7

Multiple Threaded, Long-Form Television Serial Scripts

Over the past 15 years, some of the most interesting screen-based drama has been on long-form television serials that use a multiple threaded story structure. In his book Everything Bad Is Good for You, Steven Johnson discusses how multiple threaded, long-form television (TV) serials expand viewers’ cognitive perceptions by opening spaces in the narrative.

While I agree with Johnson’s argument regarding viewers’ reception, these scripts are not as open-ended as he suggests. If so, they would not likely be produced. The question faced by the writer, then, is how to introduce the complexity made possible by multiple story lines and still give the script coherence. Addressing these questions is worth a complete book in itself. However, in this chapter, we will look broadly at several seasons of serials and argue that these multiple threaded scripts are highly dependent on theme and premise, character line, and tone to organize their stories.

Theme and Premise: Soprano’s Season 5, Episode 61 “Unidentified Black Males” 2004

Theme is an extension of what we call narrative voice in this chapter—the component or agency of storytelling that organizes the story and communicates it to the audience. This focus on narrative voice is particularly important in serials because, while their story at the dramatic or character level may seem chaotic, at the organizational and communications level, they tend to be more coherent. Narrative voice shapes the meaning of events so that they come together for the audience—in order to do so, the writer must determine a theme, an area of interest which he/she wishes to emphasize in the story, and a premise, an active point-of-view toward that area of interest. Theme is usually expressed as a noun, whereas premise is expressed as a verb. The translation of theme into premise converts the idea into action and helps drive the story.

We have not talked about theme a great deal in this book because it can take the writer away from the concrete texture of experience that we see as so important in alternative styles. An overt concentration on theme can cause the writer to attempt to focus everything around the way story serves to illustrate meaning and undercut the randomness we think is so central to alternative film. But if the writer is working on a story designed to run 7, 12, or 13 episodes over a number of seasons, it is almost impossible to submerge randomness. In this case, concentration on theme provides useful working technique to help pull the details of the story into coherence.

One possible theme for the six seasons of The Sopranos centers on the idea of impotence. Turning this into a premise, we might express it as follows: an underlying sense of powerlessness or impotence leads to an over-compensating need to be overly in control, causing the violence that drives Tony’s life, as well as his inability to open up and accept the benefits of his therapy.

Before we go further, we need to make one observation. We are not claiming to identify the one defining theme in any of the scripts we will be discussing in this chapter. Part of theme’s evocative power is its slipperiness, and the fact that it speaks in a number of ways to different viewers. We are instead developing our notion of the theme to illustrate our point. As you study stories, we invite you to consider alternative themes and then demonstrate for yourself how they are woven into the scripts.

The “Unidentified Black Males” episode of The Sopranos provides a good example of our theme. After an introductory scene, the episode begins with Finn, the boyfriend of Meadow, Tony Soprano’s daughter, attempting to pay for a family dinner. Tony aggressively rebuffs him, saying, “You eat. I pay.” Immediately we see Tony’s obsessive need to control, as well as Finn’s need to challenge it. Four scenes later, Meadow bangs futility on an old window air conditioner, trying to get it to cool, as Finn stands by, unable to do anything. Circling around their inability to make up their minds, Finn and Meadow then argue about their future together, now that he’s graduated college. Neither of them is able to make a decision. Thoroughly exhausted by the end of the scene, they cannot even decide what movie they want to see to avoid the heat.

Setting up the irony of the episode which will be echoed in its ending sequence, Meadow goes shopping with her mother Carmelo and declares that she will never be dependent on a man, saying, “There are options in life.” Carmelo, currently seeking a divorce from Tony, responds, “You have options. I have a lawyer.”

Later, after Meadow has found him a job on one of Tony’s construction sites, Finn gets sick after watching a fight between two members of the gang. Bringing this emotion back to the apartment, Finn asks Meadow what it was like growing up with the mob. She claims never to have seen any violence and then defends the mob, speaking about the powerlessness and vulnerability its originating members had faced in the Messogiorno, “All higher authority was corrupt.” Back at the construction site, Finn will not answer a sports question, fearing a wrong answer will get him beat up.

