That's a very neat summation of the three shows, and something that I wonder if potential spec writers have realized yet. Time was you needed to master a genre in order to deliver a credible spec. In this new hybrid world, the rewards are greater -- a sparkling script will probably sparkle a little brighter. But it's also fraught with peril -- because it means that your analysis skills, the stuff you do before you attempt to break a story -- become even more important.Take a look at the truly successful network series of the moment and you'll find that all are hybrids rather than genre-specific.
Desperate Housewives is an hour-long drama, a soap opera brimming with bits of comedy. The actors need finely tuned comic timing to make the scripts work, but it's not a sitcom. It's a subtly massaged, mixed-up comedy-drama. Grey's Anatomy is Sex and the Big City Hospital, with a few touches of Melrose Place and ER thrown in.
And then there's House (Fox, Global 9 p.m.), which is certainly not your traditional medical drama. It's part police procedural and part legal drama, with dyspeptic Dr. House (Hugh Laurie) often taking a prosecutor's perspective on the hapless defendant. It's just that the defendant is the patient and the motive to be discovered is some obscure but pesky infection.
For your DH script to work, you have to master the same careful balane of comedy and melodrama they do. If you're doing a Grey's -- you better not front-load that medical stuff just to show off all your fabbo research. And God-help-you if you get House's Socratic demeanor wrong:
The thing is, this episode underlines the show's reliance on the dramatic strategies usually associated not only with cop shows, but also many legal dramas. A lot of what Dr. House does is familiar to anyone who knows how some classes at law school proceed -- House's probing wit, sarcasm and skepticism is a souped-up version of the Socratic method of questioning in order to establish critical thinking in law students. It's not about establishing certainty, it's about learning to question received wisdom.So what we're saying now is that if you're going to write a credible HOUSE spec script, not only do you need to have a medical advisor who helps you come up with a weird twisty turny case, but you have to have an intricate understanding of how legal dramas work. So it helps if you're a lawyer. Oh, and the cop show thing too.
Depressed yet?
We need to imagine the television landscape today as a post-Balkan battlefield. The Networks have been fighting a scrappy insurgency for years from Cable shows. The pieces of the pie are still out there, but they're not in creamy, easy to deliver swaths of shining suburbs. It's a pitched viewer battle, clearing street, by street, by street. And the weapons haven't changed much in thirty or forty years.
Oh sure, for a while there it looked like reality was the nuclear-tipped ordnance of their viewer pacifying dreams -- but that proved to be short lived.
I'm going too far with the war metaphor, aren't I? Okay. Let me try something else.
What all these hybrid shows have discovered is that the only way to build a large audience on the TV dial these days is to borrow and recombine elements that will draw viewers from different constituencies. It's not enough that HOUSE has a cranky, male-appeal lead -- he has to have a mystery and elements that feel like a cop show. That way the men watching can exercise their figure it out circuits, and the women in the audience can invest in their caring, will the patient survive stuff. Oh, and the sweet obsessives can also take their licks following wounded House or Cameron into relationship heaven or hell. Smack it all together -- see all those elements cooking in there, and THAT'S why so many people are staying tuned after American Idol. Parts of the show appeal to different constituencies. And the blending of those elements is skilful, not hamfisted, so none of those constituencies revolt and think that they're being pandered to.
These shows are the medium-future of TV. It's an outgrowth of conversations I've been hearing from various quarters for two or three years. When executives say things like, "I want a sci fi show that isn't a sci-fi show..." or, "I need this to do more," that's what they're struggling with.
If you go in with a spec, or a series, that's just a lawyer show or just a cop show these days, you're going to get a blank look. It's time for us all to become DJ's. Scratch and Mix guys. Scratch and Mix. It just got harder, sure -- but if you're the guy or girl who comes up with the next Grey's Anatomy (rather than the next copy of Grey's Anatomy) then the ticket's right there, waiting for you to snatch it.
And if you're just trying to break in, well -- maybe it's time to jettison that idea of going in as a mystery or a sci-fi or a procedural writer. Open it up. Time to play some jazz.
Blow, Gabriel, Blow.
6 comments:
C'mon, Battlestar is straight space opera. Gritty space opera, but space opera nonetheless.
Incidentally, Denis, I hear from my prodco spies that the Canadian nets still say they're looking for franchise shows. Yes, that's right. They want the next Homicide rip. They want medical. They want law.
Take that with however many grains of Hawaiian red sea salt.
Actually, Alex, I don't think you've seen enough of BSG to register that judgement. And even if you have, I think it's a little glib and a lot off the mark. The further that show gets away from its first season, the less it has to do with space opera, or even Science Fiction. It's a character-based meditation on politics and society -- which is why the critics love it so and why the fans of the old show hate it so much. At this point, BSG has more in common with West Wing than it does with Star Wars.
As for what Canadian nets want, our job hasnt changed. We have to give them what they need and convince them it's what they said they wanted. Just cause you say you know what you want doesn't mean its so. Specially here.
WC,
I honestly tell you though I would say BSGs hybridness is the secret of its success, I'm at a loss when it comes to Huff.
I'm not even sure what kind of show Huff is. I watched half the first season thinking, "one more, one more to try and figure out what this fucking show is about" and then I was in love with the characters and didn't care.
Huff, Deadwood, these are just idiosyncratic standalones. It's also significant, I think, that they're cable shows -- so they're not looking for the last shards of the wide audience like the network shows are, anyway.
In my humble opinion, BIG LOVE is awesome.
Actually guys, I tend to think of BSG as the show that goes back to the roots of TV: We have the politics of feeding and caring for everyone in the fleet going off into the great unknown. We have the problems of defense against those whom we've wronged and now seek to destroy us. We have those giving up everything to find a new home.
Yep, BSG = WAGON TRAIN.
Wasn't the original pitch of Star Trek "Wagon Train To the Stars?"
That's what the Sci Fi pocket does - allow you to explore now from somewhere safe. In any case, I'm a whole lot more comfortable with BSG as Wagon Train than I am with just dismissing it as space opera.
BSG is definitely not an opera. There would be more swinging on ropes across chasms if it was.
I've heard the Wagon Train connection before regarding the original series, and it is that, and also of course the whole tribes of Israel thing, so there is a mythical element to it. The realist style just brings it home and keeps it from being cheesy.
Battlestar was a genre combiner even in the seventies. Biblical mythology, space opera, Western, family drama, robot dog genre.
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