Tonight I’ll be watching the season finale of a favorite television show. Artistic merits of the show may be debatable. That question is neither here nor there; at least not really. LOST has survived five seasons. It is neither a talk show nor a reality show nor a canned-laughter sitcom nor a conventional drama. In television taxonomy, avoiding these four buckets can go a long way toward adjudging a show’s merit. The show tells a very good, not great, story, and I eagerly consume it every week.
In bending a friend’s ear this past weekend about Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time (two consecutive shout-outs!) and how Dance often brings the reader into a character’s most intimate depths for two or three novels in a row and then abandons said character for another thousand pages only to reintroduce this character at a significantly different point in her life, my friend observed, “Isn’t it crazy how some novelists can keep track of that?”
Yes, I replied, it is crazy. Kind of like how LOST works, or an even better exemplar of televisual narrative awesomeness, The Wire. (Caveat duly noted.) One major difference between these shows and a series of interconnected novels being, obviously, that those shows employ teams of writers who storyboard virtually everything, and who surely possess an instant call-up system for any scene or episode they need to watch in order to check or double-check for narrative consistency and character development. Powell just had Powell.
But what if???ahhh, how many blogposts are duct-taped by this handy “What if?”???Powell had had five Powells? Or ten? What if he had been able to employ ten graduate assistants to brainstorm with him every day and even write preliminary chapter sketches? Would Dance have been any better? And if it had somehow turned out to be a better story, would we esteem it as highly in an artistic sense?
Our culture, it seems evident, holds a more reverential place for the individually created story. The most terrifying thing about Shakespeare theories, to my mind, isn’t that Shakespeare didn’t write his plays???it’s that he didn’t write all of them. We readers hold sacred the belief that the rare human mind can, in a mysterious manner that we deem genius, conjure multitudes of rich characters and envision infinite worlds for them to inhabit. The Iliad is easier to swallow if Homer didn’t have some editors who cleaned up a few lines here and there; the Bible most effectively conveys the authority of the Almighty when readers believe that God composed it from beginning to end with one almighty pen.
Television is a great medium for exploring this question of individual versus collarative storytelling. With television shows earning smaller slices of the audience pie, I sense the creative spectrum extending in both directions. Put The Wire at one end, and Rock of Love Bus at the other. Whereas teams of accomplished writers orchestrated The Wire’s narrative, an aggregate of VH1 producers hashed together the imitation of narrative from assorted clips of vacuous video. I’d argue that ten years ago, neither pole extended nearly as far: television offered neither the quality nor the horrors that it does today.
Perhaps the next step for pushing that artistic accomplishment even further is to employ just one writer for a given show and one writer only, with exclusive creative control. And cross your fingers that this writer has the narrative chops of Cervantes.