This is a thread to talk about a storytelling
The Storytelling Thread
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Well, I mean ye$ they probably $hould, but if we’re being hone$t that ain’t happening any time $oon… I’ll give you one gue$$ as to why that i$… =P
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Say…
I don’t want to mention any names, (I leave it up to you) but like an athlete who has their best years behind them and are getting old, aren’t there writers/creators who have had their best stories behind them? Shouldn’t they just hang it up and pass the mantle on to someone younger?
If there’s someone younger who can write better than Alan Moore was writing when he was 65, or draw better than Bryan Talbot was drawing when he was 65, then yes.
(I’m waiting…
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Comparing athletes to artists is a hard fucking sell, dude. Should Picasso have hung it up by 40?
The same could go for all of us. I should stop doing drugs, someone younger may need them better. Lorcan should quit socialism, some more revolutionary person could use his spot. And you should stop dating, Al-X. The best years are behind you, leave your spot on the market open for someone else, someone more viable.
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Lorcan should quit socialism, some more revolutionary person could use his spot
To be fair, this is what happens to most socialists.
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how about a singer/songwriter who is clearly going down in quality?
John Prine’s last album “The Tree of Forgiveness”, released in 2019, was his highest-charting record ever on Billboard. He was 72 when he released it.
David Bowie’s last album “Blackstar”, which he recorded while he was dying from liver cancer, was critically acclaimed and ended up on the end-of-year Ten Best lists of many music publications. Bowie was 68 when he released it.
Just sayin’…
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how about a singer/songwriter who is clearly going down in quality?
The answer is always that they should go back to whatever drugs they were on during the time they were considered great.
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Just sayin’…
Plus, like, Jonny Cash.
But, Alex, okay: Yes, while it has nothing to do with age, some musicians do have a period in which they were at their best that they never can get back to with their later work. And the same can go for writers. My example is Milligan; he was one of the best writers in the nineties. But his work in the 2000s never was as good as it used to be (yes, X-Statics was fun, but it never was as good as Shade the Changing Man or Enigma), and then he was mainly just writing mainstream superhero titles that I didn’t have any interest in, so I kind of stopped following what he was doing. I did read “The Names”, and that was good, but it still wasn’t as great as those old books.
But the thing with writers and artists is precisely that they aren’t athletes and that there is no reason why they shouldn’t be able to come back and be better than ever before. There are phases in these people’s creative works, and maybe the best ones of those are still ahead of them, who knows.
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If there’s someone younger who can write better than Alan Moore was writing when he was 65, or draw better than Bryan Talbot was drawing when he was 65, then yes.
This is John M Burns’s artwork in this week’s issue of 2000ad. He’s 82.
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The dynamic never really changes or evolves
Yeah, it’s not like Magneto and Xavier are in league and that the whole dynamic for the X-Men and their enemies have been shifted. If it were, we would probably know about it.
And it’s not like there are three different Jokers running around the DC Universe. If it were, they would probably try to get a title out about it.
While on that, no-one has ever tried anything interesting with Luthor at all. He’s not been inserted into Supermans origin in several different ways, he’s never been a deeply flawed hero or, *snort*, President of the United States or anything like that. If any of those were true, we comic book readers would definitely know about it.
Shifting gears…
Comic Books! Are they still a thing? Who reads them, anyway?
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Comic Books! Are they still a thing? Who reads them, anyway?
Ummm…..(raises hand)
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Jerry, please be quiet. The adults are talking.
Forget it, Gross. I felt like I had to hide my hobby for too many years; now I’m letting my freak flag fly!!!
Seriously, I had a moment of pride yesterday when I was asked to settle a dispute between my (32-year-old) nephew and his girlfriend about whether or not Spider-Man belongs in a montage drawing of the Avengers. It felt good to be recognized as the “authority” on such an important topic.
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Seriously, I had a moment of pride yesterday when I was asked to settle a dispute between my (32-year-old) nephew and his girlfriend about whether or not Spider-Man belongs in a montage drawing of the Avengers. It felt good to be recognized as the “authority” on such an important topic.
How dare you leave us hanging?
… WELL? Does he?
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I’m kind of a purist so I wouldn’t add either him or Wolverine into an Avengers montage… but then again, for most people these days, he does belong there, specially after the movies.
On another note, I guess it’s kinda sad that an entire generation will think of Spidey/PP as Tony Stark jr… thanks Disney =P
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Bendis nothing, Spidey’s been a reserve member of the Avengers since the 80s!
