Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Three Things I'd Like Never to See Again on TV

1. The failed trip. I was re-watching an Old Christine the other night, and wanted to tear my (remaining) hair out. First, because it was an awful episode; second, because it was credited to two writers I really like; and third, because they should have known better than to write it in the first place -- because it's a premise that never works. It's the episode "Up in the Airport," and can I put in a motion now for A Plot I Never Want to See Again on TV? It's the one where a family -- or group of friends -- is set to go on a trip, but Something Goes Wrong. They get stuck in the airport and never take off (the aforementioned "Up in the Airport" or Designing Women: "The Odyssey"). Or they arrive at their destination, but immediately get sick and never leave the hotel (Designing Women: "Stranded" or Kate and Allie: "Evening in Paris") -- or they arrive, but fall asleep because of the time change and, again, never leave the hotel (Gilmore Girls: "French Twist").

A few weeks ago, Big Bang Theory did its own variation, as the four geeks took off on a bachelor-party excursion to Mexico -- but developed a flat tire. (Their efforts to salvage the situation, wonderfully in character, did a lot to salvage the episode, but still, it was sad to see the show resort to such a TV cliche, especially after they'd trotted out much the same plot last spring, as Leonard and Sheldon headed to a lecture at UC Berkeley, but got sidetracked along the way.) You know the nice thing about when the Ricardos went to Hollywood? They actually went to Hollywood. When Samantha and Darrin visited Salem? They visited Salem. In fact, off the top of my head, only one show excelled at the "failed trip" script, and it was the sitcom Yes, Dear. But then, that was a show built on the comic incompatibility of its four principals, so the more frustrating the situation and claustrophobic the setting, the better. On Yes, Dear, the journey actually was more interesting than the destination; on all other shows, the expression "getting there is half the fun" should be more accurately rephrased as "getting there is only half the fun." The next time a series wants to foist one of those plots on us, where we start off on a destination that we never reach, maybe they can warn us by flashing on the screen, ahead of time, "Rated HF, for half-fun."

2. The flash-forward. It seems that every one-hour drama, at one point or another, uses that hoary device of starting the episode at the end: you open with a car crash, or gunfight, or a shot of the hero seemingly dead, or betraying his comrades -- then cut to the opening theme -- and then when you return, you see "Nine hours earlier" or "Three days earlier" plastered across the screen, and you go back and see how our hero got himself into that sticky situation. I've come to accept that not only is that convention never going away, but its usage seems to be expanding; Walking Dead, one of the chief offenders, just started their new season with yet another flash-forward. (NCIS: LA seems to do it every other week, but I am willing to cut NCIS: LA some slack because they did Kensi and Deeks right, and I can't think of the last time a show took an antagonistic couple with combustible chemistry, and over the course of several seasons, ignited a romance without losing what made them special to begin with. The Moonlighting Curse has officially been lifted; can we now dispense with that expression forever?)

But, you see, now we don't just get episodes starting at the end. We get whole shows fast-forwarding to the end of the season. I'm sure that convention goes way back, but let's just blame Breaking Bad Season 2 and the pink teddy bear in the pool. Was the season really any better for that goddamn pink teddy bear? And now, with How to Get Away With Murder and its clone sister Quantico, it's not just about flashing forward, then flashing back -- you get to go back and forth and back and forth all season till your head explodes. It used to be that part of the season would be the lead-up to the crime, then the rest would be solving the crime -- now you get to do them both at once. You don't just get to watch the episodes; you're expected to study them. (You've heard of appointment television; this is assignment television.) But you know, for me, I don't need something momentous happening on my screen every second: I like the exposition, the slow builds, the sense of anticipation. And I like when the writer is confident enough in their story to let it unfold chronologically. Because for me, these two-for-one storylines don't make the shows more exciting (or heaven knows, "better"); they just make them busier. And my life is busy enough without my TV show multi-tasking too.

3. The stall. I watched the hideous Flash premiere a few weeks ago, with Robbie Amell written off about eight seconds in (and mourned for only slightly longer), and John Wesley Shipp written off during his welcome-home party, sometime between the ice-cream and the cake, and I was pretty much ready to give up on the show. Did the writers really think taking a season-long quest (Barry rescuing his father) and turning it into a MacGuffin was going to warm the hearts of viewers? -- that their cold-hearted deployment of the Reset Button would be greeted by cries of, "Yeah, screw Season 1; here comes Season 2, baby!" So I proceeded to episode two with some caution, and right away, when the affable Teddy Sears appeared on the scene with a doomsday warning for the S.T.A.R Labs sextet, and Barry refused to listen to him, I hit "pause" and emailed a friend who'd already seen the episode, "Oh God, is this going to be one of those episodes where someone refuses to listen to reason, just so the writers can fill 43 minutes?" And he wrote back, "Kind of."

