Armley author Mick McCann asks why the plots of so many big budget, TV crime dramas descend into farce . . .
The Incredible Bollocks of TV Crime Drama.
In terms of TV production, the big crime dramas are high budget, labour intensive affairs, compared to soaps, each minute you watch costs many times more. So why do plots so often fall to pieces in front of our eyes. It’s so regular that me and my wife have made a deal that after we’ve pointed out three plot problems or inconsistencies per drama we have to then keep shtum. But we can’t help ourselves. We sit there watching Gene Hunt tear-arsing around the streets, whilst shouting, ‘He does this every week. Tenth time we’ve seen him screw his Quattro through central London streets and never, not once have we seen another car.’
Is it just us or have we all watched Silent Witness, Waking the Dead or Spooks thinking but that doesn’t make sense? The UK’s entire communications have been jammed, we know this because the guys just been told…..via mobile phone….eh? And Ruth is in the background searching the internet for that crucial piece of info….what? Bad plotting is distracting and annoying and this chunter has been brewing since I first watched Andy Pandy and checked the plant pots in the garden. Bear in mind I’m ignoring the tripe like Rosemary and Thyme, a couple of old lady gardeners stalked around sleepy British gardens by dead bodies, catching 22 unrelated murderers across the series, and concentrating on the ‘serious’.
We may be pedantic tossers but we do look for possible explanations for anomalies. We sussed the Gene Hunt, no cars routine. The programme was stylised or the drama was set in Alex Drake’s imagination. We want the dramas to work and will help it happen….for a while.
The creators of the excellent Ashes to Ashes and the seminal Life On Mars also brought us the big budget Bonekickers about a set of archaeologist crime fighters with a plot so full of holes that you could have used it as a sieve to warm up broccoli. The first, absurd episode ended with the heroes and evil genius stuck in a burning pit. The evil genius, fully aware that the key to his master plan was climbing out instead chose to chase a young woman in circles around the pit for no reason what-so-ever. The writers’ track record begs the question was the nonsense that riddled the series down to the writing or injected during the making? The first episode viewing figures were 6.8 million, the penultimate episode 3.8.
The BBC have recomissioned last years excellent Sherlock….brilliant but also, Luther – the new series is upon us. When I first heard that the BBC had drafted in The Wire’s Idris Elba to star as Luther, I was excited. The trailers made it clear, the BBC were aiming for gritty, hard-hitting drama, enthused with realism. Did they read the scripts before they delivered a weekly drama so riddled with plot-holes that I raced my car through them and claimed damages from the BBC? As it was extremely well made, with decent acting, I’ll give the new series one chance.
One of the many examples of nonsense from Luther was, a serial killer taxi driver, picks up a woman, explaining that it’s dangerous to be out, there’s a killer about. She’s in the back, partitioned off from the front, he drives past the end of her street. She looks into the mirror aghast, he does an evil chuckle, and we shout, ‘F’fucks sake, it’s 2010 not 1979 use y’mobile phone y’stupid cow.’ But no, they have a long journey of menacing, mirror based, murder foreplay. Not only has the killer managed to pick up the only person in the UK without a mobile phone but he also knows it. He’s therefore not concerned that the woman abducted to slaughter, from streets crawling with police, might phone someone to say, ‘Y’know the killer? Well I’m in the back of his cab, just past the end of our street, heading west towards Wortley…..ooh, can you run the bath for me?’
I’d estimate that around 80 to 90% of present day British TV crime dramas have porous plots. A few weeks ago ITV aired The Reckoning. It was an expensively made, ‘gritty’, psychological drama with fantastic production values and fine performances. Minor plot issues were ignored throughout the first episode, the basic plot idea was ace. It was saveable the following night when we’d agreed to hold our comments as we didn’t want to lose the plot. After 15 minutes we couldn’t help ourselves and here’s what concerned us.
Empty, daytime central London multi storey? No-one’s around while they discuss, then have a long fight and calmly shoot a man twice with a pause in between. They still have time and are relaxed enough to collect their car from the other side of car-park and bundle a dead body into the boot?
