How TV Can Make You Smarter by Allison Shoemaker

Author:Allison Shoemaker [Shoemaker, Allison]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
Published: 2020-09-07T16:00:00+00:00

THE CREATIVE CHALLENGERS: THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX

Do you know what’s great about an art form where you’ve got lots of individual little segments that make up a larger whole? Some of those segments are going to get pretty weird sometimes. Not all of these attempts are successful, but when they are, oh, what a feeling.

Whether a show’s big swing hits or misses, however, it can still make you smarter. Because makers of television have to work within certain confines and often rely on established forms—sitcoms have three acts, dramas and other hour-long genres have four or five, and so on—it’s easier for people outside the industry to pick apart why a given episode or series does or doesn’t work, how it operates, how it’s different, how it’s the same, and so on. That’s possible with any art form, of course, but many of us are, without realizing it, already fluent in TV. And because we speak the language, we’re in a perfect position to understand how and why an episode or series works or doesn’t—and that, in turn, helps us to better understand the creative process in general.

Humans pick up on established patterns all the time, whether we realize it or not. In the summer of 2005, I saw Friends star David Schwimmer in a play in London’s West End—a drama, it’s important to add. There were certainly jokes here and there, but this was no lightweight affair, and Schwimmer’s performance reflected that. Yet he stood up there on a brightly lit set, in a living room or office, and if there was a sustained pause after one of his lines, the audience often laughed. They spoke sitcom language; they were just filling in the laugh track.

If an episode of television airs without a title screen or the opening credits, we notice. If there’s no cold open (a segment airing before the credits roll or title card hits), we notice that as well. The Simpsons has built our recognition of form and its variations into its DNA; every time the theme song nears its end, the Simpson family assembles itself on the sofa in front of their television in some new, strange way. The single-camera comedies Scrubs (NBC), Ryan Hansen Solves Crime on Television (YouTube Premium), and Dollface (Hulu), among others, include segments or episodes in which the characters exit their single-cam world and enter a multi-cam one, with new visual and sonic language. AMC’s series Kevin Can F**k Himself, which has yet to debut as of this writing, is built from this very premise. (Google it.)

There are languages within languages too. Not a single regular viewer of The Office missed the significance of the moment when a boom mic guy (Chris Diamantopoulos) stepped into the frame in a ninth-season episode. When you learn the rules—the language—you’re prepared to recognize the moment they’re bent or broken and understand the significance.

But wait, there’s more! On top of all that, concept or gimmick episodes have become a key part of many long-running

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