eclectica: Learning to watch

Learning to watch

Posted 30 March 09 by Scott Andrews

In a fascinating article on the BBC website telly writer GF Newman makes this claim about The Wire:

“The Wire is a complicated show, one that you have to learn to watch. That in itself is good.

“All too often we get lazy and complacent in our viewing expectations, with writers too often stooping to meet those expectations rather than making the audience work, even at the risk of losing them. Persevere and you will be rewarded.”

He’s a fab writer, with a lot of interesting things to say, but I think this is rubbish.

Viewers are lazy. It’s no use bemoaning the fact, they just are. If you want to get the viewing public to learn a new way of watching and understanding drama you have to do it with subtlety and craft.

You can’t just present something obtuse, difficult and impenetrable, because they will switch it off.

The opening episode of a drama must welcome the audience in, metaphorically give them a pair of slippers and a cup of tea and let them feel comfortable. I don’t mean it has to be slow or nice. It can be fast and brutal.

But it has to at least conform to the basic rules of TV grammar.

Then, once it has established that it and the audience are speaking the same language, it can take them on a journey, challenge their perceptions and prejudices.

Let me be clear, I’m not talking about a show pretending to be Morse and then morphing into The Shield twenty minutes in. That would leave the viewer feeling conned.

Instead, think of Twin Peaks. That began as a murder mystery and went on to completely redefine what telly could be. But the first epsiode, or at least the first half of it, was like a gateway drug, letting the audience know where they were before subverting the very structure of storytelling.

If it had begun in the black lodge with red drapes and dancing dwarves, people would have lost patience with it instantly.

As Joss Whedon says: you can’t open Buffy with ‘The Body’. You have to earn it. You have to establish the ground rules before you break them.

But when Newman says that “you have to learn to watch” The Wire, he is essentially saying that you should be able to read a book in Esperanto the first time you pick it up.

No. Instead, you start with a phrase book and a little Peter and Jane. Then, when you’ve learned the grammar, syntax and vocab, you can get on with War and Peace.

Because at the end of the day you should write because you want to be watched, because you have something you want to communicate. And if you begin your drama with barriers to entry then you’re being self-defeating.

The fact is, nobody watched The Wire. It suffered terrible ratings in the US. It will have terrible ratings in the UK too.

Critics raved, because they crave a challenge, and the TV literati bought box sets in the thousands, but translate those box set sales into viewing figures and it’s just not enough.

The general public, tired after a hard day at work, brain dead, having put the kids to bed, will switch off in their droves and turn over to watch Law and order UK.

Because while LaOUK is clearly the inferior show, it is at least speaking their language.

So let us reverse the proposition.

It is wrong to say that the public should have to learn how to watch a new TV show. Instead we should say that the new TV show should teach the public a new way of watching telly.

The emphasis is on the show to lead the audience gently out of the shallows into the depths, not on the audience to dive into deep water because the show is metaphorically shouting at them to do so and then mocking them if they don’t.

“Persevere and you will be rewarded,” Newman says. But it is the writer who should persevere first. If he or she is good enough, the audience will be making the effort long before they realise they’re doing so.

Then the writer wins over complacency and tiredness, and takes viewers to new and interesting places. This is far harder than constructing a show specifically for the literati and then sneering at the public from an ivory tower because they felt unwelcome and have left.

For the record, I bailed on The Wire after thirty minutes. Both times. But I stuck with The Shield through seven seasons.

I concede that in the final analysis, The Wire may be the better show. But The Shield welcomed me in before taking me to the darkest of dark narrative places, places I would never have gone had I known where the show was going when it started, but which I willingly embraced because by the time we got there, the show had earned it.

“Come with us”, the opening episode of The Shield said, “it’s going to be a wild ride”. So I buckled up.

“Watch. Don’t watch. I don’t fucking care,” said The Wire. So I switched off.