We Are In The Writer’s Age of Television.

A downside of the breadth and quality of television is that you can choose to watch only very good shows and never run out of material. For years I only had the energy to consume rather than consume and create. As I’ve stepped up my creative time, I have to be pickier about my consumer time, and that has led me to analyzing why I watch what I watch, why it’s important to me to watch it, and how I will choose what I watch in the future. I’ve decided to eliminate the not-so-good shows from my viewing, and raise the bar to the very good and the best.

Many people have noted that this era of expanded television production has been focused on writers. Not just the sheer number of scribes required to produce all this entertainment, but also that the writer is frequently the most known off-screen name from the credits. The stars from this era like Shonda Rhimes, Matt Weiner, Courtney Kemp, David Chase, Jenji Kohan, Vince Gilligan, and Joey Soloway are all known as writers even when they’ve also directed. In the movie world, writers like Sofia Coppola and Alfonso Cuaron are more often referred to as directors, even when they also wrote notable films.

There are tv shows driven by writer/directors and there are tv shows driven by writers. I find that, ironically, when they are not writer/directors, I think of the notable directors as visual poets and the notable writers are masters of narrative. I recognize that there are those directors who are considered auteurs, but in pop culture filmed media, there are few who didn’t use the exceptional collaborators.

For my money, the very best television of this era is actually by those who excel at the visual when tied in with the verbal and structural and delivered through craft and performance. When it comes to visual media, it reaches its peak when the interplay between these is so closely tied together that to remove either would destruct the other. My first love, well known but not nearly as popular: comic books.

In comics that the best books are written and drawn by those who understand that art and script must work together to create the medium. I’m going to use comic strips to illustrate this simply: Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes contrasted with Scott Adams’ Dilbert. In most Dilbert strips, it is not essential to see the art in order to fully comprehend the joke being told, and there is rarely anything of substance beside the joke. The “acting” ability of Watterson’s characters far surpasses Adams’, and the former’s strips find far more poetry in the art form than the latter, which traffics primarily in verbal jokes.

Recently, between semesters of school, and while my kids took a vacation with their mom, I spent a little more time in front of the screen, and as I considered what was important to me, I realized that while I love great narrative tv, such as Breaking Bad or Mad Men (and really good narrative tv like some seasons of Last Man on Earth or most episodes of Sherlock), what I really want are the shows that are going to stick in my brain for the long term. I realized that those shows were exceptions, and exceptional, mostly for their ability to create visual poetry along with fantastic performance and compelling scripts.

To demonstrate what I mean by poetry, I’m going to focus on drama. Comedy is much more a writer’s medium, even when the writing is improvised (Curb Your Entertainment). There are surely good examples of great directors in comedy, but when the focus is, by necessity, on delivering the jokes, the poetry of directing less often comes into play. I’m sure there are many great exceptions. One that immediately comes to mind is the shot of Selina Meyer lying on the floor of the Oval Office in the fetal position at the end of Veep Season Five, a nice bit of visual artistry, which is not often this wonderful show’s forte.

The shows that really stick in my brain for the long term offer a few shared components.

One, they don’t require a huge episode commitment. I enjoyed chewing on the bubblegum of Lost while my kids were babies and toddlers and my mental facility was at its weakest while working 50–60 hours per week and spending every remaining waking hour chasing them down and cleaning them up. I recently thought of rewatching it with my now-tweens and the idea of 121 episodes was simply tedious. The worst examples of this bring peak drama late in the second or third season, and then simply can’t maintain find reasons to raise the stakes. I’m looking at you, Walking Dead or 24.

Two, they have something more to offer than a (mostly) compelling plot. Last year I was convalescing for a few months, and often spent 22–24 hours a day at home. During this time I watched many, many shows and movies. Among them, the first five seasons of Dexter. I then speed-watched the last two (skipping entire episodes and watching the pre-show recaps to catch up), but I can’t recommend it to anyone else. I loved The Wire, but seem to think it has more weak spots than most fans, and I enjoyed season two very much, thank you. I also enjoyed The Sopranos, but the acting far surpassed the writing for me, and a third of season one felt like drudgery. Breaking Bad chewed me up, but the memorable parts were less plot-driven and more emotion driven. For example, I loved the poetry of the cold opens, even though I could rarely anticipate how they tied into the narrative. They set a tone and feeling rather than a critical narrative step. They tied in to the plot, and usually in the same episode, but they were frequently non-essential to follow the narrative. What I really remember from Breaking Bad however, were the gruesome or shocking bits of visual exposition. The bathtub sequence in season two; Gus Fring’s exploded face; Walt’s tighty-whities; etc.

