Luckily there are plenty of other writers who talk craft. But while Espenson and Epstein might tickle your wonk-bone, I hope you don't forget some of the best analysis often comes from the watchers of TV.
Jaime Weinman, over on his Macleans' Magazine blog, runs down the new/old trend of the return of the comic "tag," and how challenging it can be in the ever-shrinking real estate of half hour comedy. With bonus points for linking to just about the only real funny part of the rather limp How I Met Your Mother Britney Spears episode:
Are tags a good thing for a show, structurally? I’m not sure. One thing I find extremely odd, and a little unfortunate, is that more and more networks are insisting that their comedies have tags even as they’re cutting back on the amount of time these comedies have to tell the story. Think about it: they’ve got maybe 20 minutes without commercials, and it’s hard enough to tell a story in that time; now they have to make sure that almost a minute of that time is set aside for a scene that can be easily separated from the rest of the episode. The tag made a lot more sense when half-hour shows ran 25 minutes. Back in the late ‘90s, network shows started doing the tag during the closing credits – remember that FRIENDS and SEINFELD and FRASIER all had newly-filmed scenes going on while the credits rolled – but now the networks insist on showing commercials during the closing credits, so the tags have to occur before the credits and further eat into the running time.
Some shows without tags really demonstrate what can be gained when the writers don’t have to come up with an extra scene. The king of that type of ending was CHEERS. (All four of the great NBC Thursday night sitcoms of the ‘80s – COSBY SHOW, CHEERS, FAMILY TIES, NIGHT COURT – had no tags.) One of the innovations of CHEERS was its use of incredibly abrupt endings: not only were there no tags, but there were no wrap-up scenes, no lessening of the pressure. The writers would get to the spot where the story ended, or maybe even a little before it, and the scene would black out and the executive producer credits would appear. Sometimes it just gave a feeling of
That Weinman. He educates and entertains.
Now, tag, reader. If you've hit a really great post on writing craft wonkery in the last little while, link to it below. Daddy's parcelling out his procrastination in five minute increments these days. It would be nice to have something to read over soup.
2 comments:
Depends a bit on your definition of a tag, too. Seems to me that on Corner Gas the tags aren't necessarily stand-alone gags, but for the most part the story is usually wrapped by the end of the third act, and the tag is a little bonus scene that's related, but not always essential to the resolution of the story. I guess that's a classic tag. On Little Mosque the tag is sometimes treated more like a miniature third act, owing in part to the two-act, rather than three-act structure of that show. Which is a whole other interesting thing. Mosque is a bit of throwback in that regard, I think. Most comedies now do the three-act thing, due to the increased commercial time. Frankly I'm kind of fond of the old two-act structure. As a viewer it's one less commercial break (ostensibly) and as a writer it's "hey, cool. I only need to come up with one really clever act out." Sigh. I'm lazy.
Anyway, it's same deal with "Teasers" and "Cold Opens". I used to assume that a "teaser" was more or less a stand-alone scene, and that a "cold open" was just that: boom, you're into the story. But in reality the terms seem to be used interchangably and they can be either stand-alone or plot related.
Oh, and leave Britney alone.
Thanks very much for the plug, and sorry for the sentence that trailed off without a conclusion "Sometimes it just gave a feeling of..." No, that wasn't avant-garde literary style. I've fixed it.
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