‘What and no CCTV…. or blokes in a booth to raise the alarm or seal the car park as the shots ring out?’
‘Why even bury the body? The only person who can link them to the body is the guy who’s paid them to kill him. No possible reason to move body.’
‘They’d be completely covered in blood, y’know like that car scene in Pulp Fiction?’
‘The police chase him around the corner and there happens to be a bloke, in a deserted street, just locking his car.’
‘The police said “No fix” on the car, i.e. they can’t trace it. Well my name’s not Sherlock but why not ask the owner, who’s standing there shouting, what his car reg is?’
‘With the use of violence, he escapes two burly policemen, out runs them and nicks a car, leaving them his car with a boot soaked in blood. Now I don’t work for CID, but I doubt I’d then go home to where my car is registered.’
‘Ok, she’s asked about the blood in the car and he’s said there’s not enough for the police to notice. Oh fair enough, that’s that explained then….utter bollocks, the guy was lying in a huge pool of blood and still bleeding, there’d be blood all over the boot.’
‘Breaking into a swanky flat, four or five stories up, who’s he? Chris Bonnington?’
‘Any burglar will tell you that UPVC patio windows are a nightmare to open, y’can’t just slip something in like that and hey presto, it’s open.’
‘What, fancy flat with no alarm?’
‘The girlfriend – with the next clue – of the woman who died days ago just happens to let herself into her mates flat, early morning, during the exact 20 minutes that they’re in there?’
‘How long’s this morning lasting? Either they’ve broken the space/time continuum or the timeline is completely fucked.’
When basic elements of the plot don’t work it’s hard to keep reminding yourself to enjoy the programme on an escapist level. The annoying thing is that when the holes appear they are often unnecessary, just sloppy, pointless plotting. N o need to move the body or return home where the police should be. Murder him in a quiet side street, alley or underpass. Let the murdered lass live in a house. Stop us questioning as each unanswered question builds a momentum washing the ‘drama’ away, we stop giving the benefit of the doubt and instead become hyper, over critical.
I’m just about to send a treatment of my second novel to a bunch of TV decision makers. I’ve condensed the plot into a page and it works, the plot is solid. Here’s the trick, I thought it through. How many processes between a daft writer like me sending something in must the script pass through? And when plots have holes so big that you could drive an Australian cattle herd through how come no-one says, ‘unless she’s related to Doctor Who, that plot doesn’t work.’ It’s most likely that through all these processes someone does point out the issues and is over-ruled. A boss will say, ‘It’s not Hamlet, it’s a TV crime drama, it’ll be moving fast, no-one will notice.’ When a plot doesn’t work I feel patronised, they must have spotted it and pressed on. The most basic thing classic dramas have is a plot that works, or is workable in the viewer’s imagination. So drama makers, stop saying ‘they won’t notice’ because we do and viewing figures will tell you that you’re brilliant drama can turn into farce whenever you choose.
One of the best jokes I ever saw on television was one written about television. A writer is being shown around the production studios of the television company that has just commissioned him to write a drama for them. The writer stops at the desk of a youth furiously tapping away at a keyboard and asks him, “what are you doing?”
“Doing the rewrites,” the youth replies.
Horrified, the writer exclaims, “but I haven’t written the script yet!”
It’s funny because it is very probably true.
Interesting piece. As a television scriptwriter, I thought I ought to respond…
Firstly, if you’re looking for authenticity in the likes of Luther and Ashes to Ashes, you’re going to end up disappointed. The former is one of the most ludicrous pieces of genre TV going. The latter is a bit of retro magic realism that trades on all kinds of (very enjoyable) cliches. They don’t purport to be gritty or realistic. And yes, they probably have plot holes the size of the Mersey tunnel in them.
