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08/04/2007: Doin' what Doogie Did


There was a child in the hair salon this morning. So instead of the normal ennui-athon of Paris fashion show footage, the DVD player had been loaded with episodes of an animated superhero show, for said child's entertainment. The show was not the one I've written for, but I liked it. It was witty, even. I was quite happy, being placidly shorn while I listened.

And then we got to the very last line of the show. It was one of those shows that has to sum everything up at the end with a contemplative voice-over line that begins, "That's the thing about life..." (By the way, it's worth googling "that's the thing about life". Apparently, there are 932 of them.)

This one went, as near as I can recall:

SUPERHERO
That's the thing about life. It just keeps going along, and no matter what you do about it, there's always something that you didn't know was going to happen.

Actually, I think it had less content than that. It was certainly that what-inducing. And it occurs to me that a lot of scripts, for all different sorts of shows, often for spec pilots, have such a summing-up moment at the end, and that you all should be warned to be very, very careful with it. First off, be very wary of using a narrator voice-over to begin with, but sometimes even a script without one will still have a moment like this in which the theme of the script is explicitly stated. Watch out. It's a minefield.

If you decide to do this, you really have to earn it. You can't just look at your story and come up with the vaguest possible aphorism that covers both the A and B stories. Even a great story will fall on its face if it turns out that the whole thing existed as an illustration of "Life is surprising," or "I wish things were fairer!" And, by the way, it's totally cheating to make the moral, "Sometimes we can't explain why things happen," in the hopes that it will excuse unmotivated events in your script. Nice try. (No really. It actually IS a nice try.)

If you're going to try to give your readers a moral gift bag, it has to be something worth taking away, something a little surprising, something that connects with what the readers have just seen in a slightly unexpected way. For example, I might be intrigued by a story that ended with two main characters walking away from a big climactic scene while saying:

HERO ONE
I did everything I could to try to help him. I don't get why he was still angry.

HERO TWO
Maybe 'cause you wouldn't stop trying to help him.

It's still a bit heavy-handed. Summing up is a heavy-handed business. But the observation that treating someone, even a victim, AS a victim, doesn't always breed gratitude -- that's at least not a sentiment you hear every day. It's a little unusual, a little thoughtful. It's also not being expressed in a voice-over, which helps it not feel as weighty.

See, that's the thing about life, sometimes you need more than a vague platitude.

Lunch: A Vietnamese dish -- rice noodles and pork and shrimp. Mmm.