Yeah, Jesus, the first Avengers books I read as a kid had Spider-Man. (In black costume no less!)
On another note, I guess it’s kinda sad that an entire generation will think of Spidey/PP as Tony Stark jr… thanks Disney =P
C’mon, be fair, Marvel did that approach in the comics first – it even was in Civil War.
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C’mon, be fair, Marvel did that approach in the comics first – it even was in Civil War.
Yeah, but not really… Sure Stark took him “under his wing” for a veeeeeeeeery short moment in the CBs, but it’s not nearly the same as what they’ve done with them in the movies… I mean, it goes well beyond that with that whole father/son dynamic they had.
As I’ve already said, the MCU Spiderman/PP is by far the most different iteration we’ve had… a couple more different details and it’s almost a new character. I’m still puzzled at how readily accepted he was considering all the massive changes they did to some of the rather important aspects of his canon, I kinda expected a big backlash…
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I like Bats but I feel he needs a villain who can give him a run for his money (be very competitive) in fighting.
Gee, I wonder who could be the bane of Batman.
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Bane is, on a conceptual level, to Batman what Venom is to Spider-Man.
Same powers. Same skill set. But stronger. More Brutish. Powered by magic goo. Towering. Ultra-violent. Venom doesn’t trigger Spider-Mans
libidospider-sense and Bane is methodical and smart on Batmans level, nullifying one of Batmans advantages. Venom and Bane even have similar masks! -
And Bane uses venom… =P
I mean, yes they’re clearly both created from the same cloth… so if you’re looking for Batman’s Venom, Bane would be it. Spidey/Green Goblin = Batman/Joker, but Spidey/Venom = Batman/Bane for sure.
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I was reading Paul Cornell’s novel London Falling and to summarise it has a group of 4 police detectives taking on a supernatural serial killer. The killer’s abilities are very much in the mold of a Freddie Kruger type, she can walk through walls and teleport and stuff (within limits of her magic).
I confess I don’t watch many horror movies but do any of them ever take this approach? The ones I’ve seen are typically teenagers or innocent families. I can’t think of one that is has cops as the protagonists. Sometimes as side characters but not actively with an incident room to try and grab the killer.
It seems rather obvious and logical if people are going missing that the police would head it up but I can’t off the top of my head think of another example.
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Deathstroke is in top shape and uses about 90% of his brain so he has higher intelligence than others.
But I don’t want to get into a Deathstroke debate. I am saying that Batman could use a villain counterpart.
And he has a healing factor… he’s a metahuman, so not the greatest villain for Batman, although he kind of is. I wish they’d go back to making him more of an anti-hero like in the 90’s-00’s… that blue costume was sick as fuck too.
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I confess I don’t watch many horror movies but do any of them ever take this approach? The ones I’ve seen are typically teenagers or innocent families. I can’t think of one that is has cops as the protagonists. Sometimes as side characters but not actively with an incident room to try and grab the killer.
I think there are a few. First one that comes to mind is the surprisingly good Fallen, with Denzel Washington.
Another one is the surprisingly bad End of Days, with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
EDIT: Arnie plays an EX-cop in that one though, so I don’t know if it counts :)
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I was reading Paul Cornell’s novel London Falling and to summarise it has a group of 4 police detectives taking on a supernatural serial killer. The killer’s abilities are very much in the mold of a Freddie Kruger type, she can walk through walls and teleport and stuff (within limits of her magic).
I confess I don’t watch many horror movies but do any of them ever take this approach? The ones I’ve seen are typically teenagers or innocent families. I can’t think of one that is has cops as the protagonists. Sometimes as side characters but not actively with an incident room to try and grab the killer.
It seems rather obvious and logical if people are going missing that the police would head it up but I can’t off the top of my head think of another example.
Twin Peaks?
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I’m not sure it counts as horror, but Predator 2?
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Batman is going from one run to another 6-7 part run.
I get the feeling these 7 part stories are for reprinting in the trade market. (Light Bulb, no sh*t Sherlock time)
The latest issue really worked itself into a corner and tune in 2 weeks to see how everything conveniently works itself out.
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I get the feeling these 7 part stories are for reprinting in the trade market
The old days of multiple ongoing plotlines such as those that Chris Claremont excelled in during his X-Men heyday, which were designed to keep readers coming back issue after issue, were not necessarily well-suited to TPB collections. Now books are written intentionally for easier collection and packaging for the TPB and HC markets. It also easily accommodates limited runs by a creative team (such as the Morrison/Quitely stint on X-Men, or Millar’s “Old Man Logan” arc in the ongoing Wolverine series).
