Why are TV shows so lazy?

Earlier today, I saw an advertisement in a teashop in Derbyshire for an event coming to Sheffield Arena in June.  It is called ‘The Wool Monty’ and it was this dire pun which drew my attention.  “The Wool Monty,” I read, “is a different kind of yarn show.” Well, I don’t know about you, but I didn’t know there was even such a thing as a ‘yarn show’, let alone a 'different kind' of one, or that it could fill an arena.  Who knew knitting was so popular? The term 'show' conjures up, for me at least, an image of singers or dancers at the very least, maybe a ventriloquist or performing dog, but I guess that's just one kind of show. We have the Ideal Home Show and The Motor Show and The Chelsea Flower Show, which are all basically exhibitions with sales pitches, so I expect The Wool Monty will have displays of different types of yarn, and maybe knitting/crochet/macrame demonstrations. Maybe there'll be a walk-on alpaca or cashmere goat. 

              Then, later, I saw a video on Facebook which began with the words: ‘Make your hallway goals a reality’.  Well, my only hallway goal is to have a hallway big enough for two people to squeeze past each other without having to get married, and the only way I can see to achieve this is to either turn my house into a TARDIS or have an open-plan toilet, and I'm certainly not videoing that. I mean, are ‘hallway goals’ a thing now? Are we meant to have them?

              Which brings me, by a very roundabout route, to my current writing bugbear, which involves another type of 'show' (a US TV show), and another type of goal (to see the writing on such shows improve).  Yes, I realise that the link there was extremely tenuous but I have to fit in various things that have struck me recently and they don't happen to be very well connected! 

        I have been watching the Amazon Prime series Blacklist, starring James Spader, an actor I have long had a secret guilty crush on. If you don’t know, it is a ludicrous show about how the FBI take on a new young female profiler on the same day that notorious, man-most-wanted, criminal mastermind Raymond Reddington gives himself up to them and insists on making a deal: he will let them have a list of names of the most powerful and dangerous super-villains currently in operation in return for his freedom, but he will only talk to the new young profiler, Lizzie, with whom it turns out he has some murky and convoluted connection (though she doesn’t know this). 

            The story becomes increasingly absurd. I’m currently on Season Five and even James Spader’s sinister charm is losing its sexiness and becoming irritating now. For one thing, it is difficult to find a man with chubby features and no hair, who dresses like your well-to-do grandad, particularly frightening, and Red is becoming less and less interesting as his apparent invulnerability begins to crumble and the conveyor belt of super-villains gets longer and ever more outlandish. One (played by the wonderful actor who plays Abe, Mrs Maisel’s dad, in The Marvelous Mrs Maisel) actually had a white cat, though that was a self-consciously comic episode.

              Anyway, this isn’t my beef. The thing that irritates me is the sloppy writing. It is something I noticed when I watched Elementary, the US version of Sherlock Holmes with Jonnie Lee Miller playing our hero alongside Lucy Liu as his expressionless robotic sidekick, Watson. While in many ways these shows have great dialogue – snappy, humorous, unexpected – and, for instance, the disconnect between Ray Reddington’s affable conversation and his sudden bursts of outrageous violence is pretty effective (though this particular schtick is wearing thin), they also have a lazy habit of doing cringeworthy exposition. In a recent episode, for example, during a team-briefing about the latest supervillain (a character inspired by realworld new-tech entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs), the person giving the briefing mentions the name of the tech company this blacklister founded. This is a made-up name, but is obviously meant to suggest any of the multi-billion-dollar companies that are realworld household names.

However, because US TV shows clearly think their audiences are cretins, FBI agent Donald Ressler has to then say something insufferably stilted such as ‘What? [Name of company]? The Social Media giant?’ (I paraphrase, as I can’t recall the exact quotation). If they are talking about the extremely famous founder of an extremely successful and well-known social media company, the FBI team would know the name of the company without this asinine ‘clue’. Yes, the information is for the audience at home, we viewers, but surely it wouldn’t be that difficult to let us know in a more subtle way? They could have Ressler reacting with shock to hearing the name of the suspect company, without telling us what kind of company it is, which would tell us that it is supposedly well-known and highly successful within the world of the show. Then they could show us in later scenes what kind of company it is, through what they actually film and through more subtle and natural dialogue. 

But no, they go for the easy, lazy option every time, giving characters ridiculously implausible dialogue simply to get information across to the viewer. As a watcher of the show, this makes me feel like they don’t care. It feels cynical, as if they assume we too just want the plot fed to us with little attempt at realism. Yes, I know this is a show with a completely unrealistic premise and extremely silly plots, but it has some great actors and some great writers, and the audience – loyal enough to hang around for about ten seasons – deserves better.

And this is before I get started on the contrived plot twists and artificially extended quests, the virtually supernatural way that Tom Keene avoids being killed in every episode, the way that injuries heal so quickly and characters are given inauthentic emotional arcs simply to provide a bit more implausible ‘character development’… etc.  I didn’t say it was brilliant, did I? But the first two seasons were at least watchable and entertaining. But lazy writing like I’ve outlined above will ruin this show, as it does so many others. Take heed, my friends.

WHY YOU SHOULD READ NOVELS:

On Facebook recently, I spotted this list of reasons why people should read novels, and I thought I'd add my own interpretations of each point being made:

FACT 1: Reading can make you a better conversationalist

“Have you read The Girl On The Train? No, Oh great, let me give you a detailed summary of the plot, then – and don’t worry, I’ll have to go back numerous times to fill in details I forgot and there’ll be lots of pauses while I try to remember the names of characters, but you’re not to jump in during those pauses as I intend to get right to the end.” 

Fact 2: Neighbours will never complain that your book is too loud

Until you throw your hardback copy of Midnight’s Children at the partition wall in frustration.