But actually, constructing a watertight crime plot is tough in the script process. It’s not like writing a novel, where you are free to make any decision you wish. Scriptwriting is a collaborative process and at any given time, you are going to be dealing with notes and ideas from the producer, the exec, the script editor, the channel and so on and so on. Rewrites can often involve total rethinks or changes in personnel and so your beautifully constructed plot suddenly sprouts a leak or two – and as you tend to them, you notice more. It’s a shifting story that will often end up looking quite different to the thing you started out with. The cliche of this is that within this process, the writer has got screwed over. Actually, on a good show with a talented team, that isn’t the case at all. What that team has actually done has improved your story and your script. But it is a very, very different way of working to prose writing and if you’re precious about your ideas or convinced that no one knows better than you do, you won’t get far.
Finally, I think it’s unfair to say that all crime drama is wildly unrealistic. By way of example, Scott and Bailey, currently playing on ITV (disclaimer: my wife was the Script Executive on the show), plays very by the book – the stories all came from their brilliant police and adviser and the writer Sally Wainwright was fascinated by trying to write gripping stories that didn’t involve maverick cops or wild hunches – but by the actual process of solving crimes.
I’ve been writing a legal drama for the last year that’s just started filming and we have gone to great lengths to get everything right – not least because the legal adviser is my best mate and he’d kill me if we fudged it or screwed it up! Yes, we have had to make some compromises, but very few indeed. We don’t just make this stuff as we go along. We do actually research very thoroughly and do our homework properly. I don’t want to look like an idiot. I want to get it right.
So yes, lots of telly is wildly escapist. And lots of it is also gritty and realistic. It’s actually a pretty broad church – much more so than it’s given credit for. Look hard enough and you’ll probably find what you’re looking for.
Great piece Mick,
I concur mostly – me and my misses often give up on a ‘drama’ because the plot has massive holes in it.
To reply to David – we all understand it is not ‘realistic’, we all watch sci-fi, rom-com, and action adventure with our disbelief turned to ‘suspend’.
However, ‘realism’ is not under question here – it is the plot, the most vital element of a crime drama. Plot in crime drama is a generic imperative.
Unless you are spoofing it or subverting it for artistic purposes – which these tv dramas are not.
Great – or even just good – crime drama can be far-fetched (Colombo), even ludicrous (CSI, Numbers) but it must adhere to its own internal logic.
If we are to believe a crime is solved through some smart logic, it must stick to a smart logical plot. Otherwise you can simply have lots of running around, car chases etc. then introduce a new character right at the end and say they did it.
Every great fiction adheres to its own internal logic – perhaps because they are written by committee in your ‘collaborative process’ these TV dramas become infected with external logics – i.e. focus groups love Gene Hunt’s Audi, so we need to put a car chase in every episode… we have a pretty flat to film in, so lets make her live in a flat… personally I can’t wait for the product placement PR bods to start adding plot twists so Mrs Smith was murdered after a great family meal at Pizza Hut…
Script writers should watch Murder She Wrote – love it or hate it, it shows 100% internal integrity, and is therefore more entertaining than these so-called ‘gritty’ crime dramas with so many holes, all the grit falls out.
Good piece Mick and Thanks for the perspective David.
Some good points there, Nick, though I think I’d probably stop at recommending Murder, She Wrote ;-). I’m not saying there isn’t a problem with plotting in some crime dramas, but for me it’s mostly about characters acting in implausible ways that suggest they’re not really fleshed out entities. Don’t get me wrong, I scream at the screen as much as the next person.
But I also think that perfectly plotted crime dramas can be incredibly dull when they’re just bland procedural. That’s partly down to the over-familiarity that audiences now have with the genre, but it can also be down to a slavish desire to serve the plot and nothing else. It might add up a story, but it doesn’t necessarily make for good drama.
As for Ashes to Ashes and its predecessor, Life On Mars, they WERE parodies – not really of cops, but of cop SHOWS. I always thought the actual crime plots in both LOM and A2A were pretty weak, but they weren’t the reason I watched. And that’s why, for me personally, LOM was a stronger show because Sam Tyler was a much more gripping, well-rounded character than Alex Drake.
