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.