Three, the best shows allow their directors some visual space to tell a story without plot or narrative being pushed forward, building character and relationships by showing rather than telling. In television this is often dictated by budget, but whatever, an artist paints with the tools they have, not the tools they want. Take Breaking Bad again. “Fly” (s03e10) was notably filmed in one location for budgetary reasons, and while it definitely feels like it stretched out the season’s narrative, it offered amazing visuals and helped define the main characters and their relationship. I understood Walter and Jesse better after that episode and could easily reflect the rest of the season and much of the series through that lens. I think it’s no coincidence that this was directed by Rian Johnson, but I think that the writers had to allow room for direction. They had to let visuals and performance tell a story that could never be told exclusively through dialogue and scene direction. Close-ups and “fly’s-eye” view, security cameras and overhead shots, quick cuts and languorous takes combine to make visual poetry through the work of a visionary director, working on a limited budget and with less shooting time per minute of screen time than one would allow compared to most films.

To sum up this theory of the poetry of television I want to use two shows I just watched to contrast what I’m looking for when I decide to spend my time in a show’s world. HBO just finished up the first seasons of heavily-advertised and reasonably well regarded (70 and 77 on Metacritic, respectively) shows: Succession and Sharp Objects. I think these scores are reasonable, and I would rank Sharp Objects a bit higher, as it offers more of the poetry I seek.

As a narrative, I found Succession to be particularly exposition and plot-driven. These shows are realtively new, so I want to avoid spoilers, but there are three significant events in the first ten episodes. There are other major plot events that are necessary to drive character development, and with such a large cast, these are clearly essential to maintain engagement with each of the main members of this family. I would watch an hour of just Sarah Snook, and she rarely got to play protagonist in her scenes. What’s missing for me is the visual poetry.

Performances are great throughout the show. It’s a benefit of peak television that there are so many great roles for actors like J. Smith Cameron from my beloved Rectify, and the leads were all compelling, with Sarah Snook’s Shiv as a standout. Characterization through dialogue is solid in the series. In particular, the siblings are each given very clear voices that help you understand their shared and individual foibles, even if some on-the-nose therapy scenes are required to convince the viewer that our assumptions are true. By the way, I blame The Sopranos for cliched therapy scenes. That show frequently held a high regard for its audience with its therapy scenes, but gave writers a cheap form of exposition, with characters telling one the viewer, with analyst as proxy, precisely how they feel, rather than their actions and the camera showing us. I was left with the same feeling from Succession that I get from many other seasons of modern television, which is that it could have been half as long with the same result.

What poetry gives us that prose struggles with is the knowledge that how we feel about a character (or situation, or scenario) is just as important as what we know. Art as vessel for our perspectives is one its greatest values.

Sharp Objects gives me more visual poetry. The show uses both time-jumps and dream-state/reality shifts to show us how the main character is experiencing her world. Through these visual cues we get a view of what drives the protagonist, Amy Adams’ Camille, without telling us every detail at each step. Admittedly, some of these steps seem designed to simply delay plot reveals, but building tension can be critical in a story like this.

At the beginning of the show, I admit that the shifts between dream-state and reality was partly compelling because I was working to figure out where we stood. There is a scene where Camille as a teenager wakes Camille as an adult from sleep. It was not immediately clear functionally, but emotionally, I understood exactly what had happened. When these scenes became more abstract later in the series, I felt their importance more than I parsed it. This works to the series advantage. We identify with its flawed characters, and humanizing them through their internal struggles is what allows this to happen.

At the conclusion of the show, we realize that we have been swayed by identifying so strongly with Camille that parts of the narrative only become clear as she realizes them. This makes the series at once both very traditional, the procedural through first person perspective, and very poetic. The poetry comes as we realize that the things we have been feeling all along — her unease, her distrust of certain characters and protection of others, her own struggles to accept her reality — are both earned and misplaced. The feelings are very human, which poetry can achieve more quickly than narrative.

