Write what you don’t know, too
Posted by Walt 06 29th, 2006
Ken Levine, one of the writers for the TV show M*A*S*H, gives a sample of script dialogue.
HAWKEYE: I think his freebazzber is ruptured.
BJ: You might have to gumenford him and eeknonoogle his interior norgalflagle.
HAWKEYE: Nurse, zignuts. Stat!
And here you were, thinking that “Writers should only write what they know”! As you can see from the above, writers often write what they DON’T know, too! It’s called a draft, where you put in the skeleton and research the fleshy details later. In the case of M*A*S*H, the medical consultant would fill in all those details, and the script would continue being polished.
Of course, nowadays, there are so many procedurals on TV, it’s hard to turn the thing on without learning (and often seeing!) about all the details of what happens when a thug empties a clip into a body, and how you know the gun was shot from 12 feet away as opposed to 20. Sometimes it seems that the procedural and techincal folks are running these crime and drama shows, and after a while some of the shows are more info dump than drama. (”As you know, Bob, his freebazzber is ruptured, so we must eeknonoogle his interior norgalflagle”)
One of the shows I still enjoy is HOUSE, M.D. simply because they don’t info dump in such an obvious manner. There’s an assumption of a slightly more intelligent audience there, and I appreciate that. The show is still a fantasy of sorts, but even when the show goes over the top, there’s the characters that grab the story away from the information, because you want to see how your characters are going to react to the situation; the situations in HOUSE would be different if different characters of the show were in the room. That’s what mixes up things. I like that.
Having watched so many shows that can be termed realistic, gritty, and/or procedural, I often find that when I watch some show that is, shall we say, looser with its facts, I find myself scoffing at it (I recently watched a cop show that had a cop standing close to a man who shot himself, and thought to myself “had this been CSI, the cop would have been splattered with blood blowback from the gun.”
The Perfessor
The shows are not strictly procedurals — more like fantasy procedurals. CSI Miami must have normal crime scene investigators chortling with amusement over the antics of Horatio.
I’ll give the shows the five minute DNA results, the easy analysis and conclusions about bullet direction, and me being an image guy, I’ll even give the the truly magical ability to recreate a license plate from the blurry reversed reflection off of a shiny car door taken from an ATM camera from a bank across the street.
As mentioned, it’s the story that revolves around these truthy “abilities”. The characters have to react in relatively unique ways. Otherwise, the characters become interchangable and essentially useless. It turns a series of procedural events into a living and breathing drama.
Ah, Walt, this may come as something as a surprise to you, but like franchise stores in a super mall, the characters are interchangeable (and thus essentially useless). As it turns out, the viewing audience wants a series of procedural events that are woven into a living and breathing drama, only without the living and breathing parts.
The average TV watcher simply can’t tell the difference between one cop/medical/lawyer/reality show and another (which is why all we have on TV is/are cop/medical/lawyer/reality shows. They all wind up looking like another, and when a new show/format breaks out of the mold and succeeds against all odds, the ink isn’t yet dry on it before there are six copycat shows on that look just like it.
Needless to say, when they all fail, no one can understand why, and then are quick to say people only want this or that because only this or that ever succeed. Hence all of the Law & Order, CSI shows. In the future, all TV shows will be (interchangeable) cloned franchise shows that are knocked off each other.
The Perfessor