The Squid, The Whale, Backstory and Busywork

I watched The Squid and The Whale on the weekend, and quite enjoyed it. The evocation of 1986 was subtle and clever, the performances were all solid, and I was intrigued by how the characters could be sympathetic even when they were saying and doing ugly things that were messing up their kids.

It was also yet another note in what's becoming my standard chorus: why I write TV, not movies.

Though I enjoyed the movie very much, at the end of it, I didn't want to spend any more time with the characters. The story about them was over. They were movie characters, I saw them at an interesting time in their lives (the span of the movie) and once that story came to its resolution, I had no wish to revisit them. What was interesting about them was done, and the parts that were unpleasant, weren't unpleasant in a 'have to see more' kind of way.

This, of course, is the very essence of a movie. It's probably one of the reasons why sequels to good movies (as opposed to Popcorn movies) usually kind of blow.

I admire the craft and the toil of any screenwriter who comes up with a competent, workable, readable screenplay. There's a lot stacked against you -- and I'm not just talking about the lack of respect you get from other stakeholders in the moviemaking process. But I still don't think it holds a candle to conceiving a really great television series.

Because a series is about creating a world from which multiple stories will spring. A well-crafted movie script is building a house. A well-crafted TV series is building a village.

Which is why it sometimes takes a village of writers to truly make it fly -- but that's a point for another time.

The delicate balance that one strikes when coming up with an original TV series is a living, organic compromise between the need to make a strong impression, and the need for space. Your character, setting, situation, secondary characters -- all need to be clearly mapped out so that when we meet them, we have an entire sense of who they are -- but at the same time, you have to leave room so that the characters can change and grow, and the situation can be re-invented, and the world you know so well can surprise you.

I'm not talking about a show like LOST here, that's built on mystery and surprise, I'm talking about your solid, kitchen-sink character based dramas.

So -- you can't blow it all in the Pilot, but at the same time, you must always remember the feeling you need to evoke at the end of the pilot: a desire to return. If people don't want to go back and see more from those characters, spend more time in that world, then you've got a situation like my reaction to The Squid and the Whale. You're done. You've written a movie, not a TV show.

In Canada, where there is a lot less opportunity, traditionally you've had a lot of crossover from people who write movies to tv series. To my mind, the fundamental differences between the two mediums, and the writer's inability to grasp this, has hamstrung more than a few series before they ever got going.

And there's another bugaboo that constricts and constrains the development of series television: fear of dynamic uncertainty.

What do I mean by that?

Well, a standard part of the tortured development process in this country (and I'm speaking not just from my own experience here; this is gathered from at least half a dozen writers I know who are currently, or have recently developed shows) is coming up with ever-more-detailed character descriptions and arcs. Sometimes a network will demand page after page of information about a character and where they came from. Early life, family life, romantic trauma in their pasts -- in short, everything that makes them what they are.

It's not hard to understand why. A TV series is a huge risk. It's very expensive. And hard to get going, and at the end of the day, you don't want to face the most terrifying idea of all:

It has to be allowed to develop organically as it goes along.

By asking for page after page of backstory, what the developing partner thinks they're getting is a fully-fleshed out character that will make the series all the more compelling.

But to a writer, a real writer, or a team of writers who are clicking and sparking on the same page, that's going to be, in the end, just a lot of busywork. You have to do it -- after all, you're not paying for the show, are you? But it doesn't really help. And you have to have the freedom to ignore all that backstory if the character takes you in another direction.

There's a problem I call "backstory fatigue." I've seen it quite a bit working on Canadian shows. You're talking about a story point and somebody says something about the character, and you have to shake your head and say, "that's not in the show yet."

One of the problems of writing so much backstory is that you get confused. You lose touch with what's been revealed to the audience and what still sits in that brick of a development document, begging to be woven into the story. Or not, as the case may be.

I'm starting to think that much of the criticism of Canadian stories being "slow to develop" is grounded in the desire to work more of the brick into the storytelling. The reality is that beyond the broad strokes of your character, your audience only needs to know what they need to know as demanded by the story... anything else is just slowing you down.

In The West Wing, for two seasons or so, Bartlet had two daughters, Annie and Zoe. You saw Zoe, and Annie was just talked about. But then they needed a third daughter. And so they invented Ellie. And it worked. You know why? Because they'd been clever enough to never specify that Bartlet had two daughters. (which surely would have happened had they been developing the show with the standard Candian brick of a bible.) They told you only what you, as the audience, needed to know in the drama at the time, which left open the storytelling possibilities until there was a need for a third daughter. Then, rather than have to "work in" that they have three daughters, that reveal of backstory drives a story of its own, in its proper time, that also reveals character.

That is the high wire act that is series television.

In Season One of The Sopranos, you see Tony's sister. In Season Two, Aida Turturro shows up and we meet Janice, the older sister. Ah. Now we have another piece of Tony. In season five, we meet Tony's good friend and cousin Tony B. Wow. We now see another side of Tony.

We didn't need to hear about Tony B. at the beginning-- only when he became relevant. Going back to The X-Files, we had the setup off the top: Mulder was a believer, Scully was a scientific skeptic. Only a couple of seasons into it did you learn that Scully had religious faith -- which Mulder derided. This was not in the show at the beginning. It does not live or exist anywhere in a bible document. It was, instead, a dynamic invention by the writers that served to illuminate the characters down the road -- and do so in a wonderfully evocative, inventive story.

It's hard to have faith. In God, in writing, in proof of concept. But as much as people want to take the uncertainty out of the development process, that can never happen. Successful series run for years, which means that everyone involved with them grows, changes and develops as surely as the characters and world they're inventing. You can't front load the process.

Which doesn't mean anyone's going to stop trying to do exactly that.

Ah well, c'est la guerre.