Every episode of Sharp Objects was directed by Jean-Marc Vallee. I believe that it is not just the vision of the director, but the cohesion of having a single director that allows the poetry to come through. The writing is solid, and I would argue that Gillian Flynn’s participation is a reason for its strength (who understands these characters better?), but the marriage of visual and script is what elevates this series. I expect that the story will stick with me, but more importantly, I expect that the visual poetry that Vallee used to tell it will embed itself deeper in my consciousness over time.

Some exceptional shows that use visual poetry better than others:

Better Call Saul / Rectify / The End of the Fucking World / Top of the Lake

Twin Peaks / True Detective

Some exceptional shows that are more heavily narrative and dialogue driven:

Succession / Breaking Bad / The Wire

Broadchurch / Justified / Mad Men / Big Little Lies

Halt and Catch Fire / The Sinner / Transparent

The Exception That Tests The Rule

The other common denominator in great narrative shows is the acting. I left my personal favorite all-time narrative drama off this list for the reason that its acting and script are so breathtaking that it overwhelmed me. Deadwood.

The Best Television Show of All Time (as voted on solely by me) was writer driven. It is missing the visual poetry that I love, but the acting and scripts were so amazing I am still in awe at its grimy beauty.

Deadwood was exceptional for the fact that its impressive actors were given lines with incredible depth and passion. David Milch is a mad genius whose skill is specifically in giving his scripts a verbal poetry that overtakes the lack of visual variety. The storylines were a sexually- and violence-heightened version of familiar stock from 20th century drama, but the style of dialogue was anciently, sub-conciously familiar while being fresh and disorienting in the best way. Some dialogue was Shakespearean, some was more Mamet-ian, and all ranges in between, but it was all catered to the characters. William Sanderson’s E.G., for example, loved his verbal flourishes, which made him my favorite Shakespearean comic relief since the the Bard wrote one.

It didn’t hurt that the cast of Deadwood, while centered on a few stars whose roles gave them top billing (Ian McShane, Timothy Olyphant, and Molly Parker), was supported by maybe the best cast of any show ever. Look at this list of actors: Kim Dickens, Robin Weigert, John Hawkes, Paula Malcomson, Powers Boothe, Brad Dourif, Garrett Dillahunt, Jim Beaver, William Sanderson, Gerald McRaney, Sean Bridgers, W. Earl Brown, Titus Welliver, Leon Rippy, Jeffrey Jones, Keith Carradine, Brian Cox, Ricky Jay, Anna Gunn, Sarah Paulson, and many more. When it comes to acting, the casting may be as good as the writing. It is sad, if somewhat historically relevant and a standard of the time of production, that there is effectively no diversity in roles on the show, with the exception of Keone Young as Mr. Wu and Geri Jewell as Jewel.

Postscript

I couldn’t decide where Fargo falls on this list. It has some exceptional moments of visual skill, but also builds its plots like a clock, and relies heavily on the tone built by the Coen Brothers to pull off the visual tics.

I did not include formulaic, non-narrative shows, including personal favorites like House or NYPD Blues, because in my experience they are necessarily formulaic. They are, by definition, writer-focused, as a wide variety of ideas are required to fulfill the formula. There are also a handful of shows that I didn’t include or reference in this essay because I don’t have proper (or any) knowledge of where they fit. I’ll leave it up to you to decide where they belong in context.

Post-postscipt notes (deleted sentences)

Some of my favorite prose writers drive the story through character, dialogue, and narrative, such as Elmore Leonard, and some of them support the narrative with beautiful bits of poetic language, such as Dave Eggers or Haruki Murakami. I don’t believe in the superiority of one choice or another, as I believe each offer their own function and reward.

I take great pleasure in my kids’ enjoyment of the shows and films that I probably wouldn’t bother going to the theater for (half of the MCU) or would never even watch (Jurassic World or Pirates of the Caribbean) by myself, but too long CGI-fests are not my bag. I’d still be at Mission Impossible and Fast and Furious, though, so don’t think me dilettanteish.

Billions does a slightly better job with [the therapist role] by making Maggie Siff’s Wendy more crucial to plot and story.