And the episode wasn't as bad as all that, but it utilized one of the most overused TV scripting tactics: the stall. The scene where someone bursts into the room with needed information, but nobody will listen to him -- because if they did listen, if they armed themselves with all the facts, the episode would be over in four minutes. I'm not even going to list the times I've seen that employed recently -- you've all seen it employed. If you're old enough to watch TV, you've seen it employed. My husband and I will often turn to each other -- when someone gets cut off mid-sentence, or dragged out of a room before he can impart key information -- and say, "So is this going to be one of those episodes where, if they were actually allowed to speak, there'd be no episode?" And it always is. And in fact, the only thing worse than the "you've got to listen to me" episode is the follow-up a few weeks later: the "you were right, I should've listened to you" episode. I'd suggest "you've got to listen to me" and its companion, "I should have listened to you," as a new drinking game, but my alcohol consumption is limited to about two quarts a day.

15 comments:

  1. I'm going to go with the love triangle. It's a common trope in literature, and seems to happen a lot on TV, too. (Buffy, Vampire Diaries, Lost, Friends, True Blood, etc.) How reflective are love triangles of reality? How many viewers are sat out there thinking, "Well, if there ain't no love triangle, I can't relate to any of this shit. When are people gunna write stories that reflect my exact sit-chu-a-shun?"

    Also, bad accents... particularly the fabled 'British accent' which exist solely in the mind of the non-Brit. Either hire an English actor who speaks with his own accent, or don't bother. You're just embarrassing yourself.

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    1. Omigosh, yes, the love triangle: once the province of soaps; now it's invaded everything -- sitcoms, fantasy, sci-fi, horror, procedurals. Poor Barry and Iris and Eddie -- on The Flash -- were stuck in that love triangle all last season; Eddie's dead and gone for one episode, and now they've put Barry and Iris into a NEW triangle. And I think they think by commenting on it, they're taking the curse off it, but you know: there are other ways to keep a couple interesting and active than throwing them into a triangle...

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  2. Getting Away With Murder should definitely change its campaign to “You've heard of appointment television; this is assignment television.”

    As far as TV tropes that should go away... how about:

    * Parking spaces always being available right where and when they’re needed.
    * Phone conversations never ending with “goodbye.”

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    1. The ever-available parking spaces are particularly annoying when the show is set in NYC, where, of course, you can circle the block for seven hours before finding parking (and then you end up putting it in a lot and paying $40.) And even more galling than that are the shows set in NYC where folks are just driving around in their own cars, as if everyone in Manhattan has a car that they park outside their apartment and use whenever they leave the house. I know it's simpler to write someone driving their own car than to show them hailing a cab or, heaven forbid, taking public transportation, but I do sometimes watch these shows set in NYC (but scripted by writers who live elsewhere) and think, "Have the writers ever BEEN to NYC?" I'm pretty sure IRON FIST, which I watched recently, had everyone driving their own cars around Manhattan, pulling up to wherever they were going, and parking them without hassle. Crazy.

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  3. Much as I'm inclined the give The West Wing a pass on pretty much everything, I fear it is partly to blame for the epidemic of flash-forwarding...

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    1. Ah, you see, a weird gap in my TV viewing: WEST WING. I can't remember what was opposite it when it originally aired, but I never watched. As my much, much younger friends are wont to say, My bad.

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    2. I just got into WEST WING and it's worth watching. Seven seasons and I'm just finishing up season five. I will say that I notice Sorkin's absence after he goes away (his last is season four), but I plan to watch the whole thing and think it's pretty excellent although it WAY overindulges in the "flash forward" thing you were talking about, as well as the unnecessary subtitles to make things seem more important than they are ("The Republican War Room: 3:32 PM").

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  4. Re 2
    I know you like to keep tv and musicals separate, but.... how do you feel about the prologue in the movie of Carousel, with Billy already polishing the stars....? Xx

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    1. Jason, I'm so flattered that you read my blog. I don't necessarily make a point of ignoring musicals here; I just don't see many on TV that I find worth writing about. But I was quite effusive about the Imelda Staunton-Peter Davison GYPSY, which I caught on BBC Four and wrote about extensively in January of 2016, in my 2015 year-end round-up -- and I try to praise CRAZY EX-GIRLFRIEND as much as possible. (Have you ever seen it? Would love to hear your thoughts.)