Into this cloying atmosphere of indecision, Finn happens upon his boss Vito receiving oral sex from another man. Later that day, calling him his “arch nemesis,” Vito bullies Finn into accepting an invitation to a Yankees game. Instead of going, Finn runs home to pack, to get out of town. Finally, exhausted after a long fight with Meadow who accuses him of refusing to commit, Finn proposes that they should just get married. The motivation behind Finn’s propose is unclear—he may simply think that being married into Tony’s family will assure his protection from Vito. But in any case, Meadow is thrilled. The double irony of Carmela’s line, “You have options. I have a lawyer” comes together at the end of the episode. First, Carmela learns that no lawyer is willing to take her divorce because of Tony’s possible retaliation. Then, returning home, she finds Tony taunting her by floating in their pool and must pretend to be delighted by Meadow’s telephoned news of her engagement.

The theme of a persuasive impotence leading to an excessive need for control is echoed in other scenes in the episode. Tony cannot talk about his marriage and instead walks out of the restaurant when Carmela asks him for a divorce. In mangled, suffocated English, gang leader Little Carmine decides to go after Johnny Sack. Discovering that his cousin, Tony B, the man he has been protecting throughout the season, has killed another mobster, Joey Peeps, and precipitated a mob war, Tony collapses with a panic attack. Instead of confronting him as he plans, Tony gives Tony B a promotion that he then brags about to his psychiatrist.

In the pilot, Tony says to his therapist, “It’s good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that and I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.” This sense of entering after the good times have passed him by structures the whole serial, which turns on Tony’s progressive rise, but which is constantly shadowed by this fate, the circumstances that he is born into to. “Because of RICO,” he explains to his psychiatrist. “Is he your brother?” she asks. This thematic line gives coherence to the whole serial. Its ending, where the audience is left uncertain as to what happens to Tony, transfers this desire for control (in the form of clarity and resolution) from the character to the audience. We as viewers suffer the same impotence as do the characters.

The Pilot as Introduction of Theme and Premise

The theme needs to be set up in the pilot and the premise. We will see how this is done in two serials, HBO’s Boardwalk Empire and AMC’s Breaking Bad. Both shows use a structure that twists the plot, starting at a point of action and then flashing back. This heightens the way that this action, the first thing we see, becomes the defining event that focuses the theme.

The theme of Boardwalk Empire through its first two seasons deals with the blindness that comes with power and the way it distorts relationships. Stated as a premise, it might read like this: great power undercuts the holder’s ability to trust others’ reactions, uncertain whether they are genuine or self-serving. This causes powerful people to depend, sometimes blindly, on people who promise rebirth, innocence, and love.

Boardwalk Empire ’s pilot opens with two masked men hijacking a truck of Canadian Club whiskey, smuggled ashore and bound for New York. It then flashes back three days to the coming of prohibition, where Nucky Thompson, the powerful and corrupt treasurer of Atlantic City, celebrates its possibilities, “We got a product that a fella’s got to have. Even better’s, we got a product he ain’t allowed to have.” Nucky’s protégé, Jimmy Darmody, is introduced as an eager young player, just back from the war, bitter that he is not been given the opportunity to advance quickly through Nucky’s organization. In order to make a name for himself and stick it to his boss, Jimmy and Al Capone, another comer, hijack the truck of whiskey, headed for the gangster Arnold Rothstein in New York, and in the process kill five of Rothstein’s men. Disgusted at Jimmy’s misplaced enthusiasm, Nucky is at first unable to find him, when Jimmy appears, offering a cut of the take.

This scene demonstrates how the script dramatizes the theme. Before passing Nucky the money, Jimmy challenges him, “You can’t be half a gangster, Nucky. Not anymore. That much I know.” Nucky in response to the money says, “I didn’t ask for this.” Jimmy answers, “You didn’t have to.” Nucky could have Jimmy picked up and delivered to Rothstein, thereby ending the incipient feud and the conflict that drives the season. This would have been the rationale action of someone who was not conflicted, not “half a gangster.” Instead Nucky says affectionately, “What am I going to do with you?” and then walks off, taking the money. In the filmed scene, he puts the envelope in his jacket.

