Templates and breaking the mold
Jun. 14th, 2007 09:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI been reading a book on TV writing, and it says the basic trick is to deliver on the template every week. The template is the stuff that the audience is there to see. If they don't get it, they don't watch.
So every week we watch the core characters, and we want to see them again next week, and if they aren't there we get annoyed.
But I reckon there's ways to make it so even without presence of character we get story about character, we get something that illuminates or comments on them, and so we get our character-fix for the week, sort of.
But then it had a section about breaking the mold, and chose a bunch of award winning episodes. Buffy-Hush, DS9-the one where they're all writers. Hush worked for me, DS9 really didn't. The thing is with Hush you lost the witty banter - mostly - but you had all the core characters in a situation rather like they're in every week, facing the same challenges and such. DS9... was about a bunch of writers imagining DS9. Their challenges were different. Their characters were different. And it wasn't the show about politics in deep space that I was wanting to watch. So I got bored of it. And yet other people chose it as their favourite, I guess because it stands out and has a theme and message and stuff. And, okay, yeah, but how is it DS9?
So Doctor Who and Torchwood both had episodes that somewhat lacked the core cast and only partially fit the template. Doctorless Who had one that didn't work for me at all and one that really did. Blink had bits of the Doctor all through it, a time travel story, jeopardy on a slightly smaller scale than most weeks but still serious and obvious and ongoing, and some really good lines. The other one... didn't.
Torchwood had one episode where there was that random bloke and Gwen. Just Gwen. And a few lines from the others around the ends. Since Gwen was mostly doing Plot and not Character she wasn't very interesting, only digging up facts that we wouldn't need to know later. And everyone else wasn't there. And did it have the usual levels of jeopardy?
... well 'usual' is a bit tricky to define on Torchwood. Someone apparently decided that what the viewer wants is an entirely different kind of story every week. And it took me a while to even slightly agree. It's kind of like I like the stories seperately but have to turn around a bit for each one and liking them all at once is... tricky. And I can't like Random Shoes if I try.
The other thing it said was that a good story is one that can only be told in that TV show.
So stories where character X has a dying father and speeds across country to meet him could happen all over the place... but ones where she comes back from the dead to do so are somewhat more difficult to manage.
But once you get down to stories that can only happen in-genre, what makes something distinctively a *Torchwood* story, and not just a horror/SF one?
... well it happening to those particular characters, obviously ...
... but then the characters are, er, possibly a little inconsistent between episodes.
I mean there's bits in the one with the fairies that bounce me right to writer level reasons because character level just sounds all wrong.
I'm trying to get back in the habit of reading stuff for class and applying it to interesting shows. This book is not on the reading list for class, but it has lots of references to Buffy and Angel and stuff that I've watched, so I start small and build.
I'm kind of really bored and feeling like my life is unproductive, and the solution to that is to do something. So I start with reading and thinking about writing. I shall eventually get to actually writing. Really. I'm sure.
So every week we watch the core characters, and we want to see them again next week, and if they aren't there we get annoyed.
But I reckon there's ways to make it so even without presence of character we get story about character, we get something that illuminates or comments on them, and so we get our character-fix for the week, sort of.
But then it had a section about breaking the mold, and chose a bunch of award winning episodes. Buffy-Hush, DS9-the one where they're all writers. Hush worked for me, DS9 really didn't. The thing is with Hush you lost the witty banter - mostly - but you had all the core characters in a situation rather like they're in every week, facing the same challenges and such. DS9... was about a bunch of writers imagining DS9. Their challenges were different. Their characters were different. And it wasn't the show about politics in deep space that I was wanting to watch. So I got bored of it. And yet other people chose it as their favourite, I guess because it stands out and has a theme and message and stuff. And, okay, yeah, but how is it DS9?
So Doctor Who and Torchwood both had episodes that somewhat lacked the core cast and only partially fit the template. Doctorless Who had one that didn't work for me at all and one that really did. Blink had bits of the Doctor all through it, a time travel story, jeopardy on a slightly smaller scale than most weeks but still serious and obvious and ongoing, and some really good lines. The other one... didn't.
Torchwood had one episode where there was that random bloke and Gwen. Just Gwen. And a few lines from the others around the ends. Since Gwen was mostly doing Plot and not Character she wasn't very interesting, only digging up facts that we wouldn't need to know later. And everyone else wasn't there. And did it have the usual levels of jeopardy?
... well 'usual' is a bit tricky to define on Torchwood. Someone apparently decided that what the viewer wants is an entirely different kind of story every week. And it took me a while to even slightly agree. It's kind of like I like the stories seperately but have to turn around a bit for each one and liking them all at once is... tricky. And I can't like Random Shoes if I try.
The other thing it said was that a good story is one that can only be told in that TV show.
So stories where character X has a dying father and speeds across country to meet him could happen all over the place... but ones where she comes back from the dead to do so are somewhat more difficult to manage.
But once you get down to stories that can only happen in-genre, what makes something distinctively a *Torchwood* story, and not just a horror/SF one?
... well it happening to those particular characters, obviously ...
... but then the characters are, er, possibly a little inconsistent between episodes.
I mean there's bits in the one with the fairies that bounce me right to writer level reasons because character level just sounds all wrong.
I'm trying to get back in the habit of reading stuff for class and applying it to interesting shows. This book is not on the reading list for class, but it has lots of references to Buffy and Angel and stuff that I've watched, so I start small and build.
I'm kind of really bored and feeling like my life is unproductive, and the solution to that is to do something. So I start with reading and thinking about writing. I shall eventually get to actually writing. Really. I'm sure.