumstances more patently contrived.

In her post, she’s focusing on the coincidence of two characters running into each other at the most opportune moment, but this theory could be extended to other implausible actions.

As an example of this, the terrific FX show Louie seemed to bother some initially, because Louis CK (who writes, directs, edits, and stars in the show) mixes a highly realistic portrayal of his actual life with elements that are fantastical in nature (e.g., in Louie’s pilot a fleet of limos is summoned to rescue a school field trip; his blind date flees to a waiting helicopter). We’re used to stories being either realism or fantasy; we like explicit code-switching. Louie breaks those rules all the time.

More directly tied to my sequential narrative analysis is this post from Cory Barker on narrative pacing in The Vampire Diaries and Nikita. Echoing Carrie Raisler’s comments on TVD, Barker says:

I’ve described Nikita season one very succinctly and clearly there were a number of fantastic twists and turns throughout, so the series did burn through a hell of a lot of plot in just 22 episodes. And you know what? I think that’s super-smart and actually kind of impressive. Just as I think the way The Vampire Diaries handles plot development in a very similar and probably even more rapid fashion is super-smart and impressive.

I’ve just finished reading Grant Morrison’s book Supergods and this seems similar to his approach. Morrison’s best comic book writing blows through mind-blowing concepts like crazy. He does superhero adventures that take place on a cosmic scale, spanning the entire physical universe and all of time.

The key element here is imagination. This seems so simple, but creative use of imagination is in short supply. If you want an implausible coincidence to take place, you can either construct a clever way to make it seem less implausible or you can construct a world where that coincidence seems normal. You can take one or two stories and stretch them out over three seasons or you can burn through those three seasons’ worth of story in one and then do it again the next season.

The writer is God. The writer controls the universe and can do anything. Instead, writers seem to often do the same thing that was done last time, only not as well.

UPDATE: Another way of describing this failure of imagination is as “intellectual laziness.” See Alyssa Rosenberg:

We often treat tropes like the Girl Who Takes Off Her Glasses and is Suddenly Miraculous as if they’re the product of bad writing, which frequently, they are. But they’re also a product of exceedingly lazy casting (and sometimes, bad wardrobing).

It is a product of the entire process of producing television, which lives in constant horror of doing something that has been done a million times before. It is sometimes ineptitude and sometimes laziness and sometimes fear. It is sometimes nothing more than the inability to fight a difficult creative battle for the one millionth time.

I think Franich is wrong, at least for the reasons he states.

His argument against setting a scheduled end for a show is this:

…having an end date ruins the possibility of course correction — and improvisation becomes more and more difficult.

Franich argues that this need to course-correct is specific (almost unique) to television.

…it seems logical that storytellers should know when their story ends. But that logic assumes that TV show storytelling ought to follow classical rules of narrative, when the entire nature of the medium makes that impossible. Unlike novelists or movie screenwriters or playwrights, TV writers don’t have the benefit of going back to correct old drafts — they can’t change information in the show’s series premiere two years later. Additionally, TV writers have the curious power to witness their work in finished form while they’re still working on it; that’s why most TV shows go through a process of adjustment in their first few seasons, as the writing staff learns what their actors can do and begin to find their show’s specific strike zone.

It is true that a novel is written and re-written until the author is satisfied. A film goes through post-production and its own editing process; the same is true for music. Theater is more organic, but many plays continue to change through the rehearsal process; even after a show has opened, the actors can adjust their performance.

I’ve pointed out that the closest corollary is the publication of comic books. Occasionally, graphic novels are published in one volume, but comics are typically put out one issue at a time. After a couple issues of a lengthy story have been published, the creators have a sense of how it’s being received by readers.

I have two main objections to Franich’s argument.

First, he gives the same two examples that everyone gives these days of shows that didn’t execute their endings well: Battlestar Galactica and Lost. (As the contemporary cliché puts it: they didn’t “stick the landing.”) But the issue of whether those endings are bad or not is totally subjective. Their “failure” can’t be objectively measured and therefore can’t be blamed on having an ending date.

Franich writes:

…in the modern age, TV writers are more aware than ever about the audience’s reaction to their series… and they’re often very conscious of chasing the audience’s interest.

This phrase seems to suggest that BG and Lost could have done better if they’d just had more time to be creative and to respond to audience expectations.

This sounds like a terrible idea. And I wonder if Franich even believes this.

He offers an example of a show that completed its ending in a satisfactory manner:

…it’s important to remember that only one American TV show has thus far benefited from having a very specific end date in mind going into its final season. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that The Sopranos is the rare show in modern television that openly refused to end with anything like an explosive climax, or a final reckoning, or a closing statement… because it didn’t really end at all.