I think The Shadow Line – though not perfect – is a fascinating example of a consistent reality that is nonetheless totally ludicrous. It’s a heighted, unreal universe, populated entirely by these peculiar noir-ish characters – but it’s such a rich, dark, satisfying alternative reality that I can forgive any of its more excessive tropes. It creates a world that you can really spend time in, and in which the unexpected continually happens. I think it’s one of the best things that’s been on all year.
Thanks Nick & Andy.
David, fantastic to have a pro perspective on board and thanks for taking the time out. Part of what you seem to be saying is too many cooks. Is it the producer who should be bringing it all together?
Couple of quick things first, I didn’t say ‘all crime drama is wildly unrealistic’. I estimated that ‘around 80 to 90% of present day British TV crime dramas have porous plots’. As Nick pointed out no matter how fantastical the premise might be I don’t think there’s an excuse for the basic plot to have holes or step outside it’s internal logic.(Nick I wish I’d thought of ‘gritty dramas with so many holes that the grit fall out….I’ll steal it y’know.)
Secondly, I realise and pointed out that Ashes to Ashes (and Life On Mars) were stylised or parodies but I think Luther is a different genre and aiming at a form of realism, yes it’s ridiculous but (as Nick said) we’ll go along with that if the basic plot elements work which they consistently didn’t. I thought the plotting of LOM and A2A was good but perhaps I was just enjoying both shows so much that I missed it. Clever but simple plots, well handled, can be extremely effective and I found The Shadow Line plotting very confusing.
I think being lazy/sneaky/limited on word count I conflated two separate issues but as you’re wrapped up in watching they feel like one and often they merge or there’s a grey line between one and the other. Porous plots and inconsistencies – it’s chucking it down outside and they enter a house, dry, which I’ve seen too many times to list. I know the two sequences may have been filmed on different days, but I can lend them a spray.
The example of The Shadow Line, I did enjoy it but I can’t comment on the plot as it got so complex that I didn’t have the slightest idea what was going on. I put this down to the fact that I missed the odd 5/10 minutes here and there. You can have ‘noir-ish’ without it being silly (the first series of Whitechapel was dark but fantastic), the cops were such a ridiculous cliche in The Shadow Line that they often made it difficult viewing. In the scene with the senior, female reporter giving the journo a promotion she was so incredibly hammed up that I half expected a farmer to walk in and chuck a load of hay over her.
The Shadow Line plot wise not a clue, way over my head but I discussed the inconsistencies elsewhere. Because I was almost enjoying it and didn’t want to ruin it by being too picky I just concentrated on a ten minute section in which a few of the typical TV crime drama inconsistencies criminal acts occurred, I know they’re very picky but it was all in about 10 mins and I was looking for them:
1) Trying to track down a very skittish suspect and have located him standing still in a park, as usual, the police advertise their arrival with their siren blaring. Only in TV crime drama.
2) General lack of traffic as they’re speeding through central London.
3) There’s a crash and small traffic jam his side of a central London junction but no other car on the other 3 approaches to the junction.
4) Kept returning to witness in the London park, big wide shots, and across 10-20 minutes not a single other person in any part of the park at any point, no dog walkers, joggers or people crossing it to go to work etc.
5) No barriers or ticket type thing on tube because there’s a crime drama chase on.
6) When me and my wife were arrested by Leeds CID over suspected mobile phone shenanigans they assuered us they can’t ‘track’ a mobile phone in the way both the police and Gatehouse were doing. I don’t know for sure that this was inaccurate but suspect it was.
My major prob with The Shadow Line, the thing that completely broke my concentration and almost ruined it was his female detective side-kick’s deformed lips. Yes it’s possible that female detectives, trying to be taken serious in a male dominated world, may pump up their top lip to 4x their bottom lip so they’ve got a salami moustache but I think it’s much more likely that an actress will inject themselves with collagen. Although it was very distracting, I am almost joking.