      I don't think I've seen the film version of CAROUSEL in 40 years! I had forgotten that they told it in flashback -- I guess that was just to "prepare" the audience for the heaven scenes, which they felt might be jarring in the "realistic" medium of film? I don't remember minding it per se -- although you tell me: did it destroy some of the suspense when you knew from the top that the leading man was going to die? It's not stories told in flashback that bug me so much; it's more the new-fangled concept of telling two stories simultaneously, set three or six or nine months apart, and flipping back and forth between them. I find them more busy than entertaining, and perhaps the rapidly declining ratings for both HOW TO GET AWAY WITH MURDER and QUANTICO since I wrote this blog entry, two years ago, are an indication that viewers have been quick to tire of them, too.

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  5. I love this topic! There are so many things, especially in shitty sitcoms, that I Just never want to ever see again (mostly cuz I just never wanted to see shitty sitcoms again). Here's a few:

    1) Characters watching a videotape of a birth and freaking out. This has been done on every sitcom ever and is just not funny. Even less funny is how there's always some sort of shenanigans involving a mixup of the tape and then someone accidentally stumbling upon it (see an awful episode of FRIENDS).

    2) A group of men or perhaps just one single man having to change a baby's diaper and absolutely freaking out about it, as if just because we have penises, we do not know that babies do, in fact, go to the bathroom, and that they need to be changed. This also falls under the category of stupid men who can't handle children unless a woman is around, which somehow manages to be both offensive to men and women all at the same time.

    3) The general sitcom-esque joke of one character talking about one thing and the other character thinking they are talking about something else, leading to shenanigans in which they keep carrying on conversations in which neither party really knows what they are talking about (again, see an awful episode of FRIENDS in which Chandler thinks Monica is gonna get a boob job and Monica thinks Chandler is afraid of her getting pregnant and losing her looks, leading to such hysterical moments as "My body is going to change" and "I don't want your body to change").

    4) Basically the entire Ross/Rachel or Sam/Diane or Susan/Mike thing in which we spend the whole series "wanting" these characters to get together and them being kept apart. The only time this has ever worked (and brilliantly) was Gary and Val on KNOTS. Everyone else is just boring and lame.

    That's all I can think of for now; keep up your great writing.

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    1. So glad you happened upon this entry, Brett, and so glad you enjoyed. Yah, it's amazing I haven't done an update (or three), as there are *so* many of these worn-out plots and tropes -- including, indeed, all the ones you note. I confess, I hadn't read this post in a long time, but was prompted by your note to give it a re-read. (I remember I got the idea for the post one day at lunch, and it basically wrote itself in my head by the time I was finished eating.) I thought to myself after re-reading it, I really need to do more of these "lean" posts, as opposed to -- you know -- 11,000 words on Knots Landing Season 12... :)

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    2. Three Men and a Baby did the "men freaking out" thing correctly--and hilariously--and that is the ONLY time it worked.

      I also agree with your item 4--man do they really think characters can't be funny while in a relationship?

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    3. I mentioned this briefly in my response to your Newhart comment, but man, I too hate "will-they/won't-they," as in Ross and Rachel. Nowadays, it seems inescapable -- like showrunners don't even dare pitch a show without a couple that the viewers will "root to get together." My husband and I stopped watching three shows this year, I think, because they all reduced to a "will-they/won't-they" mentality. One of them, I know, was the UK detective show 'Strike.' And another one was the fairly ghastly sitcom 'Single Parents,' which -- Lord knows -- had a host of other issues (like, all of the children), but once *all* they started doing was teasing the two leads getting together, and then throwing constant impediments in their way, we bailed. Not my idea of a fun time.

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  6. Have you ever seen "The Book of Daniel?" It is one of my absolute favorite shows that I own on DVD (things disappear if you only own them online!)and I think they were one of the very few to ever do the "flash forward" correctly.

    A note about the show--the final episode of the show should be skipped. If you only watch the first 7, then it is a marvelous self-contained miniseries that wraps up pretty much everything that had come before. The final episode brought in all kinds of stuff that made me think they were planning to go into complete soap-opera territory while the first seven episodes had seemed fresh and edgy. In this case, as much as I loved the characters, I think it was a good thing it ended when it did.

    The flash-forward was done correctly in episode 7 and I refrain from any hints about the content expect to say that I was riveted from the first note and completely and utterly satisfied at the end. It was one of the most realistic and thoughtful pieces of television I have ever seen. It brought together all the elements we'd previously seen, and character traits, and melded them seamlessly.

    Jesus is part of the whole series, and I have a theory about how they planned to deal with his presence in the show. I don't think it would be a terrible spoiler to say that Jesus NEVER says or does anything that could be considered supernatural. Garrett Dillahunt is amazing and completely believable.

    I think all seven of the first episodes are just great, mixing comedy, drama, and intrigue in a believable and fun way. I can't even count how many times I've watched the whole thing. I'd love to hear what you think about it someday.

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    1. I confess, this is a total gap in my TV knowledge, and clearly something I must rectify!

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