Fall TV is almost upon us and both here and over at AwardsCircuit.com, I’ll be talking lots of TV. I thought I’d start off my coverage by talking about something that has been on my mind for a while. There is a lot of high concept television being put out now and with the rise of cable shows has come a desire to curate highly loyal and rabid fans. One way shows manage to that is by creating complex narratives, that often make the viewer work a little harder by asking the viewer to make logic leaps. Or more recently, intentionally leaving things out of the narrative presented to the audience. It’s certainly one way to engage your audience, by constantly having them pour through the plot and analyze every detail, whilst building their own theories and opinions.
But at what point does this stop being engaging and start becoming frustrating? One can only look at the reactions Teen Wolf EP Jeff Davis’ remarks on leaving things purposefully unanswered or removing things to confound fans. Now I’m supposed to be on a break from this show but there’s not a day goes by that something he says manages to enrage me as opposed to engage me. I am just now understanding what he was trying to Derek’s plot line in terms of storytelling, but even though I understand it, I still don’t think it was well done or necessary. Given the amount of unanswered questions, the show is starting to feel less like a mastermind weaving a web than a demented pupeteer pulling the strings.
The same thing befell True Blood in it’s season finale. Now that once great show has gone to shit, but it still doesn’t excuse the utter tomfoolery that was that finale episode’s six month time jump without cluing the audience into whether Eric was alive or dead, how Sam got to be the mayor of Bon Temps, Arlene buying the bar or Sookie and Alcide getting together. In interviews given after the finale aired, the new EP said that he was glad the episode had strong reactions. But since the reaction was so overwhelmingly negative, was it worth it?
What these two men, and most show runners don’t realize is that while fans of shows may be forgiving, there’s a limit to how much you can obfuscate a narrative under the guise of engaging them. I had a chat with Joseph Braverman over the past weekend, and naturally we got to talking about the film that has caused many a discussion between us. I mentioned to him that Lindeloff’s style of purposefully leaving things out reminded me a lot of some TV shows I’d watched and that’s why it didn’t work. Joseph wisely reframed the conversation that in a two hour film, if you leave things out, there’s an opportunity to build on those in a sequel. However, television, being a weekly medium, is not afforded that luxury due to the fact that your patience for constantly being left out of the loop can only last so much.
Thinking back on this conversation and at the current TV season coming up, I really hope that shows can find new ways of crafting narratives that don’t have to resort to this kind of deception in order to function. It’s one thing to create a story that requires thought, but when your audience can’t understand the basic mechanics or driving force of the plot or you are just trying to make your fans angry, your show is doomed to fail in the long run.
Edit: Fystilesderek pointed me to a post they did on a similar topic, using the JJ Abrams vs. Joss Whedon theory and it’s pretty good.