When Kevin Spacey showed up at the Oscars as a presenter earlier this month, he came prepared with a very shrewd bit, adopting the persona of Frank Underwood, his character on “House of Cards. “And I sing,” he drawled from the stage, to the evident delight of Jennifer Lawrence and the like, “because it’s nice to be out of Washington and here with all my Hollywood friends.”
Even a decade ago, a guy with Spacey’s stature would not have been so eager to remind the A-list movie crowd that he currently was working in serialized television, especially for a network hitherto best known for its delivery services. My, how times have changed. Some of those fixed smiles greeting Spacey at the Academy Awards were accompanied by the tacit acknowledgment that Spacey’s hit Netflix TV series had generated far, far more interest than most of the movies on the slate of honorees.
These are, people like to say, the golden days of television, which really means we are seeing a renaissance of serialized, long-form drama: “House of Cards,” “True Detective,” “Mad Men,” “Girls” and on and on. This form is hardly new — you can trace the origins of serialized drama back to at least the 17th century — but its renewed impact on creativity in general, and top-tier dramatic writing in particular, is only just beginning to be felt. On Wednesday, the venerable Sundance Institute announced that its prestigious writing labs would expand their portfolio to include writing for TV and online platforms. The first so-called “episodic story lab” will be held this fall in Sundance, Utah. They will not be focused on training people to write for sit-coms and soap operas.
The most telling words there are “episodic story.” That appears to be the wave of the moment. Certainly, the discriminating consumers who see themselves as far above the consumption of procedurals are, demonstrably, becoming very fond of a form that gets much of its exposition and introductions out of the way in the first couple of episodes, and then can set its familiar characters free to range in a wide variety of juicy situations and complications. I even sense a new frustration among audiences with single movies or plays, which have to start their storytelling from scratch and that complete their narrative arc in one fell swoop, offering only an act of viewership that does not require the thrill of the binge. Single stories are starting to feel minor. These days, all the cool kids are penning, and watching, long-form serials.
The last time this happened — in 19th century England, after Charles Dickens figured out the lucrative pull of narrative serialization — the novel changed for good.
Writers suddenly began to get better at making their chapters stand alone, as well as work within a larger whole. They learned how to give the newspapers and magazines publishing their work the same-sized chunks each time, plugging the same hole (the equivalent of air time, really). Some of these scribes knew how their story was going to end before the audience had read Chapter One, for they already written the whole shebang. Others evolved their yarns as they went, responding to the their readers in something like real time. They also quickly learned the importance of both several plot strands moving at once, and of having emotionally resonant central characters. With his Pip, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Little Dorrit and the like, Dickens was a master of this skill, creating a bevy of long-lived malcontents upon whose fate an audience would hang with the rigor they now apply to the doings of Don Draper. And Dickens certainly came to see the pleasures of not needing to explain himself, or the fruits of his imagination, every time. He liked the money, too.
That Victorian trend petered out, though. The single novel reasserted itself, once publishers figured out to make it cheaply available. What about this time?
That’s a fascinating question. You could argue that today’s serialization mode is, per the Netflix model, very much on the consumer’s terms, not the publisher’s, which has changed the very nature of serialization, perhaps almost beyond recognition or even that definition. Maybe these serialized cable dramas will end up repeating themselves one too many times and lose their centrality in the cultural conversation. Maybe. Things change fast these days.
But to a large extent, long-form drama is in vogue now precisely because we are consuming ever smaller chunks of so much else in the cultural marketplace. Long-form is the antidote to the ubiquitous viral video, the one-minute laugh with the cat or the hapless local TV anchors with their mistakes and malapropisms that can liven a day spent in a cubicle. Too many 30-second, social-media bites of a toddler with a puppy are enough to make you crave an eight-hour binge of “True Detective,” duration and its implication of substance being a not insignificant factor there.
It’s also worth noting — and Sundance surely has noticed — that writing for these high-end serialized TV dramas requires a different skill. Most of the shows we are talking about are written by scribes who started out penning works for the theater. But some of them thrive in writers’ rooms while others flail (and quickly get fired)
Aside from the issue of some writers just playing better with others, one of the great advantages in writing for television is that (unless you are the show-runner) you are freed from the tyranny of the big idea, or the lack thereof. How many potentially fine writers have been felled by that particular hell? Many is the playwright (or Hollywood screenwriter) whose work has been torpedoed by structures or plotting that fall apart or don’t excite a crowd.
But if you hire that writer and let him or her work on an established show with a pre-existing structure, you may well find that talents can soar, just like a nervous franchisee who ends up with a thriving Subway. Think about it: it is easier to write the dialogue and subsidiary action to a pre-ordained plot. Some writers, of course, need the plot to be their own. But others do their best work when they do not have that particular burden. In fact, by requiring a different skill-set, these shows are revealing sides of former playwrights we never saw in the theater.
It all does beg the question: why is that increasingly famous TV writers’ room (no longer so populated by anonymous figures these days) not often used to write movies or plays?
If the success of some of its products is a guide, it’s actually a more efficient division of creative labor. One person has an idea, guides the ship and worries about the big picture. Others fire off individual sections of the plot, or focus on dialogue or little touches of character. There is no inherent reason why this should be the modus operandi only of serials.
Of course, teams long have shown up in dramatic writing. Plenty of ghostwriters have saved Hollywood movies. Plenty of evidence shows that William Shakespeare had his writers’ room, too; it’s just that his friends didn’t get any credit in the First Folio. Now, they’d all have agents, a demand for executive-producer credit and, maybe a career within which they’ll never have to come up with a complete story again.
Twitter@ChrisJonesTrib
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