My wife pointed one out the other week that was hillarious, the actress had obviously had the treatments half way through filming but the scenes aren’t shot in chronicalogical order. So her face kept jumping from normal to an ironing board forehead, a mouth that struggled moving and a salami moustache, then back to normal, back to the weird face and then back to normal. It made us dizzy.
Hi Mick,
I think that plot inconsistencies are not the same – not in my mind – as some of the small things you picked up on The Shadow Line. I have to admit that, for me, if you’re worrying why there’s not enough traffic on the road in a scene or enough extras in a park scene, then you’re not enjoying the show enough. Do you really care about stuff like that when you’re into the drama? Oh, and for the record you can track a mobile phone signal as long as its GPS is switched on. And as we discussed earlier, it’s not ‘realism’, it’s a world, a world like ours but somehow not quite. In that world, I’m not worried about how much traffic there is no the road, for example.
Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I must admit that I do find viewers obsession with getting every tiny detail correct a bit mystifying. My first telly job was working for a period cop drama and I was astonished by the letter we used to get complaining that a car number plate was out by one year or someone used a ballpoint pen that didn’t come into existence until 6 months later or something. For me, I just couldn’t imagine caring that much about an insignificant detail. What I would more interested is whether the scripts were good, the characters well rounded and the dialogue sharp and crisp. Authenticity does not come from having the right ballpoint pen. It comes from having brilliant characters.
Of course filming is an inexact science in which compromises have to be made. I just got an email this morning from my director about a scene they’re going to have to cut. Of course, we have to think about whether that impacts on the plot in any way. That’s just how filming works.
In answer to your other point about how TV drama works, no, I’m not saying there are too many cooks. Rather, I’m saying you NEED a lot of cooks. A writer can’t do it on their own and nor should they. Of course, on a badly run show beset by problems, yes, it will very soon feel like too many cooks. But when you’ve got a great creative team working together, believe me, you need all the brain power and effort to solve all the problems that come your way.
Finally, I would seriously question Luther being taken seriously by anyone as a piece of by-the-book police drama. Luther is ‘aiming at a form of realism’ about as much as Life of Brian accurately portrays the Bible! I think the consensus is that it’s a pretty insane, over the top bit of escapist nonsense. Certainly not a show for fretting about the myriad of plot inconsistencies: you’ll give yourself an ulcer. It’s not my cup of tea personally, but it’s clearly enjoyed by a healthy audience. If I you were I’d just turn over and watch something else instead!
I wasn’t thinking of Luther as a ‘by the book’ police drama but that it was attempting a ‘real’ version of a cliched reality – they wouldn’t have had him walking through walls. My point was that even when you suspended that initial reality, the internal logic Nick was talking about was also missing. I don’t shout ‘but people can’t fly’ when I’m watching Superman. Being Human is pure fantacy but the plot lines are water tight, the production values fabulous and the budget will be much smaller than Luther.
Like I said David I think there’s a grey area between between what I call inconsistencies and bad plotting. The examples I used in the article, the murderer picking the woman knowing she had no mobile phone is bad plotting, as is the evil mastermind in Bonekickers chasing the young woman around the pit when the person he should be catching is escaping. Benny Hill’s chase scenes are real park life by comparison.
In The Reckoning, returning home to the house where the police would have the address, burying the body when there is no need, bad plotting. Whereas him miraculously arriving at a 4th/5th floor window or, in seconds, easily breaking into a UPVC patio door (which you simply can’t do) is either bad plotting or in the making. People coming in from the rain completely dry or central London being completely empty for 20 minutes @ 8am is what I call inconsistencies.
You could probably break the ‘issues’ down into about 10 sub-categories. Maybe we should call things like, them not being suited and booted in protective clothes as they enter a crime scene where forensics are still working (as I think they did in Shadow Line) anomalies. I know some directors don’t like the clothing but they should get a grip, as you’ve pointed out people are much more switched on about procedural stuff. You would never see stuff like that in the first, fabulous series of Sherlock.