Fact 3: Knowledge by osmosis has never been perfected. You’d better read.

I learned everything I know about Narnia and Middle-Earth from books.

Fact 4: Books have stopped bullets – reading might save your life.

Only if they are shaped like a Kevlar vest, or made out of bullet-proof glass.

Fact 5: Dinosaurs didn’t read. Look what happened to them.

They evolved into birds which massively outnumber humans – there are 40-60 birds for every human currently on the planet.

The only reason to read a work of fiction is because you enjoy it. Nothing else makes it worth it.

Except (maybe) in order to pass your Eng Lit exams…

 

 

A forgotten prize-winner and an interesting experiment: Stanley Middleton

In 1974, the author Stanley Middleton won the Man Booker Prize for his novel Holiday (he was a joint winner along with Nadine Gordimer). Despite this claim to serious literary ability, I’d never heard of him before someone mentioned him on a Facebook site, but I became interested in him during a conversation about novelists from Nottingham (a city only an hour away from where I live).

According to Wikipedia, Middleton was a creative powerhouse – he was a talented church organist and a gifted water-colourist too. He wrote 45 novels, twelve of them before he wrote Holiday. His first novel was published in 1958, the last one in 2010 (a year after his death). He was an English teacher at High Pavement Grammar School in Nottingham for many years. And apparently he turned down an OBE due to believing he shouldn’t be rewarded for doing what he saw as simply his job *.  

I have never read Holiday but it was clearly sufficiently accomplished to be awarded a prestigious literary prize. This was a man of great ability, a man whose literary life was, by most people’s standards, a successful one. Yet I have never heard of him or his most famous novel, and neither have any of the people I have asked.

I tell you this because it has made me think long and hard about this weird activity in which we engage our energies, we writers.  For most of us, whether we are any good or not, and even successful and talented people like Middleton, it is an unrewarding activity, at least in terms of the way most people judge ‘rewards’. Middleton was able to publish his novels, win a Booker and be offered an OBE, but he presumably never achieved the wealth or fame of the handful of contemporary novelists most people have heard of – J.K.Rowling, Robert Harris, Terry Pratchett, etc. Now, around a decade after his death, I suspect that he is generally forgotten, except by those who knew him and those who know his books. Who knows? His reputation might be revitalised in years to come – there have been many creative artists in different fields who were quickly forgotten after their deaths but later ‘rediscovered’. But, for now, Middleton seems to be a relatively forgotten author, despite his success during his lifetime.

Writers like myself, who have had some things published but nothing that has made them any money or given them any fame, would love to achieve Middleton’s success. Forty-five published novels! A Booker Prize! An OBE! Yet most people I speak to who aren’t writers and readers (and that is, in fact, most people) would consider such success to be relatively unimpressive. More obvious worldly achievement is generally better-respected these days (and perhaps always has been) – massive wealth, a name and a face that everyone recognises, books that top the bestseller lists, novels that are picked up by Hollywood and made into movies. There are novelists who have these things even though they are dreadful writers and will probably be forgotten forever after their deaths. There are also, of course, extremely talented writers in this category of the super-successful who will be remembered fondly for many years by many people. But, in today’s publishing world, achieving Middleton’s level of quiet success is a major feat in itself – hell, getting a novel published in the first place is like winning the lottery, and having further novels published if your first one isn’t as successful as your publishers hoped is virtually an impossibility.

In 2006, The Times pulled a stunt that produced some interesting results. They circulated the first chapters of Holiday, and also of a novel by V.S.Naipaul, to numerous agents and publishing houses, presumably using false names. All rejected Naipaul’s novel, and only one agent accepted Middleton’s.  From this, we can assume that publishers in the twenty-first century have different tastes, or know that their readers have different tastes, or are simply unwilling to invest in ‘literary’ novels.

What lessons can we learn from this? Do we give up writing? Is it a pointless waste of time?  I have two thoughts. One is that, if you are a writer, you can’t stop yourself writing – writing is your greatest pleasure (which isn’t to suggest that it isn’t often difficult, painful and stressful) and a writer is who you are, published or not. Earning your living through writing is another thing entirely. The second is that we need to see the rewards of writing, just as we see the rewards of reading, as being different in kind from the rewards of, say, being a solicitor, or a surgeon, or Kim Kardashian, or the founder of Google or Amazon. The rewards are intrinsic, not instrumental. There is something inexpressible that every writer who is serious about their craft has experienced – a feeling of satisfaction in having successfully translated what existed inside your head into something that others can understand if they want to. It is nice if people read what you have written, even nicer if they enjoy it – nicer still if they take the time to tell you they enjoyed it – but, even if no one ever reads it, you still have that profound sense of having achieved something worthwhile, however flawed you feel it is.

The joy of becoming better at something you find intrinsically enjoyable is in itself one of the rewards of taking yourself seriously as a writer. And I’m not even mentioning the myriad rewards of the actual writing itself – the pleasure to be had from putting the best words in the best order, of exploring new worlds, constructing lives, creating characters, getting inside their heads, telling their stories, examining ideas and philosophies and what ifs. The act of attempting to entertain others is profoundly enjoyable. There is a therapeutic quality to writing at times – self-expression, creative contentment – and sometimes a performative element too, a showing off. Few writers are rich and famous, and in fact many barely make a living at all from their writing. Many never give up the day job. But no one would do this activity, which is hard and time-consuming and exhausting, if they didn’t get some sort of deep-seated intrinsic reward.

Some of us might manage to write the novels or stories or poems or scripts that fill our imaginations. Being published, read, performed, admired, or paid – well, that’s the icing on the cake. The sad fact is that most of us are lucky to get even the cake, but sometimes it’s enough just to smell the batter rising in the oven...

 

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Middleton