The downside for some (but not all) readers is the loss of those long plotlines that play out over a dozen or more issues, as well as less emphasis on continuity and the resultant tendency to reboot a series or even an entire line of books.
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Well, she was the creator, writer and star, so…
Hogwah! Everyone know the only quality women has is their not-at-all-subjective superficial attractiveness! Trophy huuuuuuunt!
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Let’s get some more realism…
You want realism on television?! Fuhgeddaboutit! How realistic was it for Daenerys to ride a dragon without a saddle and not CHAFE?! Or for a character to be arrested on Law & Order on Monday, and go to trial by Friday? Or for the Miami CSI unit to have all this high-tech equipment and be able to have their entire staff focus on one crime at a time? Or for Sean Hannity to tell the truth?
You want realism on TV, watch the National Geographic channel.
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Getting back to Seinfeld, there were apparently 19 black characters over 180 episodes of the season, the most well-known of which was Kramer’s lawyer Jackie Chiles, who was a not-so-subtle caricature of OJ Simpson’s lawyer Johnnie Cochran (“If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit”). The other well-known POC character, the Pakistani store owner Babu Bhatt (“You are a bad man, Jerry; a very, very bad man”), was (ironically) played by Brian George, an Israeli/British actor who later played Rajesh’s Indian father on Big Bang Theory.
But enough about cultural insensitivity; let’s talk about storytelling!!
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But enough about cultural insensitivity; let’s talk about storytelling!!
More often than not, one has informed the other.
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You want realism on television?! Fuhgeddaboutit! How realistic was it for Daenerys to ride a dragon without a saddle and not CHAFE?! Or for a character to be arrested on Law & Order on Monday, and go to trial by Friday?
I read a good one a while back. In British TV shows where they have court proceedings they often have the judge bang his gavel. Judges in the UK don’t have gavels, they just saw it on American dramas and thought it was a good dramatic device (which it is to be fair).
I know Mike once told me he struggles to watch 95% of medical shows because they just get everything wrong.
As a rugby fan I was really impressed with Clint Eastwood’s Invictus because they got the gameplay and ref calls completely right BUT to get a star name they had Matt Damon playing a guy who in real life is 7 inches taller than him and 80lbs heavier. If someone Damon’s size played in that position he’d be mincemeat.
Or some show to star a female character who is up and coming have this great apartment on a secretary’s or waitresses’ salary?
I was watching ‘Isn’t it romantic?” on Netflix with Audrey the other day. They were pretty funny on there with the ‘gay best friend’ character who is constantly around and never works but still has a great apartment and clothes.
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Yeah and generally if it doesn’t completely jump the shark I think the storytelling should be most important. I don’t watch Law and Order with the intention of learning legal process, or Holby City to learn surgical techniques. It’s to see if they get the bad guy or not or save the dying patient. I know as an IT guy that hammering away at a keyboard while ones and zeroes fly across the screen is nothing at all like hacking but I can live with it because the reality is pretty boring.
Everyone will have their own cut off point though where it becomes too dumb to watch.
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Like Gilligan’s Island…. The premise was a three hour tour of the Hawaiian Islands yet they were shipwrecked with all these clothes they came with for such a brief tour. Also, to go on a trip with such a bumbling two man crew…
Gareth mentioned Jump the Shark. I remember that Happy Days episode and the rest of the series where the Fonz was so liberal afterwards dating a deaf girl, a ballerina, sheltering a boy of a single mom, standing up for a black man on trial in jury duty… all this from an Italian guido type of guy in a leather jacket in the 50’s Milwaukee….
It’s television. Drug of the nation. breeding ignorance and feeding radiation.
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Girls would shoehorn an occasional black boyfriend for the Lena Dunham character. Strange thing was that the other 3 women were much more attractive than Lena was, yet her character pulled all the hot guys. Let’s get some more realism…
Having Lena Dunham scoring all of these hot guys lampshades the “schlubby guy-hot girlfriend/wife” trope that seems to upset a lot of women.
Leads me to think that, while Hannah might not have been much to look at, she was an extraordinary lay.
Mind, you, in addition to her frumpy looks and doughy physique, you’re still left with her neediness and narcissism.
So, yeah, definite hellcat in the sack.
