- By Dan Veaner
- Opinions
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The current season of Madam Secretary is a case in point. The series is an obvious nod to Hillary Clinton, with this final season being a "what if Hillary won the presidential election?" what-if. The Hillary character, Elizabeth McCord, is a lot more likable than her real counterpart (in a feat of stunt casting and fiction meets reality, the real Hillary actually appeared on the show as herself along with the real Madeleine Albright and the real Colin Powell, to give advice to the fictional McCord in last year's opening episode). So far, so good. But the writers this year seem to think they can put their feet up and, instead of writing effective and entertaining drama, dole out statistics of the cause au jour to the various characters so it appears they are having a conversation. An extremely stunted, one-sided conversation.
The last two episodes were especially onerous, with last week's attacking the ethics of using robots and artificial intelligence (AI) instead of soldiers, and this week to champion the cause of better health care and mental health care for veterans. Both good causes. Both bad episodes.
When I took Drama 101 in college, and just about any other theater class, my teachers stressed, "don't tell it if you can show it. Showing is much more dramatically captivating than a character describing something that happened off-stage." If a script happens to be promoting a cause, the most effective scripts get the audience on-board without ever suspecting they are being dramatically manipulated. They become so engrossed in the characters, how they are interacting, and what is happening to them that the audience sympathizes which characters doing or promoting the right things, and reviles those characters doing the wrong thing. Make me care about the characters and the world they inhabit, and it makes me care about their point of view. It makes me care about what is happening to them. Show me and I'm in. Tell me about it and I'm out.
There is a thing in drama called the "suspension of disbelief". A well written script can do the craziest things and still get the audience to suspend their disbelief if that script sets the rules and then follows them religiously. For example, I could write a script about a boy from a distant planet who, upon coming to Earth, finds he has super powers including flying in the air or even in space. It is important to be consistent with those rules, because any misstep outside of them interrupts the audience's engagement with the show, leading them to say, "Wait... what? Boys can't fly! Or breathe in space!"
When characters speak in a way that it has been established they don't speak, it likewise pulls the audience out of the drama. In a scene in the Oval Office in this week's episode, as the characters recited their facts and figures, I paused the show (we watch it on a streaming app, so there is a pause button, one of the best buttons ever, especially when nature calls just as something exciting is about to happen on screen) said to my wife, "Did the writers go on vacation and they used a brochure for a script this week?"
That was the opposite reaction from the one I expect the writers were going for.
In general, Madam Secretary has been a high-end drama that is strongly character based. Not quite as well crafted as The West Wing -- not that show's last season -- the last season was a hot mess that forgot why audiences loved the show in its previous six seasons -- but certainly in that class of dramas. Madam Secretary has had its preachy moments in its past seasons, but never with such obvious, clunky writing hammering points home to we audience members, who must be too dense to get the point the first, second, third, fourth, or fifth time.
It is not dramatic to have a bunch of characters standing around reciting statistics. It is dramatic to show a character suffering from mental illness and not getting health care for it. This week's script kind of tried to do that, as if the writers realized they should play lip service to drama as they hammered their audience with their message. But mostly it was lines from the brochure.
When someone knocks on your door to try to get you to join their religion, often being dishonest about it by beating around the bush instead of just coming out with it by saying, "I believe you will go to Hell if you don't join my religion, so how about it? You joining? You won't like Hell, you know..."
My favorite was the person who thrust a magazine with a woodland scene on the cover into my wife's hands and said, "Wouldn't you love to live in a place that looks like this?" Our house is in the woods. It pretty much looks the same as that picture. My wife looked at this person incredulously, momentarily at a loss for words, then finally exclaimed, "I do live in a place that looks like that!"
Most people I know have a negative reaction to this sort of thing. I'm not of a religion that sends its members door to door, but I do feel sorry for the folks who do it. (I had a Mormon friend who told me he was sent door to door in a foreign country, and he didn't speak the language. He said he didn't get many converts. Or any. Or at least he didn't know if he did get converts, because... he didn't speak the language!) They must be dealing with a whole lot of rejection. It can wear a person down. But if they do it to me I don't feel at all sorry for them.
To my way of thinking such people are trespassing on my life, not to mention my property, to preach that their beliefs are more important to mine, most of the time without even asking what my beliefs are. They are being disrespectful to me as a person, and also to the culture I grew up in that has thousands of years of history and faith -- as it happens, thousands of years more than their own. And they are disrespecting me in my own home.
So while I enjoy hearing stories of the pranks some people like to pull on these door-knockers, my response is simply to close the door, and then return to whatever they interrupted while mumbling grouchy mumbles.
Same with preachy television. First of all, why do Hollywood writers think that they are right and everyone else is wrong, and therefore it is OK to evangelize in a medium that most people enjoy because it is a way to relax by leaving the real world behind? What social expertise do they have that the rest of us somehow missed? And in what universe do they believe they can convince me of their point of view when they are not only disrespecting me, but doing it on a screen (that I paid for) in my own home?
Being preached to is unavoidable in real life. Democrats tell Republicans what they are doing that is wrong, and Republicans tell Democrats what they should be doing. As an independent, a lot of people seem to feel free to lecture me about how their world view is the right one, and everyone else's is wrong.
But talk is cheap. Actions speak louder than words, both in life and on television. And good grief, if you are getting paid what Hollywood writers must be getting paid, for heaven sakes pull out your Drama 101 notes from that box of college junk you have in the back of your closet, and remind yourself of the things you are supposed to know to justify getting the big bucks. Don't talk about pulling out that box. Do it.
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