That’s not true. It did end. It ended exactly the way that David Chase, creator of The Sopranos, wanted it to end. He didn’t have an explosive climax or a “definitive” ending (in that sense that we would see Tony Soprano get killed or sent to prison), because that’s not the story he wanted to tell.

And despite the “modern age,” Chase famously defied audiences’ expectations. (e.g., The Russian). He says he came up with the ending 2 ½ years before they shot the finale. There’s no particular reason not to believe him.

My other big objection is that this theory seems to suggest that fewer restrictions mean better art.

Franich argues for the value of “improvisation,” by which he means “exciting jaunts” and taking the opportunity to “change direction if you find a blind alley.” That’s one way of approaching the production of a TV show, or any other act of creation, but it’s not the only way. Some actors improvise on the set; some plan and prepare carefully. You can’t say one way is automatically better. (I’m not arguing writers shouldn’t be free and open in their creative process.)

But the bigger problem is that restrictions themselves can provoke creativity. I am persuaded of this belief by the first volume of the Projections series, a regular review of cinema edited by director John Boorman and Faber & Faber editor Walter Donohue.

In this book, the following question is posed to a number of directors from around the world: If you were given an unlimited budget, and were under no obligation to distribute it, what film would you make?

Here are excerpts from the answers:

Arthur Penn:

Not unlike the prisoner long confined to a solitary cell… I cling to my tiny, familiar prison space. Give me choices to make and I can begin to force a film into existence… I need restraint, limits; above all choices.

Krzysztof Kieślowski: I don’t believe in absolute freedom. In practice it is impossible, philosophically unacceptable… the goal is not as important as the means of attaining it: it is not possible – thank God! – to achieve our goal.

Sydney Pollack: Frustrated as I may be with whatever limitations there are, it is, for me, those very limitations that serve initially to point me in a direction to solve the creative problem.

Paul Verhoeven: …an unlimited budget is as much nonsense as a symphony of ten hours. How much art can we stand?

Terry Gilliam: From the beginning, I have been convinced that I have always been saved from mediocrity by lack of money… I need a budget to fight against; it makes my imagination work twice as hard.

I wouldn’t argue that setting an end date will automatically lead to a better TV show or a more effective ending. But it seems clear to me that avoiding them won’t lead to better shows either.

UPDATE: I got a response from Franich on Twitter.

UPDATE TWO: This article by Jeff Jensen on “the next Lost” hits on something: “The mandate of any TV show is to stay on the air for as long as possible by any means necessary, not to produce artful cohesion over time.”

USA Network shows aren’t just part of a consistent brand, but are the result of a mathematical equation. For example, there is a color scheme:

USA is so specific about the look and feel of its shows that it tells producers to make sure there is a “fruit bowl” in each potentially drab scene. This is metaphor: It could literally mean a bowl of fruit or, more often, a splash of color, as in a scene in “White Collar” with a red office chair in an otherwise monotone room or a bold-colored billboard outside a window, against an always-blue sky.

In fact, Margaret Lyons at the Vulture spelled out how to create a hit show for USA.

• Find a Catchy, Bland Title, Preferably Two Words, That’s Already a Phrase in the Lexicon
• Create an Unlikely Duo: One Rule-Bending, the Other Uptight
• Make Someone a Rookie With a Desirable Area of Expertise
• Add Will-They-or-Won’t-They Chemistry
• Add a Sunshine-y Locale…
• …So You Can Have a Poster With Characters in Sunglasses

These are the shows that are part of the formula:

• Psych (since 2006; set in Santa Barbara)
• Burn Notice (since 2007; set in Miami)
• In Plain Sight (since 2008; set in Albuquerque)
• Royal Pains (since 2009; set in the Hamptons)
• White Collar (since 2009; set in New York City)
• Covert Affairs (since 2010; set in Washington, DC)
• Fairly Legal (since 2011; set in San Francisco)
• Suits (since 2011; also set in New York City)
• Necessary Roughness (since 2011; set in Long Island)

(If you’re really interested in the USA brand strategy, I strongly urge you to read Cory Barker’s analysis.)

In 2009, I wrote a post about shows that were regular viewing options for me, but were also not nearly as good as they ought to be. Most of the USA shows fit in this category.

Burn Notice is the strongest of all of them, for me. It’s not a perfect show, and after five seasons, it’s running low on creative juices, but it’s the strongest execution of elements that are also repeated in other shows.

