When I am in a work crunch — which I am these days — one of the ways I deal with the pressure is to watch TV shows. Fortunately, Netflix makes this easy.
Since I don’t particularly care which show I am watching, as long as it has decent writing, and having exhausted, for the moment, Jennifer Jones and Stranger Things, I find myself randomly ping ponging between lots of offerings on tap, including Luke Cage, iZombie, Galavant, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Gotham, Grace and Frankie, Penny Dreadful and of course Buffy — always Buffy — among others.
When you are watching so many shows, you start to notice that each one is actually about a very well-defined reality. In a sense, that specific defining reality is the real point of the show. Each TV series possesses an exact mix of knowing humor, sardonic ruefulness, tragedy, romance, absurdity, kindness and cruelty, hopefulness and despair.
It’s almost as though there is a giant bank of sliders, labeled with every human emotional quality. I can picture the writers and show runners working through the exact settings of those sliders together, before a single script has been written.
Once the show if off and running, that particular setting of reality sliders becomes a sort of bible. If you write for the show, whatever you write needs to conform to that bible.
Of course there are exceptions. Just as The Beatles evolved from the Mersey Beat of their early days to something far more daring and interesting, some TV shows manage to break free of the shallow moorings of their first season and transition into a far deeper and more powerful reality.
Like, for instance, Buffy.