With The Shadow Line I didn’t get the nuances of the plot and suspected that it was a case of Emperors New Clothes, make the plot hugely complex so that people pretend to ‘get it’ so as not to look daft or just bombard them with new angles and keep the action moving so they don’t concentrate too much on the plot. I couldn’t write more than a couple of lines about what the core plot was. But as I said I missed maybe 5% of the show.
I specifically spent 10 mins looking for probs in the Shadow Line, so yes, some of them were small things that I may not always notice. As I said in the article these small things can add up, usually with bad plotting, and the viewer gets more picky and/or it just turn into farce. SL was clearly a hugely expensive chunk of TV couldn’t they have simply dressed a couple of the extras as joggers? Bad production values for me.
I agree, I the scripts need ‘to be good, the characters well rounded and the dialogue sharp and crisp’ but if they’re doing a scene that is supposed to be set in Leeds and you can see Big Ben on the horizon it distracts from all that, as does the bad plotting.
The phone tracking, I know it’s technically feasible, I was told by Leeds CID that they are not allowed to do it, well not as a matter of course and not without a lot of pre-planning. But those are the things I’d over look if the prog grabbed me, which Shadow Line kinda did.
I think these are some of the things that separate out the good drama from the bad and that most of what we are served up isn’t good we just put up with it, which, considering the budgets, is criminal. Just out of interest, what percentage of crime drama do you think is well written, well made and basically solid? How often do you come away saying, ‘That was really good.’?
I think we could end up going round in circles here.
Suffice to say that I do not believe that a character being in a park in London on their own is bad plotting, or even ‘grey area’. Of course the director could have had extras in the background, but he clearly didn’t want them. I must admit that I find it a little bewildering that it bothered you that much. I’ve run in Wimbledon Common a few times when I’ve been down working with a writing partner, and I’ve often found myself on my own in parts of it. Is that so weird? It does feel like a little like you’re asking the world that’s presented to you to work exactly as you personally would like to have imagined it (right amount of traffic, correct number of bystanders). That’s quite a tall order.
But here’s the good thing: what we want from crime drama is clearly not the same, and that means we’ll enjoy and not enjoy different things. One person’s competent and thorough is another person’s dull. One person’s ground-breaking and original is another person’s badly plotted. Though I hope we can agree on not bringing up Bonekickers, which must surely stand as an example of everything that’s wrong with investigative drama!
I certainly wouldn’t like to put an arbitrary figure on what’s good and what’s not. Some is, some isn’t – and we’d probably think so for different reasons. Twas always thus. What I think you have rightly touched on is a certain bombastic kind of drama that is more interested in being big and brash than it is getting the basics right. Following on from the success of the likes of Life On Mars, I think there was a penchant for high concept drama, and a lot of of it didn’t work. However, I think the pendulum has really swung away from that and I think there is now definitely a better mix, including some proper grittier stuff.
How often do I come away thinking ‘That was good’. Probably not quite as often as I’d like, but regularly enough. But I also know that making TV is a peculiar business and things rarely turn out exactly as you’d quite imagined. Sometimes you nail it. Sometimes you don’t. And when you don’t, it’s not for lack of effort.
Anyway, thanks for writing the article and sparking the discussion. Nice to see a bit of TV drama coverage on the hallowed pages of CV.
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David, y’monkey, I said the lack of people was bad production values (or an inconsistency), not ‘plotting or grey area’ and that I wouldn’t normally notice it but I was being extremely picky for a 10 min burst of the show. (It wasn’t ‘parts’ of the park, they were multiple shots from high, repeatedly showing the whole of a central London park – about 8am – empty for 15/20 mins.)
But for me, when you notice stuff like, they are small bricks that build a shows realism or not and add to the stuff that does regularly annoy me – knowingly chasing the wrong person – burying a body for no other reason than they think it’s a dramatic scene – the psychic taxi driver and woman with no phone – using electronic devices while the servers, satellites, networks etc are down – returning to a house that would be crawling with police etc. etc. etc. It’s lazy and patronising TV making.