With the exception of how he acts with his wife-to-be Margaret that we will discuss below, Nucky’s success turns on his ability to make shrewd and unemotional decisions about what is best for him. For instance, he does not hesitate to turn on his brother whenever it is expedient. Yet in as much as he is capable of affection, Nucky feels it for Jimmy, his protégé, much in the way that Nucky was the protégé of the Commodore, the man responsible for the financial success of Atlantic City. This is the theme of possible rebirth and love—held by those most close to him, those he has the greatest difficulty in seeing through, and those it turns out he will have the most reason to fear.

This theme is repeated throughout. When Nucky in Chicago learns that his brother has been shot, he calls Margaret and asks her to hide the ledger of his illicit financial dealings in his office desk. In response to her question about why she should be the one to do it, he says, “I don’t know what’s happening right now and until I return, I would prefer to rely only on you. Can I do that?” Margaret of course looks at the ledger, giving her important knowledge of Nucky’s dealings that will drive subsequent episodes. In season two, Nucky signs over the deed to his road lands to Margaret in order to protect them in the case of his conviction. Instructed to sign them back to him at the end of the season, she instead signs them over to the church. Nucky never once considers that this is possible. Although season three has not been released, we can imagine that Nucky’s rage once he discovers this betrayal will not only focus on his loss of income, but his, now too apparent, misplaced trust in Margaret.

Breaking Bad ’s pilot similarly opens in medias res^a with a pair of pants floating down into the desert. After flinging them out of an Recreation Vehicle’s window, Walter White, driving like a mad man, eventually runs the vehicle off the road and, under the pressure of an approaching siren, records an apologetic video to his wife and son. “I want you to know that … no matter what it may look like … I had all three of you in my heart.” He picks up a gun and aims it at the oncoming sound.

The show flashes back 3 weeks to the very work-a-day life of Walter, a high school chemistry teacher who, although he says to his class, “chemistry is the study of matter. But I prefer to see it as the study of change,” suffers from his own stasis on the day of his 50th birthday. Walter is presented as an everyman. In that role, he is financially strapped, tepidly happy, and certainly not living the life he had dreamed. He is contrasted to Hank, his Drug Enforcement Administration brother-in-law who has no children and recounts his adventures on local TV news. Needing money to pay for the treatment of his recently discovered lung cancer, Walter decides to cook meth with his former high school student Jessie. When asked by Jessie why he is doing it, Walter attempts to blame it on his need for money, then considers and finally says, “I am … awake.”

The theme circles around the idea of what it is to be “awake” in contemporary America. It suggests that everyday, middle-class life in America is a form of sleepwalking, a catatonic state grounded in a fear of not being able to pay the bills and not being able to act because the little you have built might collapse. The premise might be similar to that of many rock songs and teen movies—that it is better to live a wakeful, short life than a longer, somnambulant and safe one. Actually, just an aside, this is not a premise, but a moral. To make it a premise, we need to make it active, something like this, “taking control of your life, even at the expense of your safety, leads to the a sense of purpose that transcends the danger.”

We can see it dramatized throughout the pilot, but we can make an example out of a key scene that precedes Walter’s first attempt to cook meth. His son, Walter Junior, who has cerebral palsy and must use crutches, is mocked by some jocks because his parent must help him buy pants. Walter, whom we sense would have bit his tongue in his old life, vanishes out the back door of the clothing store and then reappears in the front, beating on one of the jocks. After they leave, defeated, the stage direction says, “Standing here, Walt feels a kind of power —one brought on by an absence of fear.” Earning this absence of fear drives his character as the serial progresses. It comes from challenging and then overcoming increasingly more powerful threats as he gets deeper into the drug trade.

Character Lines

This book makes the argument that restorative three-act structure is not merely a means of structuring a story, but a strategy for developing characters. In restorative structure, the character makes a false decision that violates her own values or turns in the right direction with insufficient preparation to sustain it, and then must face its consequences. Confronted with these, the character must acknowledge and adjust to overcome them. This usually requires her to integrate heretofore conflicting pieces of her personality. The resultant change leads to personal redemption—the character changes in time for her mistakes to be corrected—while the cracks in society that have motivated her initial conflict are smoothed over. By the end of the film, the character is clearly defined. In learning the lesson the film teaches, by seeing and then addressing her flaws, she is no longer doomed to fall victim to them again. We considered a number of consequences of this structure including that: story dominates texture, tone is consistent, motivation is clearly accessible, the character change is essential, and that social conflict is less important than character conflict.