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I remember that Happy Days episode and the rest of the series where the Fonz was so liberal afterwards dating a deaf girl, a ballerina, sheltering a boy of a single mom, standing up for a black man on trial in jury duty… all this from an Italian guido type of guy in a leather jacket in the 50’s Milwaukee….
We also have to be careful not to stereotype too much and the idea of someone working against type as the narrative goes back to The Good Samaritan 2000 years ago.
It took me until my early 20s to realise that on the train I should sit next to the punk or the metal guys as they never start anything, it was always the guys in a pair of chinos or a polo shirt that caused hassle.
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I can agree to an extent.
I’m not sure singling out the Fonz is necessarily that fair, you can be Italian and wear a leather jacket and be liberal. However we can sugarcoat the past in adaptations of it. In films and TV the trend is that the protagonist character will be the one to stand up for current values. That happened but not every time. Forrest Gump’s best friend is black, every lead character in Call The Midwife stands up to racial and sexual prejudice in a surprisingly 2020 way.
I used certain language 20 years ago I wouldn’t use today, and that hasn’t been some ‘road to Damascus’ conversion of my values. It’s just the context of the times. When I was a kid the BBC had a blackface minstrel show on primetime TV.
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Happy Days went through a kind of weird transition in its later years — the “liberal Fonzie” period — where they more or less ditched the 50s setting and transplanted everyone to the early 80s. Chachi had feathered hair, Ted McGinley sported the prototypical 80s preppie look, Joanie had a bad perm, Fonzie had the little girl from Poltergeist as a step-daughter.
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I wonder how badly a show like Married with Children would be received these days… I mean, it would be harshly judged, no doubt, it’s just a matter of just how harshly… =P
Shit, now I wanna watch it… u_u
Compared to current and recent sitcoms on cable (live action and animated), it’s pretty tame. It was pretty much the progenitor of a lot of current fare. Back when it came out in 1987, there was nothing like it on American television. Nowadays, there’s quite a bit, even in normal network shows.
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Considering the number of online trolls who harp on about SJW’s and virtue signaling? Probably not.
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I think you have to be more subtle about it than in the 70s and 80s. I remember the Mr.T cartoon show where he’d actually come on screen and give a lecture at the end.
There are still probably just as many ‘moral stories’ being told but I think the audience expect to work that out themselves. This last series of Doctor Who had an episode that got a lot of criticism because it ended with a monologue that bashed the moral (that polluting the Earth will eventually make it uninhabitable) over the viewers head.
It didn’t need it because the message was already clear when they made the twist that this planet they thought was an alien one was a future Earth.
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I wonder how badly a show like Married with Children would be received these days… I mean, it would be harshly judged, no doubt, it’s just a matter of just how harshly… =P
Shit, now I wanna watch it… u_u
Compared to current and recent sitcoms on cable (live action and animated), it’s pretty tame. It was pretty much the progenitor of a lot of current fare. Back when it came out in 1987, there was nothing like it on American television. Nowadays, there’s quite a bit, even in normal network shows.
Really? I haven’t seen any current or even recent show that goes as crass as MWC, do you have any exemples? I’m interested in taking a look.
You’re the Worst is fantastic. Two very toxic people fall in love and the show follows their fucked up relationship. It just finished its 5-year run last year. I think it’s available on Hulu.
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You could check out the Honeymooners?
I remember someone — I think it was Saturday Night Live, but it could have been another skit show — did a Honeymooners “Lost Episode” parody where Ralph actually did hit Alice. I was really young when I watched it, and unfamiliar with the source material, so it mostly went over my head at the time. I didn’t actually get it until a few years later when I saw a couple of episodes of the original.
And, yeah, it’s cringey as hell to watch Ralph shake his fist at his wife and threaten to punch her. It’s weird to think that spousal abuse, even if only threatened, would ever be a source of humor.
On a related note, it’s also cringey as fuck now to watch old sitcoms like All in the Family and Diff’rent Strokes, where they had laugh tracks playing while a home intruder attempted to rape Edith Bunker, and Mr. Carlson from WKRP was grooming Arnold and Dudley to be molestation victims. As if it wasn’t horrific enough to see “The Big Guy” from WKRP plying two children with wine and porn in the back room of his bicycle shop, the “studio audience” was roaring with laughter while he was doing it.
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Yeah, I mean, even back then the argument would have been that we’re laughing at, not with, Al Bundy’s mysogynist, backwards and completely hapless views, and at the show’s absurd stereotypes of the empty-head blonde and the domineering wife. But even so, it permeated each of those stereotypes, and it did presumably allow male viewers to take pleasure in Al’s mysoginy. I don’t think any of that could be done in this way today.