For example, the narration by Burn Notice’s protagonist Michael Westen works. It can set up the theme for the episode or give technical information about some tactic that is being employed. Necessary Roughness and In Plain Sight both use opening narration by the central characters, but the words don’t ring true. It sounds like what it is: the writer of that script trying to telegraph that episode’s message.

All of the USA shows I’ve listed are about a central character who is an expert in his or her field. Shawn Spencer in Psych has keen observational skills; Hank Lawson on Royal Pains is a gifted doctor; Kate Reed in Fairly Legal is a top mediator. But while Westen is very good at what he does, the show never makes it look easy for him to accomplish his feats. Frequently, the plan he has set up to take down a villain falls apart and Westen has to scramble to recover.

In contrast, Dr. Dani Santino on Necessary Roughness can cure anyone through her combination of talk therapy and hypnosis – all over the course of a single episode. Hank Lawson is an amazing physician whose specialty is apparently every medical condition anybody has ever had in the world; he can use a bendable drinking straw and a bottle of shampoo to cure an aneurism.

If you think in terms of storytelling, what is so interesting about a character that is very good at what they do and they perform their skill and then they win the day? Think about classic movies like Rocky or Star Wars. They’re about people who have to overcome incredible odds in order to triumph.

It’s not that you can’t do shows about people who are really good at their jobs. Think about TV detectives Lt. Columbo and Jim Rockford. They’re good at their jobs and they always win, but their looks are very unassuming. Columbo wears a rumpled raincoat and wanders around as if confused. Rockford lives out of a trailer and frequently gets beat up.  Most of the USA shows’ experts are very attractive in appearance; they look like the winners they are.

In fact, some of these characters take it a step further. They know they’re good; they know they’re right. But as portrayed, they’re just arrogant. They spend a lot of screentime arguing with other characters about why things should be done their way; after they lose the argument, they go ahead and do it their way anyway.

I’m particularly thinking of Fairly Legal’s Kate Reed and In Plain Sight’s Mary Shannon. To put it plainly, these two are just rude and selfish. And because they’re the heroes, they always turn out to be right in the end. In particular, Shannon just pushes the boundaries of propriety, with both her family and her co-workers. Shawn Spencer is along the same lines, but the bigger problem I had with that show (I gave up on it in Season 3) was that it was clear that they mostly wanted to do a silly show rather than an actual mystery (I don’t know if things improved). For that matter, Dr. Dani also seems constantly plagued by episodes of righteous anger.

At the other end of the scale is Annie Walker, the 28-year-old CIA trainee at the center of Covert Affairs. Annie is whatever the script needs her to be at the moment: skilled one moment, naïve the next. She’s one of the Agency’s top field agents or a total wet-behind-the-ears greenhorn. (I should point out the real breakout character is Auggie Anderson, a special ops officer who was blinded on a mission.)

Could just one time, when everyone else is sure of something and only Annie wants to follow another path, could she turn out to be wrong? Just once?

(I should also point out that every episode of Covert Affairs is filled with moments that recall the TV show Alias, always to the detriment of Covert Affairs.)

The other shows that I think are fairly successful with their execution are White Collar and Suits. I think the biggest reason I like White Collar is because there’s an actual interesting conflict at the center of the show.

Neal Caffrey is a con-man, forger and thief. Peter Burke is an FBI agent dedicated to catching such people. Neal is congenitally dishonest. Peter is true & clean to his core, almost incapable of dishonesty. They’re thrown together, first as prisoner and warden, then as co-workers, then as friends. But Neal is constantly drawn to his former criminal life and Peter simply cannot look the other way.

The only real flaw to the show is the ongoing conspiracies that run through each season. Neal was chasing a music box that lead to stolen art that has now come into his possession, but must be disposed of discretely.  There’s also the mysterious death of his girlfriend.  This part of the story typically trickles out in drips and drabs over the season, often seeming needlessly complex. (This ongoing storyline element is typically one of Burn Notice’s few flaws as well; last year, Cory Barker also pointed out the pointlessness of ongoing arcs in USA series.)

That said, this season’s continuing story about some stolen art treasures that Peter and his friend Mozzie are in possession of paid off wonderfully in last night’s season finale, which was all about Peter having to decide whether to embrace his new legal life working for the FBI or to cash out and return to his criminal ways.

Suits also has two strong characters, but is based on a key premise that seems quite flawed to me, almost fatally so.  Crack lawyer Harvey Specter hires Mike Ross to be his new associate; Ross must pretend to be a Harvard Law graduate, when he is actually a dropout.