We contrasted this structure with the more open-ended structures in alternative films. Although we considered a range of films with a number of different strategies, we identified some recurring characteristics of this structure including: structure does not lead to final character definition and that, even after the film ends, characters frequently still contain irresolvable contradictions. In most of these films, social conflict is foregrounded rather than dismissed by resolution of character conflict.

Long form serials use character development strategies that draw from both models. While not offering the clear-cut character resolution we see in restorative thee-act structure, they are also not as open-ended or socially focused as are some alternative films. This stylistic hybridity is a consequence of many things, one of which is the frequency of their episodes and their extension over a number of seasons. Serials must balance their need for sufficient closure to satisfy the season’s viewer against keeping the conflict open for subsequent seasons. They also must have sufficient variety to warrant continual viewing.

Having sufficient variety is complicated by the fact that, in order to be coherent, characters tend to be focused around a limited set of conflicts. Thus, while subsequent seasons have different story elements, their plots tend to reprise the same set of fundamental conflicts. So for instance, Tony Soprano’s underlying impotence becomes more pronounced in each season of The Sopranos as does the intensity of his response to it; yet, each cycle moves no closer to his character’s resolution—as long as he is alive, there are no final answers to the contradictions in his character or his situation. In a sense by reiterating the conflict and having it lead to similar outcomes (for instance, Tony’s killing Ralphie and then Tony B in subsequent seasons), Tony becomes increasingly more like the essence of Tony, defined not by his resolution, but by the structural permanence of his conflict.^b

The reinforcement, rather than the resolution, of character contradiction suggests that the character lines in serials not only develop through a sequential line, but also through an increasing composite picture that the viewer forms by superimposing character lines of previous seasons against that of the current one. Character’s line and motivation become more complex or ambiguous by virtue of this juxtaposition. The circling around, or folding back upon, the same set of issues suggests that we view the development of a serial character line as a spiral, a recurring cycling action that gradually penetrates deeper into the character.

Taking this into consideration, let’s look at Walter White’s development in Breaking Bad. After the pilot, the next two episodes center on whether he can bring himself to kill Krazy 8, the drug distributor who survived the first episode and is chained in Jessie’s basement. Walter, looking for a way out, asks Krazy 8 for a reason to spare his life. “Sell me,” Walter begs. Krazy 8 makes the most of Walter’s hesitation, engaging him in a heart-to-heart that ends with Krazy 8 getting Walter to admit that he has not told his family about the cancer. Even when Walter realizes that Krazy 8 is only playing him and that he must strangle the drug dealer, this unexpected intimacy does not let up. The killing is close-up, hand-to-hand, and unescapably personal. When Jessie returns home, he finds Walter has cleaned the basement out. The slate has been wiped clean. We assume that Walter has had enough. Upon his return home, he finally tells Skyler that he has cancer.

Yet, Walter’s return to his family does not last. After announcing he is thinking of not undergoing treatment because of the cost, his son’s contemptuous reaction is, “Go on Dad. Just give up and die.” When a former colleague from graduate school offers to pay for the treatment, Walter tells his family that he deserves the right to make a choice and that he will not do it. Then, after some thought, he changes his mind and agrees to treatment. But rather than taking his former colleague’s money, he decides to pay for it himself—by returning to cook meth. We can possibly read this as simply an act of pride— that he does not want someone else to support him—but the structure of the serial does not leave it like that. In episode 10 in the second season, he learns that, with his cancer in remission, his immediate financial worries are over. Instead of celebrating, Walter does not know what to do with himself. He has a manic binge, in which he frantically repairs the substructure of his house. While stocking up at the building supply store, however, he cannot resist giving advice to someone he presumes to be a competitive meth cooker. Pondering this as he makes his home improvement purchases, Walter finally makes up his mind. He leaves his cans of paint in the checkout line, approaches the cooker in the parking lot and warns him to, “Stay out of my territory.” In the next episode, he has back to work with Jessie. Two seasons later when his brother-in-law begins to target Walter’s old assistant, Gale, a misdirection that could deflect attention from him, Walter almost blows his cover by insisting that Gale is not capable of such a high quality of work.

