I started writing about characterization a couple of months ago but got sidetracked. Sorry for the delay.
Although, now that we’re talking about this sort of thing, the fact that it took me so long to get to Part 2 tells you something about my character, doesn’t it?
Ah, but that’s a whole other kind of lesson, isn’t it?
As has been mentioned elsewhere on TVWriter™ earlier, yesterday I wrote about my experience over the last weekend at trying to cut the pay TV cord.
I wrote about it right here, actually, and will be glad to wait while you read that post if you haven’t already. (What? You haven’t already?)
The gist of what I said is that even though I didn’t get el cordo cut all the way through, I did achieve what I considered to be a pretty big victory: I got my DISH bill cut almost in half.
Last week Gwen the Beautiful and I got a notice from our not so close personal friends over at DISH Network that as a thank you for using their service for 17 years in five different cities across the country, they wanted to personally thank us for our loyalty and were rewarding us the chance to watch some movie channel we’d never heard of for absolutely free for a few months.
Oh, and they also wanted us to know that they were raising our monthly fee by about five bucks because, hey, expenses, you know?
Over the past few years, we’ve been watching actual television shows on television less and less and thinking more and more about ditching everything, plugging a laptop into our flatscreen, and living out other people’s fantasy lives without leaving that strange comfort zone created by being online. The only thing that mitigated against that was the concern that it would just plain be too hard to keep track of when shows we wanted to see would be on without a DVR to record them automatically.
Once you the writer have given us, the audience, characters with whom we can sympathize, your next job is to give these new people some “tsuris,” which is Yiddish for “Trouble with a Capital T.”
As Aristotle pointed out a couple of years ago, effective writing comes from building up to a climax, which means that once you’ve established the basic situation for your character – the need the character has that must be fulfilled, or the problem she, he, or they must solve – you’ve only brought yourself to the starting point. Often, that point is one relatively small but nevertheless unmanageable stress. Let me repeat that – “relatively small” yet most definitely “unmanageable.”
This is not going to be a permanent situation for your hero or heroes, not by a long shot. Because even then, right at the get-go, while the hero starts working like a house afire to dig out of the crisis at hand, your job is to ratchet up the pressure and make things even tougher.
When writing for television, the key to creating a successful series is populating it with characters the audience wants to come back and see again and again. This means that the characters – especially the leads – have to be, at the least, interesting, as well as realistic. I say “at the least” because over the years I’ve found that words like “quirky” and “weird” have described some of TV’s most popular heroes.
In the ’60s, for example, we had Ironside, the wheelchair-bound detective, running a team that could help him solve any crime and capture any crook. In the ’70s there was Wonder Woman, a woman who dominated every scene of the show, and pretty much every man in it as well. The ’80s gave us the A Team and the guys on MIAMI VICE. The ’90s brought the buddies of FRIENDS and SEINFELD to the fore. And the 2000s – well, I don’t know where to begin. Every successful show for the last decade and a half has featured characters far different from your standard neighbors next door.
Notice that I haven’t said that your leads need to be likeable. Once upon a time, network executives demanded likability, but characters like ALL IN THE FAMILY’S Archie Bunker (way back in the ’70s) and NYPD BLUE’s Andy Sippowitz (a ’90s icon) cracked the mold. And more recently the casts of THE SOPRANOS, CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM, GAME OF THRONES, BREAKING BAD,and all the other cable network anti-heroes have totally shattered that misconception.