The show’s creator Aaron Korsh explained that he changed the initial premise:

I wrote a spec piece that I originally intended to be a half-hour Entourage-type based on my experiences working on Wall Street… We went in and pitched to USA how we would take these same characters and put them into the world of law… It was interesting because when it’s Wall Street, he was only faking going to Harvard, he wasn’t faking a law degree. To work on Wall Street, to be a mathematical genius, there is no degree you need to have whereas to practice [law], you need to pass the bar.

This is a key point. Harvey and Mike are hiding a huge secret that can’t last forever and that will have huge repercussions if it’s ever exposed. What’s the eventual deus ex machina that solves this dilemma? Mike magically gets a law degree on weekends? How do they write their way out of this?

The next show to come from USA should be Common Law:

‘Common Law’ stars [Michael] Ealy as Travis Marks, partner to Wes Mitchell (Warren Kole), two police officers on the homicide team at the Los Angeles Police Department. In true USA Network format, these two partners have issues, and in effort to solve them, their captain sends the two to couples counseling.

Two other pilots have been cast, but not yet shot: Over/Under (A day trader with a gambling problem gets fired and has to start over in Brooklyn) and Wild Card (Two lawyers solve people’s problems in Las Vegas).

FOOTNOTE: Carrie Raisler reviewed last night’s Covert Affairs season finale and perfectly expressed my feelings about Annie Walker:

It’s beyond ridiculous that Annie can always follow her hunches with no consequences later, and it’s even more frustrating that her hunches all stem from her almost pathological idealism. It’s tiring, especially because she ends up being right every single time. (Once, she just needs to be horribly wrong and have her idealism thrown back in her face. It would do wonders for her character.)

I also think the A.V. Club’s Kenny Herzog nicely captured the dynamic of White Collar:

Man straddles both sides of the law, man thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room, man incites chain of consequences that effect other peoples’ lives and, as is the case for Neal in “Countdown,” man is forced to confront the dire results of his actions.

The Onion A.V. Club has a new interview with the great character actor Stephen Tobolowsky, in which he talks about some of his experiences of working in television. He perfectly describes the challenges of telling stories.

Before I quote him, let me point out that dramatic writing (movies, TV, theater) typically has a three-act structure. In Act One, we introduce the characters and set up the situation. In Act Two, things get complicated (e.g., a cop is chasing a killer and tracking down clues; a man and a woman have met, but something is keeping them apart). In Act Three, all of the problems are resolved.

Here’s what Tobolowsky said:

It’s always easier in television to continue act one. Act one is always the easiest thing to write, because we are introducing characters. We are introducing the situation. We are introducing crisis. And we don’t have to be responsible for answering any of it, because that comes in act two and act three. So season one of Heroes was amazing. Because you’re introducing these phenomenal characters. It’s so exciting. You have a terrific villain. You have this deadly virus, and you don’t have any idea how it plays into anything. You have all the balls up in the air. When we got to season two, the issue was “To be or not to be? Do we move at all into act two, or do we reintroduce act one?” And they kind of stuck with that second plan. Introduced new heroes. Kind of just reconfigured, reworded what the problem was, and never really advanced the issue of the story. They just kinda reworded act one. And eventually, you have to get act two and three.

But when you do that in TV, that’s when the show ends. So when you have a successful show, you don’t want to do that…

I think you have two choices: You either have to plan forward with the complications you have previously set up, or you can take a view from the side, a side-view of the parallel story that was happening that’s going to eventually impact your main story and affect it. Those seem to be two easy tactics to do. Another thing you can do is just cut forward in time. So, like, two years later. Like Deadwood did. You know that one season where they just said, “Now we’re cutting ahead. So we’re doing geological core samples of a bigger story than what we’re telling. And what we’re gonna do is, we’re gonna jump forward now and pick it up from a new beginning. And you’re going to have to, as an audience, catch up with all of the new characters in it that you missed over the intervening period of time.”

As I wrote in this post on Lost and the pacing of sequential narrative, writing Act Two is a unique challenge for television. We can probably all think of movies that have a great premise and maybe a good ending and then the middle hour of the movie is just the characters wandering around and stuff happens. But with a movie, at least you know that Act Two is going to run around an hour or so.

With a television series, that Act Two can be really long (for example, Lost‘s Act Two ran about 100 hours of television). And the producers don’t know how long the show will be successful or if the network will continue to renew it every year. Moving the story forward can be very difficult.

What you can do instead is just get your balls in the air – the characters and the premise – and then juggle as long as you can. Just keep the balls moving and maybe no one will notice they don’t actually go anywhere.

