– Or YES, Good Writing Does Still Exist in TV Shows –
– Also, Why American TV Occasionally Sucks –
Allow me to be self-indulgent and annoying for a second and quote an episode of Sherlock –
Jim Moriarty: Do you know what happens if you don’t leave me alone, Sherlock? To you?
Sherlock Holmes: Oh, let me guess, I get killed?
Jim Moriarty: Kill you? No, don’t be obvious. I mean I’m going to kill you anyway, someday. I don’t want to rush it though. I’m saving it up for something special. No no no no no. If you don’t stop prying… I will burn you. I will burn… the heart out of you.
Sherlock Holmes: I have been reliably informed that I don’t have one.
Jim Moriarty: But we both know that’s not quite true.
This section of text seems entirely irrelevant without the voices of the actors, the scene, the context. Yet – and maybe this is because I’ve seen this scene before and have had time to process it – this scene conveys so much on it’s own. The insanity of Moriarty, the stubborn, emotionless Holmes. Or, the seemingly emotionless Holmes. I’m going to stop myself now, before this turns into a rant about Sherlock Holmes in literature in general, because that’s not what this post is about (though it is horribly tempting to change topics).
What strikes me about this script – or, to be more specific, section of dialogue – is how simple it is, and yet how creepy is can remain, even in it’s lifeless “text-on-a-page” state. What this tells me is the writer’s of this show know what they are doing; a skill many seem to lack in television these days.
Allow me to be self-indulgent once again and quote How I Met Your Mother, so that I may prove a point-
Ted: I’m gonna do what that guy couldn’t, I’m gonna take the plunge… Well, I guess that’s not a perfect metaphor since… for me it’s falling in love and for him it’s… death.
Barney: Actually, that is a perfect metaphor.
Now, I’m not going to lie here – I love How I Met Your Mother. And I can perfectly visualize this scene in my head. But I don’t hear it, I don’t feel it. It’s a cheap joke that’s been reposted on a blog, written by a blogger who assumes she has something intelligent to say about the world. The words are lifeless and hold no meaning. I can’t even bring my self to laugh at it. This, unfortunately, is true of most shows that I watch – they are less memorable and I lose the desire to watch them and geek out over the small details.
Now, to be fair, Sherlock is a drama, and HIMYM is a comedy. They don’t operate on the same level generally – my inner need to analyze the living crap out of a TV show is going to be more pronounced when I watch a modern drama over a modern comedy. But I feel like society (American society, specifically) has relegated the comedy to a silly, void-of-meaning medium. Sitcoms are there to make you laugh once, and then you never really go back. They rely on cheap jokes in the worst case, life-situations in the best. But comedies can be funny and contain meaning [read: Anything by Oscar Wilde (playwise)]. Dramas in the US don’t fair much better, as they often end up focusing too much on action and not enough on story.
So why does this happen? It happens for several reasons, the most important (and disappointing one) is that stories and storytelling don’t make money in the United States. And I would wager that making money is a major factor in picking shows for a Television Station. this makes sense – you have to pay the actors, directors, camera men, make up artists, broadcasters, etc. What’s sad about this emphasis on money making is that story falls to the wayside. If a show doesn’t catch on immediately, it’s scrapped. If the show follows a familiar formula that has already proven to make money, then it will probably be picked up. This leads to an over saturation of terrible writing by people attempting to make a buck.
(There are exceptions to this, of course. Lost and The Mentalist being among them.)
The problem with TV, at least here, is that over saturation. Let’s take a look back at Sherlock for a second. Sherlock is a wildly successful British TV show that focus’ on accuracy and loyalty to the source material while modernizing the main characters and making them People. The scripts are brilliant, at times filled with laughter, and then shaking with sadness. The scripts are alive before they are acted, and when they given to the actors, the scripts become real. It engages the audience, and makes them connect with the stories on an emotional level.
What did the US take away from this? “LET’S MAKE OUR OWN SHERLOCK. IT MAKES MONEY.”
There are several problems with this; first among them being that Sherlock Holmes is an inherently English story. He belongs in London, on Baker’s street, and any attempt to Americanize it would be disappointing at the least. Secondly, I have little faith in the passion of American screen-writers. I have the feeling that this version will lack all of the wit, the venom, the terror, and terrible sadness of the original. Now, i could be wrong, but in the case of Americans Americanizing British Television, the record is currently something like 0-2.
