Creative Writing 101
Those in the know are quite familiar with the concept of formulaic content. It’s much easier to follow a template than to create original art. This is further exacerbated by studios bent on wringing every last cent out of expensive franchises. Why re-invent the wheel when we can re-sell it with a new cast or distribute a shiny new format instead?
Oddly, based on box office receipts, consumers seem quite content with regurgitated plots and characters and continue to shell out billions of dollars. The constant stream of pre-digested, familiar content actually seems to enhance emotional attachment to the property. For the viewer, revisiting beloved characters must be easier than having to learn a whole new language.
Further, the trope of Hollywood films and TV as pablum may have strong scientific support. Studies show that familiarity with narrative arc enables deeper engagement with the content. It’s easier to understand what you’re seeing when you’ve seen it before.
Much like today’s growth hackers, Hollywood storytellers have understood this phenomenon and, over decades, learned how to craft their product for the most visceral impact and it all begins with the script.
Nowhere is the concept of repetitive story structure more apparent than in television. The entire point of television is to attract the largest possible audience and get them hooked. The average individual in the US consumes almost 147 hours of TV per month. Clearly, the plan is coming to fruition.
Making television content easier to produce, through formulaic storylines, and simpler to digest, through familiar archetypes, serves the purpose of aggregating eyeballs. Eyeballs that are then served up to the real customer, advertisers.
When you boil it down, television is based almost entirely on the needs of advertisers. The oft-repeated scenarios. The suggestive but not too racy scenes and language. Cliff-hangers. Advertiser-friendly is the description most often used for this self-subjugation.
In trying to serve the needs of advertisers, writers have ceded control of their most valuable tool, dramatic flow. The entire conceit of a story unfolding over four neatly packaged dramatic acts is somewhat odd. It’s easy to understand how we got here, but is this really the best way to tell a story now that we don’t have to rely on a viewing paradigm developed in the 1950's?
As a corollary, these patterns are engrained in our brains. Consequently, when TV’s mental wallpaper loses continuity it’s quite jarring. The ad-skipping of TiVo and binge viewing of online services are the viewing equivalent of the red pill.
Repetitive storypoints are easier to identify. Incessant ‘bumpers’ recap the action you just watched or are about to see. Unplanned commercial breaks regularly disrupt the scripted action (predominantly on Hulu). The net result is we develop an internal spam filter and simply stop watching bad content.
One of the most exciting propositions for the new paradigm of video distribution is the re-invention of narrative. Storytelling is once again about to get creative. What amazing works of art will emerge once writers aren’t limited by traditional 30/60 minute running times and four act structure?
With the written word, irony is perhaps the most difficult message to communicate. Hollywood’s content assembly line has reduced writing to a vestigial organ. Now, the industry is itself about to be re-written with a new cast of characters and shiny new distribution platforms. That is sweet, easily digested irony.