You’re right we could go around in circles but I’ve enjoyed the debate and I bet we wouldn’t be that far apart on good and bad drama. I don’t agree with the horses for courses argument, or think it’s not that simple. I think we’d only occasionally disagree on good or bad. I reckon we’d agree Life On Mars was fantastic TV and that Bonekickers (from the same people) was crap. I think we’d agree, for example, that the police rushing to catch a skittish crim or witness with sirens blazing is a silly and constant TV cliche.
That legal drama with Maxine Peake seemed fairly solid and enlightening to me, as you’re in the middle of the same genre, was it? Which TV crime dramas from the last six months do you think worked? I only see a couple of TV crime dramas a year that are thoroughly satisfying, last year’s Sherlock was stunning.
Anyway, thanks for taking the time, I’ve really enjoyed your insights.
I like the piece Mick, its funny and true. I think for me though it may have just missed on one thing. I dont get to the great holes in the plot because of the programs themselves. They are cliche on cliche. I have seen good cop goes bad, bad cop turns out good, cop works to hard to the detriment of his health/family or others. I’ve seen the one whose hands are simply tied by the bigwigs at city hall but he cares so damn much. Gene Hunt is an excuse to rewrire the cliched 70’s cop that also never existed.
They try too hard to be gritty and real when the fact is that real police work is not that exciting. Its mundane. Idiots commit crimes generally not super brained masterminds. So the entire premise for these programs has turned me off.
I believe the original Sherlock Holmes were a success because detective work was new and the process interesting. These days we rely on grasses, CCTV and DNA. We dont have Moriarty, we have Levi Belfield, random nutjob.
So its the genre is flawed before i have seen the plot.
Interesting piece. My wife and I watch a lot of what we think of as pulp/trash TV, much of which is crime drama, and to be honest as much as I can see logic problems or continuity glitches as well as anyone else, it only bothers me when it feels like the writers are being lazy, rather than the characters just being stupid. People – criminals and cops alike – are not always that smart, and that’s something we easily forget in the less tense environment of our living room, but if you find yourself frustrated with the production more than the characters, there’s a problem.
A good example is the one you mention, the “loud, premature announcement of arrival” that TV cops do, because it seems only to exist when the writer either needs a chase – sometimes forgiveable – or needs the suspect to get away – not forgiveable. If I’m sitting there thinking that the only possible way the next two or three things in the plot could happen is if this initial unlikely or lazy bit of writing played out the exact way it did, then I’m thinking too hard about the production, and the production, like the writer, should be invisible. Worse, if from my sofa I can think of five less distracting ways that the same thing could have happened, there’s a major problem, isn’t there?
And I’m not particularly demanding on this front – one of my favourite shows is The Wire, but unlike some of my friends, it has by no means ruined dafter shows for me – but the first step to any show being mature or gritty is for it to be intelligent. It doesn’t matter how much cred a show builds on complicated detail or research if it blows it on the in-your-face Macguffins.
(And y’know, I really think less is more in this regard. Production teams seem to think that complex=smart, but half the issues we’re talking about could be avoided by simply not including detail that you can’t quite pull off. If you don’t know how a career criminal or super-cop would handle the fine print of a situation, for fuck’s sake fudge the details, don’t expose yourself.)
Which I guess means that I kind of agree with you, but my requirements aren’t quite as rigid. Though I find it interesting that you gave Luther such a drubbing over the a little dumb behaviour of it’s panicking taxi-passenger, but gave Sherlock, which aired around the same time with almost exactly the same killer conceit, but handled it in a far more hilariously incompetent fashion, a free pass. I gave Sherlock a lot of leeway thanks to it’s frankly charming sass, but each episode took some pretty severe liberties with my tolerance.
Very good article! Just been watching Silent Witness (under duress) and have found myself almost slapping my forehead in exasperation! Is a bit of realism too much to ask for? I understand how some people can say “It’s just a TV programme” and that scripts have to be changed for reasons of expediency/pacing etc but for me it really detracts from the show.