In order to understand how this pattern of cycling compares to that of the three-act model of character development, we need to consider is how we understand Walter’s meth cooking. In a restorative three-act model, we would be clearly positioned. Not only would the cooking and the violence that goes along with it be a false solution that marks the end of the first act, but we would understand that Walter is violating his own value system and that at some point he will have to come to terms with it. Even if he could get away with (in dramatic terms) the initial meth cook in the pilot, the killing of Krazy 8 is the kind of violation that we expect needs to be accounted for. Further the meth and the killing, both of which takes three episodes, would be an action that Walter works up to in the course of the first act, not one that he does in the pilot. Yet, the fact that happens so early in the life of the serial intentionally blurs its moral consequences. It is a given. If you watch the show, you accept it. As such, we understand that we are expected to be unclear how to read it.

Secondly, we do not know how to take the end. At the time of this writing the series is not completed, but we suspect that when it is, Walter will pay with his life. What we do not know is how and what it will mean. But we can speculate, at least broadly. If his cancer remains in remission and he dies from the violence associated with the meth, the series will suggest that it may have been a mistake to become Heisenberg, that a slow and steady life remaining asleep may be the best way to live after all. If he dies of cancer while still reigning as Heisenberg, it might suggest that being “awake” was worth it, that it gave the last part of his life a meaning. Finally, if he dies from something unrelated, it will challenge our confidence that there is any meaning in the story world at all—that the narrative voice is a different order of organization than the chaos of life. This would be the most radical of possible endings because it would not only take us in a different direction in the story world, but cause us to retroactively question our faith in the organization of the story telling itself.

The fact that we do not know is, of course, important. Because of the length of long-form serials, the ambiguity of their stories linger in a different way than do single episode features (this is obviously different in features that are part of a series). As we have mentioned previously, endings causes us to retrospectively revisit stories and reinterpret, where necessary, their meaning in light of the finality of their conclusion. The lack of an ending means a lack of a final frame of reference. This allows the viewer of a long-form serial to engage the character outside of the final frame of the narrative and draw consequences uncontained by the completed character line. Paradoxically, such release from knowledge of the overall story structure may encourage an openness, a sense of imagination, in the viewer which reinforces Johnson’s quote about shows that “force you to be intelligent” by filling in crucial elements. Sometimes stories seem more alive before they end. Serials may evoke this kind of excitement by virtue of their very seriality.

Because it is spread over a number of characters, Boardwalk Empire does not have the same intensity of single character line as does Breaking Bad. The range of characters we follow means that cumulative meaning of the series is focused on their interweaving. For our purposes we will concentrate on the line of Jimmy Darmondy, which is tightly woven around that of Nucky and is completed in the first two seasons. Imagined as restorative three-act structure, Jimmy’s first act false solution might have been to turn against Nucky. He would ride the success of this, even after the viewer begins to anticipate that Jimmy lacks Nucky’s decisiveness and ruthlessness. Jimmy would get in further over his head until he falls, only then beginning to understand his own limitations. In the third act, he would realize that he can play in this game only as a sidekick and seek to rejoin Nucky, who would accept him back.

The beginning of Boardwalk Empire is developed in just this way. Although Jimmy steals Rothstein’s liquor and kills his men, he does so not in rebellion, but in service to Nucky, believing he is completing his mentor’s unspoken wish. Jimmy’s rebellion only begins to build when he is sent to Chicago and then again in his negotiations with Nucky who wants Jimmy to return to Atlantic City. Jimmy really begins to peel away from his mentor when Nucky cuts a deal with Rothstein. Jimmy’s false solution, his turn into the second act, comes at the end of the first season when Jimmy intently listens to the Commodore’s rant against Nucky. He begins plotting against his former mentor at the beginning of the second.

In the course of the second season, Jimmy’s star rises and then falls in much the way we would expect of a restorative second act. Yet, he never truly breaks free from his mentor. Talked into sanctioning an attempt on Nucky’s life, he approaches Nucky just prior to the shooting, hands out, palms up, with an equivocal statement, “It doesn’t make a difference whether you are right or wrong. You just have to make a decision.” It is unclear whether this is a warning or an apology, but it emphasizes Jimmy’s uncertainty, his lack of commitment to his own second act. Trumped by Nucky’s importation of real Irish whiskey, Jimmy can only passively agree when his partners decide to sell off their cheap stuff. By the end of the season, Jimmy is ready to return to Nucky’s good graces. In the last episode, he asks for a chance to set things right. As the Boardwalk Empire showrunner, Terence Winter, puts it,

Thinking he has succeeded, apparently earning his way back by killing off the witnesses lined up to testify against Nucky, Jimmy shows up at a final rendezvous only to have Nucky shoot him. What Jimmy has learned does not matter. He is not allowed to get away with his transgressions and redeem himself.

