January 1, 2025 - 10:30am
According to a widely-shared recent essay, executives at streaming networks routinely ask screenwriters for film and television to produce scenes in which characters “announce what they’re doing, so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along”. The streaming platforms also have thousands of micro-genres in their catalogue including “casual viewing”, which is used for films and shows that go down best when you’re not paying attention.
It can be a salutary experience for a screenwriter to observe viewers when those viewers are watching a screen. You may have — if you’re any good, you will have — burned midnight oil and brain cells to make your screenplay cogent and your plot watertight. And then you see people watching á la Gogglebox: doing the ironing, chatting, wondering whether the bins need to be collected. A screenwriter’s job is to make them pay attention — or, at least, it was. Film editors and directors now labour over shots that viewers miss when there’s a notification on their phone; scrolling and “second screen” viewing have made this even more acute.
Is it any wonder that a lot of modern streaming TV suffers from slowness and bloat, considering that its main function is not to keep you entertained moment by moment, as analogue TV did, but merely to keep you subscribed to the service, with its enormous range of little-watched fare?
The actual viewing figures for streaming services, despite being more accurate and more readily available to the networks in question, are kept a ruthlessly close secret. You can have a “hit” show that nobody is actually watching.
So it’s no surprise that “casual viewing” is on the up, and this may not necessarily be a bad thing. One of the most irritating ways TV has changed alongside tech in recent decades has been the vaunting of every single programme, no matter how trivial, as epically unmissable. One longs for the days when things were just “on”, without any fanfare telling us how life-altering they were. Programmes such as Vera and Emmerdale are trumpeted like the arrival of the Queen of Sheba. Nobody ever claimed that Shoestring or Terry and June were going to change our lives, but it was nice they were there. And maybe it’s that breezy genre of show which Netflix and its competitors, previously beholden to complex arcs and “journeys”, are rediscovering.
This steer to writers, however, hits on an age-old question: at the start of a show in particular, would the viewer rather be a little lost, or have everything spelt out? Cinema, with its lack of competing distractions, has always had the edge over TV here. Watching the beginning of a film requires a heightened sense of mental effort: they’ve already caught you, so they can afford to be more coy.
There is an art to setting the scene out in dialogue and action. If you get it right, the viewer won’t even notice they’re receiving the information. Having a character “announce what they’re doing” cuts across that. There is no need for Hamlet to enter proceedings and announce: “Here I am, lads. Time to find out if the stories about my father’s ghost haunting the ramparts are true.” An even slightly attentive audience member will have picked that up from dialogue, and attentive is the key word here: if you’re only half-watching a programme, then of course everything will need to be announced.
Pretty soon, this may all be academic. Advances in AI mean that any day now we’ll likely be able to pause the action and ask the characters who they are, what they know and what they want. The art of screenwriting may well transform into the art of curating the best prompts. Netflix and the other streaming services were born from technological change. They may die from it too.
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SubscribeIt’s the old vicious circle effect; script writers get the attention of the viewer with a bit of naughty and outrage, then viewers get fed-up with it. Watch, bore, repeat. Poor writers, zombie viewers. Whether or not you do tons of explication is just a small detail. And poor cinematographers, who spend ages arranging subtle lighting or camera motivations. The zombie audience have got to change, but they stay zombied due to the pap on offer. Chicken and egg.
In many thrillers, the clues are visual and can be very subtle. It was this attention to detail that made watching them enjoyable. It’s bad enough already with several scenes of exposition. Exposition can be delivered with skillful writing but in today’s shows that’s been abandoned too.
What I would find most useful would be a screenwriter’s intro/overview telling you which pc boxes the drama is going to tick:
*full-measure of LGBTQ included….tick
* most white men beastly….tick
* female cops physically overpower dangerous crooks…..tick etc etc (examples here: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/non-binary-sibling-is-entertaining)
Not holding my breath though….and only kidding (mostly anyway).
Rather than these things being announced (and they almost already are, with ‘trigger warnings’) I’d like them to stop. We need better alternatives.
THESE things aren’t announced with trigger warnings! Quite the reverse. But if and when you figure out how you are going to “stop” them….Well count me in.
But surely all those things are just normal life, aren’t they? Tell me if there’s going to be a female giving birth (oh horror) but a trans woman birthing would hardly be worth mentioning! A white actor playing The Moor is shudder-inducing, but a black actor playing a Viking chief is hardly noticeable! A heavyweight boxer overpowering a woman is anathema, but a 5 feet tall woman defeating the Hulk is kind of banal! Come on! Get it right!
Thanks….is it me then who’s been living in the parallel universe? I’ll try now to get with The Programme….honest I will.
Well done! Follow The Programme , my young Paduan, and you will soon be a fully-fledged traveller on The Parallel Path.
“Best known for his work on Dr Who” I’d have asked them to keep shtum on that myself
TV is shit and rots your brain.
Hmm. I get the sense you’re still undecided.
The real problem is surely that there is too much fingertip entertainment, be it old or new tech, and too much stimulus hurled at us wherever we go, in shops, on headphones, etc. Shops have long recognised the effect it has on customers’ ability to make considered choices and I imagine TV and one;ine entertainment firms make use of much the same psychological effects.
Perhaps the industry could try making things that are watchable instead of looking for ways to shoehorn social messages into the plot.
Watch William Friedkin’s French Connection from 1973. It’s shocking how much better that is in every respect – script, direction, editing, performances – than any ‘thriller’ that’s on Netflix. And that’s just one example.
Agreed. But that’s a masterpiece. You only get one of those a year.
Damn right.
That would be the specific reason that I unsubscribed to netflix a couple years ago. Being hectored with fashionable social dogma isn’t entertainment, it’s tantamount to torture. Could I just have an interesting plot and a well told story? Apparently that’s a bridge too far.
I now tend to watch TV drama from the ’70s and ’80s rather than contemporary stuff. Just finished watching the Alan Bates version of “The Mayor of Casterbridge” and am trying to decide whether to go for “Heimat” or “When the Boat comes in” next.
What I enjoy about all of them is that they are more slowly paced than most modern drama and therefore allow time for character development and plots that evolve more naturally and convincingly.
And whilst most of them do raise questions and even seek to make ‘political’ points, they do so with subtlety, nuance and, most importantly, respect for the intelligence of their audience.
Heimat, definitely.
There have always been programmes where characters tell each other the plot, and tell each other the backstories of other characters.
the angle statues were scary.
They’re vaunted and promoted because today, everything in life must be a hyperbolic experience. This is because in atomising populations for conformity and obedience, life is joyless, superficial to an extent of pointlessness. This phenomenon needs motivating forces to replace agency, will and order that has been programmed away to create mere functional automatons.
Oh, when I was young and so assured that the arcs of history, art, and justice must surely curve ever upward. Now I lie in bed listening to the celebrating demons of Hell’s darkest caverns who roam at will through the world of men.