EDITOR’S NOTE: If you need further real-world examples of how this plays out, read the first two paragraphs of Kyle Buchanan’s look at the upcoming FX show American Horror Story.

FOOTNOTE: Here, Lynn Reed quotes Kristin Thompson’s book Storytelling in Film and Television:

As Kristin Thompson describes, traditional characters “made some sort of mistake each week, learned a lesson, and promptly forgot it,” or solved a crime, healed a patient, and promptly forgot about them.

Here’s another piece of my discussion with AOL TV’s Maureen Ryan (See the previous video here). In this video, we talk about how fandom has changed, particularly in today’s social media environment.

Fans can be more visible and louder than they’ve ever been before. As Ryan points out, there’s now an attitude of “Because my voice can effect things, it should effect things.” She cautions, however, that creators should maintain their own vision in the face of pressure from vocal viewers. She feels that fans shouldn’t write TV shows, in particular because the results are awful.

We also talk about the history of fandom, particularly the shift from just the celebration of work to trying to influence the work itself. Has social media empowered fans or emboldened them to try to participate in the creative act?

Any TV show that continues for some time needs to tell stories (and it’s nice when those stories add up to something). But lots of shows, especially hour dramas, don’t do this simple thing. Instead they spin their wheels, episode after episode.

(If you watch enough TV, you know what I mean. Characters make the same mistakes over and over; they repeat the same arguments; they have adventures that seem just like previous ones.)

On a recent edition of the TV on the Internet podcast, the A.V. Club‘s Carrie Raisler praised The Vampire Diaries this way:

It has the most momentum of any show I’ve seen in the past… I can’t even remember how long. It just moves. Every episode has cliffhangers. Every episode has three or four major “Oh My God” moments. The plots are so well developed.

I was intrigued by the way she phrased this. I like this idea of momentum in storytelling. So, I put the question to her: “Why does TDV’s efforts work for you and how rare is this kind of narrative momentum?”

Here is Raisler’s response:

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about how they manage to tell such cohesive long-term stories, and I think it’s because they aren’t trying to tell several different unrelated stories throughout a season or the series. 

Since the show began, they’ve been telling one long, twisted, story that intertwines all of the characters and their respective backstories. Almost everything that happens feeds the main story arc in some way (aside from a few romantic arcs that work within the framework and add color, but are ultimately unnecessary), and they’ve managed to use this big-picture view to construct a really compelling tale.

They’re also very aware of how to construct an individual episode within the story to include several suspenseful moments and jaw-dropping reveals each week.

Also, within the series each season has had a singular driving force. In season one, they mention Katherine in the first episode, and she shows up in the finale; In season two, the sun and the moon curse is introduced in the second or third episode and paid off in the penultimate episode. They don’t drop plot threads or do “filler” episodes, and this is a sort of unspoken promise to the audience that their effort in watching will be paid off. It’s pretty masterful.

I definitely think this particular brand of narrative momentum is definitely rare in today’s television landscape: the only show I can compare it to right now is Breaking Bad. This is a bit of a stretch to wrap your mind around, I know. Obviously, the quality levels are a bit different and both shows are attempting to accomplish different things, but Breaking Bad structures their season arcs in a similar fashion in that everything builds momentum each week until the end, and every story feeds the main story.

The Vampire Diaries was created and is produced by Julie Plec and Kevin Williamson. Here is an interview with them.

While in Chicago, I got to talk with Maureen Ryan, of AOL TV. We discussed a few things, but in the clip here, we talked about a subject that interested me: How has social media, especially Twitter, influenced those who write about television on a regular basis?

A lot of the key reporters and critics are on Twitter and tend to all follow each other. I would have thought the key problem would be the danger of the “echo chamber” effect, which might lead to the herd all speaking with one voice, but Ryan talks about Twitter as “the second-guessing machine.” How can you use Twitter to be aware of what’s being talked about, while avoiding losing your own point-of-view and keeping your own criteria about what to write about?

From a journalistic standpoint, Ryan notes that there’s a value in the way news breaks really fast on Twitter, but then asks what is the value of a reporter breaking news? You can’t replicate the newsfeed, so you then need to bring something else, perhaps quality analysis or exclusive clips. Ryan says that Twitter forces her to substantial enough in her work to be worth her time.

She also points out that the old TV beat model of writing a review before the first episode appears (perhaps revisiting the show a few months later), seems to be fading out. Young people often know about a show in advance and will make of their minds about whether they’ll tune in. The way that outlets like AOL TV, Hitfix and the Onion A.V. Club’s TV Club cover television does seem like a break from the past.