In fact, the learning may all be with Nucky. The tracking of Jimmy’s line illustrates how the movement of one character is interwoven with that of another. Terence Winter puts it this way,

Tone: The Larger World

Finally, as consistent with other discussions in this book, we will look at what these serials suggest about the world beyond the story. As in other chapters, we will not focus on the explicit content of the serial (i.e., is the story explicitly political), as much as how it uses its tone and manner of presentation to imply broader meaning.

Full of period touches, particularly in costumes, appliances, music and sets, Boardwalk Empire ’s representation of the 1920s is respectful, almost worshipful. Like many series explicitly set in an historical period, the serial carefully works external events (Harding’s election, Jack Dempsey’s fights) into its story. Through its sympathetic treatment of characters who violate prohibition at the same time it dwells on the hypocrisy of the Agent Van Alden, the agent who is supposed to enforce it, the serial shares with the audience the implied agreement that prohibition was a mistake. But they do it in a gentle way. The scripts do not convey a superior position to the characters in the story, but share a world-weariness with them, a sense that this kind of behavior is expected. The joke, if anything, is on the government and the belief that natural human appetites, such as alcohol, can be legislated.

While also careful to work in historical events, Mad Men, by contrast, is targeted to a knowing audience laughing, at least at times, at the mistakes of the past. The most obvious of these easy targets is in the serial’s portrayal of ethnic and gender stereotypes, as well as advertisings close relationship with the tobacco industry. The pilot, entitled “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” turns on Don Draper’s attempt to come up with an advertising slogan for his firm’s biggest client, Old Gold cigarettes, after the Federal Trade Commission has forbidden advertisements that make cigarette health claims. His solution is to come up with a slogan—“It’s toasted”—a solution that the company find acceptable because, even though it is true of all cigarettes, diverts concern from the health issues. When Joan introduces Peggy to her new job as secretary, she says of the electric typewriter, “Now try not to be overwhelmed by all this technology. It looks complicated, but the men who designed it made it simple enough for a woman to use.”

The net effect of this is to put the viewer at a safe distance from the action. Whatever the overt point-of-view of the serial—women’s inability to advance in corporate America for instance—the formal structure remains reassuring and unchallenging. From our vantage point today, it is easy to mock the trade commission’s timidity or the sexual hypocrisy of the fifties without recognizing our own blindness to our prejudices of today. As many of the mainstream examples we refer to in this book, Mad Men proposes change in its content but assures us that we are insulated from change by its narrative perspective.

Homeland, as did 24 before it, draws from the cultural zeitgeist and the subsequent wars following September 11. But if we contrast it to 24, we can see how the environment has changed, not only in terms of conflict, but also in narrative structure. 24 presents the terrorist threat as shadowy and unabashedly evil, giving us initial villains in each season who are duped or naïve, and them moving on to terrorists, and politicians who are stereotypically evil. Except in rare moments, the center of our identification is with Jack Bauer rather than with the terrorists. Even when Jack goes overboard in his interrogations, we are consistently reminded that such excess is necessary for the safety of the country. The scripts do this by presenting the terrorists as images, seen largely through surveillance devices.

Homeland, by contrast, richly characterizes Brody, the planted terrorist who does not complete his mission in the first season. By lingering on his difficulties in returning to his wife who has fallen in love with his best friend, the serial positions the audience to identify with Brody. While first duplicating 24 by showing us Brody’s life only through surveillance, we soon see him directly. In fact, the serial credits his inner life sufficiently to include a series of his flashbacks that explain why he has come to be a terrorist. This identification with a character who would had been treated as the abject other in 24 deepens the viewers’ confusion about how to take Brody’s actions and raises questions about the politics of identification. In doing so, it suggests a richer and more ambivalent approach to terrorism that had previously been presented. Time has changed how we see terrorism and this has resulted in formal changes in our storytelling.

