Serial Killers – The Perils of Making a Television Novel

Welcome to the Season Finale of Year One - my last school paper for the year.

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America is split in what it desires from television. Often times people simply want to tune in in order to tune out their lives. It’s an escapism designed to allow us to forget credit card bills, oil changes, spousal arguments, delayed trains, traffic jams, and overcharges. Most of us aren’t looking for anything complicated; any distraction will do.

In this regard, episodic television is a comfort. On the same night of every week a viewer can tune in and watch a set of prescribed characters dance through a situation that takes little more than twenty minutes (plus commercials) to encounter, evaluate, and resolve. At the end of every episode all conflicts are settled. Arguments are forgiven and forgotten; threats to safety and well-being are vanquished. Everyone ends up right where they started. Very commedia dell’arte.

This is why television often contributes to the lowest common denominator of entertainment. There is validity to the complaint that scripts are base and that performances are only skin deep. People declare with pride that they never watch television because it harms the overall artistic nature of our culture. It does not challenge. It does not inspire. It merely gives us a way to shut off our consciousness and reset.

Yet television can be a remarkable source for artistic merit. There are people who are trying to build something more, something special. Solid character development. A continuing story. These things and more cannot be achieved with merely a weekly tune-in that can be picked up and dropped anywhere at the points between season one and season ten. I propose that serialized television contains the best opportunity to elevate our collective quality of expectations from this medium.

A failure of episodic television is that it is incompatible with real life. People and their lives change as times goes by. Over the course of five years a human life has the potential to be significantly altered. We get new jobs, or new positions and responsibilities within them. We meet new people, forging new relationships as other ones falter. We undergo trials and discoveries that affect our personalities as well as our dreams. The stagnancy of episodic television is a poor reflection for the long-term nature of the human condition.

One of my first favorite television shows was Star Trek: The Next Generation. Each week the crew of the Starship Enterprise would face a new villain to threaten the safety and security of the principals, and each week the challenge would be met with virtually no long-term consequences. If a character died (which was remarkably rare considering the number of times their lives were threatened) they’d barely be mentioned again, their absence unremarked either subtly or overtly. At times there would occur a seemingly significant role-shift, such as Commander Riker’s battlefield promotion to the rank of Captain in the two part episode The Best of Both Worlds – yet the very next episode showed him reduced back to the rank of Commander. Riker’s return to his previous rank was devoid of either explanation or emotional content; it was as if the trials and perils of the previous week had never happened.

Another example of the unreality of episodic television happened on ABC’s The Commish. The show focused on both the work and family life of Tony Scali, a police commissioner in a small town in upstate New York. In one episode Tony’s teenaged son was kidnapped by a Mafioso. It provided one of the highlights of the series in terms of potential character development as a fearful parent experienced the terror of knowing his child was in mortal danger. By the end of the episode young David was returned unharmed, and the next week there was no follow-through. Tony seemed to have immediately recovered from the threat and fear of loss to his family. Viewers who had missed the episode would never have a notion that just a week ago this parent and child had their lives threatened. It was this unrealistic approach to the exploration of lingering effect that kept at bay substantial emotional investment on the part of the audience.

Episodic television tries to throw in long term elements, but with minimal lingering effect. One such example is in the NBC series Quantum Leap, a show about Sam Beckett, a scientist who travels through time to “put right what once went wrong.” In the episode The Evil Leaper he meets his evil counterpart, a woman who also leaps through time in order to create as much havoc as possible. This antagonist makes more than one appearance in the series, but the interim episodes were so far apart it took a great deal of in-character exposition to explain who she was when she returned.

By contrast, the nature of serialized television operates very much like a novel. Individual episodes function as chapters in a larger overall story. The events of one episode have a direct, lingering effect on the characters and the worlds in which they inhabit. All actions have consequences, be they major or minor. This far-sighted approach to storytelling operates on a far more parallel track to real life, and is therefore better equipped to resonate with an audience in a way that transcends its time slot.

Aside from an afternoon soap opera, the first time I witnessed a television show with a serialized nature was the science fiction epic Babylon 5. The show took place on a space station constructed ten years after a cataclysmic war that nearly resulted in the extinction of the human race. The purpose of the station was to provide a neutral place to encourage diplomatic solutions to stop another devastating war before it could occur. As time went by the audience was subjected to a plot that carried over from one episode to the next. A decision in one episode often held serious repercussions in subsequent episodes all the way to the end of the series.

In this regard watching Babylon 5 was like watching a novel unfold. In the five years it took to tell the tale each of the characters underwent a transformation. People fell in love and got married. People left or died, and their absence was felt by their friends and colleagues. It was refreshing to watch a show in which actions had consequences.

Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski created a story bible for the series detailing every major plot point across a period of five years. While this is a laudable goal to attempt, it is not without risk. During its fourth year he show was slated to be cancelled forcing several plot points to be wrapped up prematurely. It was than granted an unexpected reprieve for a fifth year, but there wasn’t enough remaining plot to fill a season. Several new elements had to be created to fill in the gaps, and the resulting season was relatively shallow.

The creation of a five year plan is commendable, but the inability to carry it out can greatly hinder the overall product. Moreover, many authors feel that creating a plot in advance of the storyline and forcing the characters through it is as unrealistic as imagining every story finishes where it begins. In his book On Writing, novelist Stephen King said

In my view, stories and novels consist of three parts: narration, which moves the story from point A to point B and finally to point Z; description, which creates a sensory reality for the reader; and dialogue, which brings characters to life through their speech.

You may wonder where plot is in all this. The answer—my answer, anyway—is nowhere. I won’t try to convince you that I’ve never plotted any more than I’d try to convince you that I’ve never told a lie, but I do both as infrequently as possible. I distrust plot for two reasons: first, because our lives are largely plotless, even when you add in all our reasonable precautions and careful planning; and second, because I believe plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren’t compatible. It’s best that I be as clear about this as I can—I want you to understand that my basic belief about the making of stories is that they pretty much make themselves. The job of the writer is to give them a place to grow (and to transcribe them, of course).

Playwright Brett C. Leonard, author of The Long Red Road, gave us a writing workshop in which he explained a piece of his writing process. A story, he told us, consists of creating the characters and what they want, then to follow them along and see what happens to them. If it is natural that a man on a journey to the Grand Canyon stops along the way, he should stop. He may meet a woman. He’ll have feelings about her, and the two of them may fall in love. Thus the realistic approach to storytelling is dictated by the characters’ desires, by their wants and by their dreams. The story follows them; they do not follow the story.

Author Neil Gaiman expressed a similar notion:

It's like hitchhiking from New York to Los Angeles. You know more or less where you're going to be when, and you have a fair idea of where you're going to hit on the way, but you don't know everything that's going to happen. You don't know that the car may break down at some point and leave you stranded in St. Louis for a week, or whatever.

Other television series have learned and followed this lesson. HBO’s The Wire is a show about police officers in Baltimore, Maryland. Each season was constructed with an organic build based on actual events and experiences of the show’s creator, David Simon. It was this draw from reality, both in terms of character and story, which allowed for a more naturalistic quality of storytelling to emerge. Instead of attempting to develop a plotline across the show’s five year run, each season placed the characters in a new situation that would run its course by season’s end. As the characters moved through the story they were affected by the world in which they inhabited as much as their actions had lasting influence in the community at large. Furthermore, each season was not wholly independent of those previous or subsequent. Characters not directly involved in that season’s primary plot thrust would nonetheless regularly resurface with the full force of their histories behind them.

The worst mistake a serialized television show can make is to retroactively alter the plot of a series. In the pilot episode of NBC’s Heroes a pair of brothers, Peter and Nathan Petrelli, are told of their father’s death. This event does a great deal to inform the nature of the two men and their relationship with one another. It helps to guide and shape them as they struggle with the dangers they regularly face.

Two years later, in season three, it is revealed that the men’s father is alive. What’s more, Arthur Petrelli is directly responsible for every major plot point over the previous two seasons. To validate the charge, several scenes were filmed with the show’s previous chief villain, Daniel Linderman, loathly taking orders from Arthur in a way that completely contradicted two seasons of his character’s development. This was an example of such blatant revisionist plot history to rival the “Greedo shot first” controversy that spawned so much ire in the world of Star Wars fandom.

This is another lesson that can be learned from the novelists such as Neil Gaiman discovered while writing his graphic novel series Sandman. In some respects, Sandman was very much like a serialized television show in that each issue was published independently before he’d finished writing the whole story.

[I was] writing it with no room for change—I couldn't go back to change things that had already come out. In a novel, you can always go back and make it look like you knew what you were doing all along before the thing goes out and gets published. If you need a gun in a desk drawer, and you realize that in Chapter 11, you can go back and put it in that desk drawer when you opened it in Chapter 2. So if I'm going to need the gun, I'm going to have to do it in some other way that's satisfying, or I don't have a gun.

A significant achievement in the writing of a series comes when the writers reinvent some of the shows history without blatantly making it obvious. In the season three episode Rapture from the reboot of Battlestar Galactica, a woman named Deanna discovers the secret identity of one of her predecessors. The audience is not given the information; Deanna sees the face of a hooded figure leaving us only with the cryptic statement, “You? Forgive me, I . . . I had no idea.” Seventeen episodes later, in season four, the character’s identity was finally revealed. Executive producer Ronald D. Moore openly admitted being unaware of the identity of this mysterious person at the time the former episode was aired, but the subsequent episodes were written with that in mind. The reveal was done in such a way that never contradicted the shows prior plot points, storylines, or character motivations.

