Tuesday, November 30, 2004

SECOND THOUGHTS ON TELEGRAPHING

Of course, to pick up the previous post, if you can't tell stories about people failing to communicate well, you are depriving yourself of a huge source of real life drama. We've all got in trouble for not telling someone something. What puts the curse on it is that we know we're watching TV, so we know the writers are going to make something of it. In real life, most of the time we don't tell someone something, we get away with it. That's why we keep doing it.

What I might have done to take the curse off the Everwood episode: allow the obvious setup, but call into question which story we're going to tell. Ephraim says "I'll get caught." Bright tells him "You won't get caught. People lie all the time." Thus calling into question, for the audience, whether someone who lies will get caught.

I think this is akin to the believability issue. If you have a hard-to-believe plot turn, you can (a) come up with something more believable, (b) contrive to make the plot turn as believable as possible or (c) address its very unbelievability.

By addressing the unlikelihood, you can make it mean something else. Ephraim's feeling guilty about not telling Amy made it about something else, so the plot didn't hinge on "will he get busted" but instead on "which is worse, lying, or telling the truth too late?" Had we been given a sense earlier on that that was the issue, it might have reduced the wince factor. For me at least.

9:59 AM

1 Comments:

This is good advice. It's the same as running a court trial - if your client has some holes in his case, you better be the one to point them out because you can be sure that your opposing counsel will. Okay, maybe not the same, but similar?

Perske Blatjang

By  Anonymous, at 12:59 AM  

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