In the pilot of Girls, an HBO series about three young women in their early twenties living in New York, one of the character talks about her love of the earlier HBO series, Sex and the City. But where Sex and the City features women in their thirties and forties who had found professional, but not romantic, success, the characters in Girls seek not only romantic success, but their professional identities. The Sex and the City pilot opens with Carrie narrating the breakup of a well-heeled English journalist for her “Sex and the City” column; Girls opens with the struggling Hannah, the main character, both being financially cut off by her parents and losing her non-paying internship. Carrie’s column is advertised on the side of a bus; Hannah who also wants to be a writer is unknown and unpublished. Carrie’s relationship breakup is the end of a quick, but very romantic courtship. Hannah confesses her financial cutoff to her sometimes boyfriend who never leaves his apartment and treats her as his sex toy.

This intertextuality^c works in ways that are not dissimilar to the spiraling we see in the character line. While the scripts in Sex and the City purport to a toughness, they still glamorize romance, disconnecting it from the drudgery of building a career or the logistics of sex. The urgency for romance in Girls is juxtaposed with a restlessness, a looking for purpose, a grittier sense of how little control the characters have over their own lives. Sex is more explicit, but also more mechanical and unsatisfying. If we read Girls in the context of the earlier Sex and the City, the contrast between the two adds a dimension to the later serial’s world. The impact of the financial crises has shifted the possibilities that had been opened to the characters. They live in contrast to the dreams they saw represented when they were younger.

We may read the plane crash that ends the second season of Breaking Bad as an ironic extension of Walter’s actions from the individual to a larger social context. In response to the crash, indirectly caused by Walter, his high school holds a memorial where he is asked to speak. Thus, Walter is not only a cause of the suffering, but also a member of a community of sufferers who are expected to share this common tragedy. He is both cause and mourner.

The irony of Walter’s position works well, but it also illustrates one key difference between television serials and some of the alternative films we have considered in this book. While the plane crash succeeds in juxtaposing the individual’s actions to the reaction of the larger community, it does not dramatize the disconnected sense of unexplained contingency we sometimes see in contemporary life. By fully foreshadowing the crash—we see moments of its aftermath before many of the preceding episodes—the serial makes its actual occurrence a satisfying resolution of these hints. However, the very fore-shadowing diminishes its randomness or contingency. In this sense, it feels very different than does the reoccurring twenty dollar bill that blows out the window of the cab in Scorsese’s After Hours or the earthquake that turns the story in Altman’s Short Cuts. This need to overexplain or setup may be part of the compromise build into the structure of long-form television serials. For events to pay off in the course of the season, they must be foreshadowed in most, if not all, the previous episodes. Or, if they are important events from the serial’s deeper past, they must be recapitulated in the reminder sections that begin many episodes. This tends to undercut the randomness of subsequent events. The very need to keep viewers up-to-date also diminishes the element of chance or accident that gives many alternative films their power.

Summary

Multiple threaded, long-form television serials have opened up storytelling possibilities for writers who have previously seen their aesthetic interests limited to alternative features. Because of their multiple plot elements, serials foreground theme as a central core that unifies individual episodes and entire seasons. Thus, they give the writer more opportunity to concentrate on ideas than do mainstream features. Because viewers may live with a serial over a number of years before it is resolved, they get used to complexities and contradictions in the characters. Therefore, the writer’s treatment of character can be richer than that it is in both traditional television and in more mainstream feature films. Further, instead of experiencing serials as the linear development of character lines, viewers may also see them in terms of the juxtapositions across seasons. As a result, the restorative three-act model of character build and resolution becomes more complex, and the viewer is able to accept that characters may never resolve fundamental contradictions. Finally, by evoking historical moments, earlier treatments of social issues or stories that foreground theme, serials may raise complex relationships between the story and the broader world. Foregrounding these contrasting representations can connect scripts to larger realities in ways that go beyond what we had previously believed television could do.

References

1.  Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good For You (New York: Riverhead Books, 2006), 63–64.

2.  James Hibbert, 2011. “Boardwalk Empire showrunner explains finale, talks season 3,” Entertainment Weekly, December 11, 2011. Web. Accessed June 1, 2012, <http://insidetv.ew.com/2011/12/11/boardwalk-empire-finale/>.

3.  Ibid.