Other shows have a good blend of plotting vs. following. In Fox’s 24, each season has one major threat which must be vanquished. A fair amount of background is detailed before the season begins both in terms of character and story, and the facts are slowly revealed over the course of a season. In this case plotting has the effect of providing discoveries of who the bad guys are and their motivations, and then more significant reveals of who the bad guys really are and why the whole story is more dynamic than was originally presented can (and always do) occur. Multiple layers of complexity are possible, leaving the main character a changed man from one season to the next along with his colleagues.

Subsequent seasons of 24 take previous character development stories into account. Jack Bauer grows with each passing event that happens to him. Threats to his family, his intimate relationships, and his failures or success all have an impact on how he deals with the next situation he encounters. Sometimes a lover or colleague dies (and they die a lot). Sometimes Jack fails to stop the bad guy. Sometimes he can only carry out his mission by swallowing his fear, his pride, or his self-respect. And we feel for Jack because the affect can always be felt within the words the writers give him to speak, the actions they give him to undertake, and Kiefer Sutherland’s portrayal of the character.

Perhaps the most frequent goal of any American television series is syndication. Once a show accomplishes this it can live forever in reruns. It takes 100 episodes to get there, and the average number of episodes each season means it takes at least five years. This means five years’ worth of stories, five years’ worth of characters, five years’ worth of challenges and love affairs and antagonists. Some shows try to sneak their way to syndication within the original concept, such as the original Star Trek’s “five year mission” to explore new life and new civilizations. Another trick (attempted by more than one production company) was 1993’s Time Trax, in which a policeman from the future must travel back in time to recapture 100 escaped convicts resulting in a formulaic freak-of-the-week plot structure.

Some shows are successful beyond their original measure. Chris Carter’s The X-Files¬ was plotted for about two seasons, but the success of the show meant he had to scramble for story ideas once he discovered the show could run into three seasons and beyond (it ultimately ran for nine). Sometimes the popularity of a show brings an unprecedented measure of attention to a particular actor as it did with ER’s George Clooney, who left the show after five seasons to pursue a successful film career; yet the show was able to carry on another ten seasons without him. David Duchovny left The X-Files with a similar (though less successful) goal, and the show only lasted two seasons beyond his involvement.

Both serialized and episodic television can run into trouble when its success outweighs its ability to maintain its own weight of viewership and fandom. Shows that run long enough eventually begin to run thin on new ideas that fit within the original concept, and the show runs the risk of “jumping the shark.”

In the 1970’s Happy Days ran for a number of years before the episode Hollywood in which charismatic tough-guy Fonzie straps on a pair of water skis and executes the daredevil feat of jumping over a shark. Since then, “jumping the shark” has become an idiom to describe

…a moment. A defining moment when you know that your favorite television program has reached its peak. That instant that you know from now on...it's all downhill. Some call it the climax. We call it "Jumping the Shark." From that moment on, the program will simply never be the same.

No matter how well-intentioned, superbly written or excellently performed, sooner or later a show must change, or it must die. The fact that there was once an entire website (and more than a few books) devoted to heralding the death of a series before the body grows cold denotes there is a limit to how much change an audience will accept. The basic concept of Roseanne was that of a working class family, relatable to a broad swipe of American demographics. The sudden change of the Connor family winning the lottery altered the landscape of the show too drastically to maintain the ratings, and the show faded away.

Another Great Moment in Shark Jump History was in the 1980’s comedy/detective show Moonlighting. The show was a relatively rare combination of serialization on the part of the principal characters and episodic structure in the cases they worked on. Bruce Willis as David Addison and Cybil Shepherd as Maddie Hayes brought a mutual charisma and sexual tension that viewers found inescapable for the show’s run – until season three, when the pair finally consummated their relationship. Afterwards the pregnancy of Cybil Shepherd resulted in a profound absence of her character. The show’s success was so centered on the potential romantic involvement of its two main characters that when that aspect was removed the show no longer had legs to stand on.

In order for a show to maintain integrity throughout its entire run, a development team could do worse than to follow the adage “quit while you’re ahead.” Find a story and follow it, but don’t push it farther than it’s willing to go. The popularity of DVD sales takes some of the strength out of the power of syndication; no matter how unsuccessful a series may be during its original aring, devoted fans can still rent or purchase the series to keep its memory (and royalty checks) alive. The short-lived Fox show Firefly is one such poignant example of this.

Much like comic books, television may never be universally considered to be high art. But just because things don’t happen doesn’t mean they can’t. Give consideration to the possibility, and anything becomes possible.