Pretty much everyone on Married With Children was a walking stereotype, and the butt of jokes. Al was a misogynistic loser with a dead end job. Peggy was a lazy, inattentive housewife. Kelly was a dimwitted slut. Bud was a horny creep. Marcy was a naggy feminist. It was mostly a parody of formulaic sitcoms like The Cosby Show or Family Ties, and I think that’s how it got away with most its off-color humor. It was also fairly broad, to the point where someone on the right could agree with all of Al’s bullshit, and someone on the left could laugh at him.
It was sort of precursor to Seinfeld’s philosophy of “No hugging, no learning.” And the one where the mall Santa sky dives to his death in the Bundy’s backyard is an absolute classic.
But then, I was even surprised at how badly How I Met Your Mother has aged in a very short time. People go on about Friends being mysoginyst and its lack of diversity, but considering how much later HIMYM was, it’s actually quite weird just how much it is a matter of course that outside of the two female protagonists, all other women are simply depicted as empty-headed pieces of flesh to be deceived and fucked (and not just for Barney, but also the pseudo-romantic Ted).
From what I remember about HIMYM, pretty much all of the characters outside of the core five were basically ciphers that wandered in and out the lives of Ted, Barney, and Robin.
Ted’s one girlfriend, Victoria (whose name I only remember because of the song by The Fall they played in one of her episodes) seemed, from what I recall, like a well-rounded secondary character. I think, at one point, she was intended to be doomed mother in the title, though.
And, I don’t know if it was intentional or not on the part of the writers and producers, but Ted also came off as one of those creepy “Nice Guys” that women complain about.
There was also the unreliable narrator aspect to the show, but I do see your point about the parade of sex ciphers that were offered up to Ted and Barney.
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And, yeah, it’s cringey as hell to watch Ralph shake his fist at his wife and threaten to punch her. It’s weird to think that spousal abuse, even if only threatened, would ever be a source of humor.
Don’t know if anyone here watched That’s My Bush but it’s a sitcom based around George W Bush, taking place in the white house. Made by Trey Parker and Matt Stone. It’s just as bonkers as South Park but they continually riffed on that part of Ralph and Lauras relationship from honey mooners.
Set to start at 17:32.
(I am not now, nor have I ever been, a pirate on a pirate ship.)
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Aside from the funny alien, most television shows with ensemble casts have a similar dynamic, whether set on a spaceship, or in a police precinct, or a hospital ER, or a law firm, or in Jerry Seinfeld’s living room. If you can make the conflicts and interrelationships compelling and entertaining, the setting or genre isn’t important for the purpose of telling a good story.
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CSI type shows are an anomaly even compared with traditional detective shows, in that the murder-of-the-week is the only part that matters. Most traditional crime stories gives some importance to the detective — look at how many are even named after the detective — but in CSI the detectives are generic and interchangeable and can be swapped out with no impact at all on the week’s storyline. Actual characters are a secondary concern. The main cast might have a few character tics to make them seem “real” and a few minutes a week given over to a sub-plot for one of them, but basically they don’t matter.
Except for that guy with the sunglasses. You couldn’t have the meme without him.
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The CSI / Law and Order shows are interesting. I listened to a discussion about them on the Pilot TV podcast the other day. Empire magazine editor in chief Terri White is a big fan but she conceded they are a real throwback to TV of the 80s and 90s. The style, the rapid pacing of the plot and the standalone nature of each episode, she said there was an element of ‘comfort food’ about it.
The other thing about them too is they are very long lived, CSI had 15 seasons, L&O: SVU is on season 21 and 30 years since the concept began on TV. You think how many serialised shows people start but give up after a while. How massive Dallas and Lost were for a while to a degree these shows never were.
The ability to flit in and out may be a key to longeivity.
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The other thing about them too is they are very long lived,
They are also perfectly suited to being packaged for nightly syndication for endless rebroadcast, since you can skip an entire week of episodes and just pick it next week with no problem — unlike Dallas or Lost, which were very popular in their original incarnation, but suffer in syndication because the storylines continue from one episode to the other, so skipping two or three episodes in a row really throws off your understanding of what’s going on.
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Actual characters are a secondary concern.
For me, I think the opposite. My favorite procedurals were the ones with the distinctive leads like Castle, The Mentalist, Lie to me, Elementary. They had one on last year called Instinct which I really loved. Hey would NCIS be the same show if you replaced Gibbs?
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