What's That Going On There in the Background?

IT LOOKS like this week is about riffing on the posts of others, or, as I like to call it, "the internet."

Alex Epstein found this hilarious and fascinating experiment from the UK where they hoodwinked two ad guys. It's too delicious not to watch in its entirety:



He then went on to make this point about how that impacts your writing and the audience:

When it comes to getting the right details into your story, my feeling is "the audience doesn't notice, but they notice." To unpack that a bit, the audience sees all sorts of details they aren't aware they're seeing. They don't consciously read them, but they process them. In particular they notice when they are wrong. They might not bump consciously, "Hey, that's wrong!" But they'll get a sense that something isn't right.

I'd like to expand upon that a bit and speculate about how it affects making television everywhere -- but especially in Canada.

Details have become ever more important as our age has speeded up. If you go back and watch a lot of TV programs from the 1970's -- even the good ones, you're liable to find yourself somewhat bored. People will point to the fact that the pacing is much slower, with stories unwinding at a snail's pace. They may also note that our propensity today to "cut into the action" isn't nearly as pronounced in the older material. But there are a million other little things that affect that perception -- a million other things that the audience notices and doesn't notice.

On one level, this is what we talk about when we say that the result of a mystery has to hide in plain sight. If there's anything to be figured out in your drama, you have to seed things in there up close, as you go along, so that the audience could figure it out for themselves before you go off and tell them what happened. We all know how delicate this balance is...if it's too easy to figure out, the audience's enjoyment will be ruined because they "saw it coming." If you don't seed in something that indicates where you're going, they'll complain it "came out of nowhere."

That's probably what they'll complain anyway -- but the difference with a good use of the technique is the more they think about it, the more sense it will make. Or the theories or analysis will make them say, "oh, man, it was right there!" I'm thinking now about The Sopranos ending. I'm pretty sure there were a lot more people who hated that ending five seconds after it went out, than there were the next day. Just saying.

That whole "hide in plain sight" aspect of story breaking is something that other people have written about before and probably written about better.

What I've been thinking about lately is how that drills down to even the barest, smallest details.

When you write, you are always asking your audience to fill in some parts. If the hero wakes up in the bed of the guest star the next morning, we're asking you to imagine what happened in the off time you did not see. When someone says, "well, I guess we better go check it out" and you cut to them at the location, we're asking you to surmise that they got there under their own power. There are a million and one other examples of this, some of them even a little more complex and less lame.

But if we writers are on our game, we are also sometimes asking you to NOT understand a few things. We're asking you not to be able to put together clues too early in the narrative. And we're sometimes shoving stuff past you that you're not meant to understand at all -- because you not understanding it adds to the realism.

E.R. is the king of this. Or it was, once upon a time.

When E.R. came out, there were people at the network who freaked out, thinking that people would be highly alienated by terms like "blood gas" or "chem seven" or whatever other obscure medical lingo they used. The opposite, of course, was true.

The level of talk lent authenticity to E.R. that exceeded -- far exceeded -- what we'd been used to from other medical shows. It raised the bar on realism.

N.Y.P.D. Blue did the same thing not through its headline-grabbing stunts like showing bare bottoms -- but more through the roughness of its largely invented language. Did it matter that no one called suspects "skells" In real life. Hell no. In that case, art led life -- I remember hearing that cops had picked up the term, which was entirely an invention of David Milch.

Similarly, if you've seen the great film Children of Men, you doubtless know the effect that all these little animations had:



I've been thinking about this a lot lately -- because The Border is meant to be chock full of all this info. It works on many levels. That kind of overloaded, busy background is essential in a world where people are texting and talking on the phone with monitors in the B.G. as bustle goes by.

Sometimes on Canadian shows we try to get away with too few extras, or dressing that looks art directed rather than real, or -- not enough bustle.

Sometimes we won't go with acronyms or jargon because somebody somehwhere says, "people can't follow it."

Not only can people follow it, but if you try to take it away, they're liable to think your whole show is bullshit.

But man, it makes it harder to write.