I believe that this spurs from a distinct lack of appreciation for stories in our culture. We want our stories fast, conflict heavy, and action oriented. We want our comedies vaguely funny and enjoyable. While there is nothing inherently wrong with this, it has caused the Media-at-Large to believe that we don’t care what we consume. That we don’t care about stories. So they feed us formulaic television, and hope that we don’t notice that 2 Broke Girls is essentially a really bad take on Friends – only with two girls who are vapid and lack the mental complicity to do anything interesting. (Again, there are exceptions. Psyche and Modern Family are both fantastic comedies – because the writer’s know their characters [in Psyche] and know how normal people function [in Modern Family]. Baseline: They know what they are doing.)
Yet, some of the best shows on television are hour-long, story-oriented shows. I do very much believe people like to be engaged in their stories, and what screen writers need to realize is that if they put passion into their script and pay attention, try to comprehend what they are doing, then the show will catch on. I’m not saying do away with the sitcoms – I’m saying give stories, Real Stories, a chance. They may, in fact, surprise you.
February 4, 2012
My Life of Stories
emigee93 markus zusak, stories, The Book Thief, to be continued, unsolicited opinions Literature, Story Telling, Unsolicited Opinions 1 Comment
-Or Why I Will Never Be As Good A Writer As Markus Zusak –
-Or Storytelling, Part 2 –
– A Guided Tour Of Suffering –
To your left,
perhaps your right,
maybe even straight ahead,
you find a small black room.
In it sits a Jew.
He is scum.
He is starving.
He is afraid.
Please – try not to look away.
First, some context: The above quote is from Markus Zusak’s brilliant novel The Book Theif, which revolves around a little girl named Liesel Meminger. She lives with her foster parents in Germany, circa 1940 , and fosters a love for reading – a skill which she learns through reading stolen books with her foster father. Also, her family is hiding a Jew in their basement.
There are few words that adequately describe my love affair with this novel. It is quite simply one of the most beautifully written books I have ever had the pleasure of reading (and I am taking my good sweet time reading it.) I use this book for writing inspiration, but probably not in the way you think. I read this book and my self-esteem says:
“Wow. I suck at writing.”
And then I usually respond with:
“Yeah, I do. But I could be better. Let’s get writing!”
This may strike people as weird, but it’s the way I improve – I see someone working in my preferred medium, someone who is significantly better than I am in that medium, and I get this feeling that I need to improve. I need to, in some way, prove to that person that I can write amazing things, I just need to work at it a bit.
This is how I feel with Zusak’s writing. He wrote The Book Thief from the point of view of Death, but he makes Death world weary and haunted. Death takes you on the journey of Liesel’s life because it fascinated him, which, in turn, fascinates the reader. Death points out the horrors of the Holocaust without being heavy handed – in ‘A Guided Tour Of Suffering,’ he merely asks that you don’t look away. That statement resonated so much with me that I nearly cried; how many times do we witness suffering and look away?
Zusak’s writing is beautiful, resonant, relevant, and powerful. He makes his characters into real people – people that you care for – and tears at you with the terrible horrors in their lives. He can sting you with a line and soothe you with a paragraph, make you cry with the turn of a phrase. Zusak’s manages to capture all of the beauty and deformed depravity of the human condition in a way that makes me want to write like him.
I want to be able to influence people the way his writing has influenced me, and that is why I continue to write at midnight each night, because that is the only time I have to myself. It’s why I read my stories out loud to fix tense changes, why I struggle through writers block, why I even bother with the lofty dream of some day being published. I want my writing to matter to someone. I want my characters to come alive on the page, to have a reader make a connection with something that I have written.
These wishes feel very selfish as I write them, but I want to gift my stories to readers. I want readers to dissect, interpret, and attach meanings to my words that I never even imagined while writing them. I want to give people a story, so that they might find meaning in it. Markus Zusak and several other writers have given me the gift of inspiration, and I, in turn, want to give that gift to someone else.
The last line of The Book Thief:
“I am haunted by humans.”
I am haunted by stories, festering in my mind, clawing their way out. I am haunted by the words I want to say, and the stories those words tell. I am consumed by them.