Monday, February 08, 2010

An audience wants a story to be over, an audience wants a happy ending, and an audience wants to relax. Those are all things that someone who’s purveying to a mass audience can’t possibly put up with. Can’t have that happen.

T. L. Reid went to the Future of Story conference in Edmonton last weekend, where Hart Hanson, showrunner of BONES, was the keynote speaker, and went to the trouble of transcribing Hart's fascinating talk. What I find most interesting about the talk was his thoughts on what makes a mass audience show, what the audience wants and what keeps them watching. (He loves THE WIRE, but his show gets twelve times as many viewers.)

Definitely check it out.

Labels: showrunner

10:38 AM

2 Comments:

Thanks for posting this link. It's got me thinking a fair bit about my writing.
"You have to want to entertain people." yeah, that's going a post-it note on my monitor.

By  Norlinda, at 5:32 PM  

I've had many TV writers come onto my staffs, mostly from the feature world but sometimes the novel worlds and they write down. They look down on entertaining the masses, and they get fired. It just doesn't work. It always shows. The actors can tell. Everyone can tell.

Now THAT is something you don't hear every day. It's both true - you really can tell - and excellent of him to acknowledge it.

Thanks for pointing this out. It's a fascinating talk, well worth the read.

By  kimshum, at 3:08 AM  

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