Ben’s Blog: You vs The World.
It’s infuriating that a general theory of anything should be named with such a pair of of misleadingly narrow words as “Hero’s” and “Journey”. We should, of course, have the imagination to use Joseph Campbell’s narrative archetype as the metaphor he intended, but the Dungeons & Dragons tone runs throughout (time for step 9, seizing the sword!) In 2016 it seems impossibly juvenile to base our entire narrative culture around the myth of a man leaving his village to adventure, only to return triumphantly with an elixir.
Is this why our current TV golden age feels so essentially contemporary? The love that gushes towards Netflix, Amazon and HBO is not simply based on an enjoyment of good story telling, it bubbles along with the sense that the new wave of great TV drama expresses something refreshingly and excitingly of the now. Recognition, perhaps, of a fresh narrative archetype.
Films are single stories told, in the first showing at least, in a public space. They are not just mass entertainment but mass public entertainment. In this context the (gender neutral) Hero’s (possibly entirely metaphorical) Journey makes sense. The story is not the crowd but the individual sat amongst them, it talks directly to you about the lessons you have to learn about yourself. TV is also mass entertainment but it primarily happens at home and over a vastly extended period of time. We don’t want TV locking us indoors for hours, trapping us on our sofas, just to lecture us about our need for personal growth.
Some spoilers. Pretty much every change that Walter White goes through happens in episode one of Breaking Bad. Things get more intense, but in terms of him “breaking bad”, his decision to do an immoral act for dubiously justifiable reasons, that’s ep 1. Transparent is not the story of someone coming to terms with her true identity as a woman, again that key change is a given from the start.
Most striking is Games Of Thrones which surely should fit every sword and sorcery archetype and symbolic quest narrative Campbell has to offer. But Game Of Thrones is not a Hero’s Journey. He’s sworn vows, broken vows, lost his love, lost his life and is soon to find out his true identity by Jon Snow still knows nothing. Luke Skywalker takes just over 6 hours to grow from a naive boy into a warrior humbled by his own personal darkness. We’ve followed Snow for 60 hours and apart from a change of hairstyle he’s the same noble, trusting, simple hero he was at the start. After 60 hours of Game Of Thrones pretty much the only thing that has really changed is the weather.
It’s often said that in the best sitcoms nothing changes. Our characters have a problem, find a solution, which fails, we reset for next week. This worked fine in the UK where writers were happy to end their work after 3 hours. The loungers demanded by US networks meant a new model became necessary, a way of repeating the same character beats with a fresh angle – they let the world change.
Is this the technique that has enabled TV writers to find a new paradigm? Mad Men is not a show about Don Draper coming to realise that he’s a shallow narcissist with a self-fictionalised personality. It’s a show about a shallow narcissist with a self-fictionalise personality experiencing the 1960s and inventing a coke jingle. Films are about people changing. TV is about people in a changing world.
Lawrence Gray August 23rd, 2016 at 8:18 am
Interesting insight! I rewatched Breaking Bad from beginning to end and also realised that Walter was Walter right from the start… And suddenly I thought, was he like that as a teacher? They gave him a lot of motivation and kept piling it on to keep him focused on his need for money, but this dark side of his could not possibly have been hidden for so long. In short, an iffy premise that was probably why it was a series that didn’t grab people right away. And that it was the character of Pinkman who had the real story arc and the dynamic between those two gave the real texture of the series. Similarly, the relationships had strong arcs and where Walter did not, all the character’s around him did have those arcs.
As for Jon Snow… is he really the star? Tyrone Lannister is perhaps the guy with the arc that we are interested in. He does develop. And one suspects that the brilliant art direction, good looking nakedness, and shock plot turns, has kept us watching. Though right now there is a sort of, “I’ve started so I’ll finish” feel to the show as it strives to wind things up rather than merely wind down.
Jon Draper, once the revelation of his past happened, he became less interesting and in many respects the scripting became less and less engrossing or even coherent. Peggy Olsen had a hard core arc that for some reason the series never full developed despite the promise of the first season.
In short, I’m less certain that there is a new paradigm here, more of a merely practical issue of long form TV shows. Actors cannot make as much of a commitment to something lasting that long and so their Characters end up becoming victims of schedule clashes, budget changes, and other personnel changes in the production team and so consistent growth patterns become difficult to sustain. Similarly there is the issue of multiple directors, writers, working on a show with limited knowledge of where anything is going.
I’ve just watched three seasons of Vikings and Ragnar Lothbrok definitely has a well sustained character arch, similarly his brother Rollo and the other characters. But I note that Michael Hirst has written most of the scripts and so, unusually, one finds a single voice at the heart of the show, and a very strong sense of history and the role these characters play in shaping that history. Definitely a show a cut above the norm because of this sustained attention to character development.
So I think before people start thinking there is some rule one should follow for TV drama that is fundamentally different from the feature film, I think one should still strive to understand the characters and how experience changes them and keep that in mind as one writes the series.
I just finished scripting a long form series for Singapore TV. They’re shooting it right now. I battled with the production process to maintain continuity. After all, if a guy gets beaten up he really should not be bouncing around as if nothing happened ten story minutes later. But of course, when you shoot the scenes out of sequence, have different directors working on different strands, and actors who never read the whole series scripts but merely work from one scene to the next informed by directors who also never read the whole series, one is always going to struggle to maintain a strong character arc.
I still think that if you do, it makes for a better series.