A matter of character

I think I discovered something that is probably fairly obvious to most people, and that I knew on some level, but it emerged in concrete word form today: the best TV series are the ones where the plot reflects on the series characters.

This explains why some shows, like Cold Case or Law and Order, don’t have much emotional resonance. We rarely learn much about the main characters week after week, and when we do it almost seems like it’s thrown in as a bone to the viewers rather than the main thrust of the program. Raising the Bar started out that way for me this year—I didn’t care much about the characters and the stories seemed indistinguishable from every other courtroom drama. However, one episode away from the finale, I think it’s gotten better. This week’s story of the struggle of the judge’s clerk was quite well done.

Eli Stone is a show that’s gotten it right from the beginning. Every week’s plot is used as an excuse to learn something new about Eli (and the other characters, too). The plots have to be interesting, of course, and innovative is a bonus, but at the end of the hour if we were to sum up the show it should be something like: Eli learns X by doing Y. Not, as many procedural shows insist: Y happens, which makes the characters do A, B, C, D, A (again), S and T.

NCIS has found a happy medium. The characters are engaging and we know how they fit into the puzzle of the team, how they interact with each other, but we don’t really know all that much about them away from work. We’ve been fed tidbits from time to time (Tim’s stint as an author, for example) but the plots let us see how the team reacts, almost like a single, multifaceted entity.

The Mentalist is still trying to find its way in this regard. This week’s episode was, again, okay, but not outstanding. A good conundrum, and some intense scenes of memory retrieval, with a few “bones” thrown to us about Jane’s emotional response to the situation, but at the end of the day it was an A, B, C, D, A, S story rather than X and Y.

The reason this strikes me as so important is that I hope to be embarking on a novel series and, as the writer, I need to keep in mind at all times that the stories should be used in service of the characters, and not the other way around if I want them to be memorable, and remembered. Some TV shows go a little overboard (House and Grey’s Anatomy, for example, where the disease-of-the-week is used as a metaphor for absolutely everything in the episode), but their hearts are in the right places, I think.