by Neil Landau
2 Broke Girls follows roommates Max (Kat Dennings) and Caroline (Beth Behrs) as they try to start up a cupcake business. Max is from a poor, working class family while Caroline was born rich. While both are now broke, they have differing points of view based on their upbringing.
Whether it’s the Ashton Kutcher character or Charlie Sheen’s, Two and a Half Men follows the tried-and-true “Odd Couple” dynamic: it mixes Alan (Jon Cryer), an uptight father, with a hedonist, charming bad boy. Each one is right and each one is wrong. The truth lies somewhere in the middle.
Ensemble cast/multiple POVs. Desperate Housewives, Grey’s Anatomy, Shameless, Downton Abbey, Burn Notice, The Walking Dead, Friday Night Lights, Parenthood, The Wire, Entourage, Six Feet Under, Glee, Dallas, and How I Met Your Mother
In these series, there are often more than A, B, and C plotlines. There are as many stories as necessary to “serve” each of the main characters. However, the A story will often encompass more than one character.
In The Walking Dead episode “I Ain’t a Judas,” the A story revolved around Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) debating what they should do next in the face of dwindling food and supplies; the B story involved The Governor (David Morrissey) as he prepared Woodbury for battle; and the C story involved Andrea (Laurie Holden) as she decided to travel to the prison to negotiate with Rick. All of the stories, however, involved other supporting characters. This storytelling device is used more often in serial dramas, rather than self-contained episodes.
Downton Abbey tells the story of the wealthy upper class who live in the grand estate of the same name, as well as the servants who work there. In episode 6 of season 2, a badly burned Canadian officer comes to Downton claiming he is their lost heir, but the family isn’t sure whether to believe him; Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens), still in a wheelchair, is cared for by Mary (Michelle Dockery); meanwhile, Carson (Jim Carter) debates whether to work for Sir Richard Carlisle (Iain Glen). These are but three stories in a tapestry of many other character threads.
Parallel or Multiple Worlds
Once Upon a Time takes place in two parallel worlds; one in Storybrooke, Maine, and the other in the fairy-tale world of the Enchanted Forest. What happens in one affects the events in the other.
Game of Thrones is an example of multiple worlds, as well as a sprawling fantasy epic set on the continents of Westeros and Essos. Within each realm are a world of characters, settings, and rules.
Parallel time periods, sporadic or consistent use of flashbacks to inform on present action. The Americans, Revenge, Any Day Now, and Lost. The main purpose of flashbacks is to inform present day dilemmas or provide the key to solving a central mystery. They can also be used to provide subtext.
Examples:
Revenge is a retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo, where Emily Thorne (Emily VanCamp) returns to the Hamptons to take revenge on those who wronged her late father when she was a little girl. The show utilizes flash-backs to reveal character secrets and motivations.
The series Any Day Now revolved around the long-term friendship between women of two races, Mary Elizabeth O’Brien Sims (Annie Potts) and Rene Jackson (Lorraine Toussaint). They became friends in Alabama in the 1960s during the civil rights movement. Though set in present time, every episode wove a current story with one from their shared past.
In Cold Case, a show in which Detective Lilly Rush (Kathryn Morris) sought closure for longtime, unsolved cases, the use of flashbacks helped dramatize the testimony she got from interviewees.
Synergistic/complementary arenas. Law & Order franchise
Law & Order, in which the first half-hour revolves around the NYPD tracking a case and arresting a suspect, and the second half-hour shows the prosecution of the defendant by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office. The show dramatizes the conflict between catching a criminal and the legal hurdles to prosecute one. In an episode titled “The Collar,” a priest refuses to cooperate with the authorities, claiming that his communication with the killer was “privileged.”
Subjective or objective POV. CSI, Numb3rs, Bones, Ally McBeal, The Ghost Whisperer, Wonderfalls, Twin Peaks, and Battlestar Galactica
A subjective POV example includes The Ghost Whisperer, in which Melinda Gordon (Jennifer Love Hewitt) has the ability to communicate with ghosts.
In CSI, audiences see the “CSI shot,” an extreme close-up of forensics, whether a gunshot, hair, or injury. It is a completely objective view of evidence.
In Bones, the team often debates alternate theories as to how a crime happened, giving the audience the chance to witness the possibilities and go inside “the mind” of the team.
In Ally McBeal, Ally (Calista Flockhart) has visions of a dancing baby, which serves a metaphor for her biological clock.
In Battlestar Galactica, audiences witness Dr. Gaius Baltar (James Callis) as he interacts with Cylon Number Six (Tricia Helfer). Number Six appears only to Baltar and no one else, which leaves the audience wondering: is it all in his mind? Or is it really happening?
Documentary/Interview Commentary
Breaking the Fourth Wall. Another POV option is “direct address,” in which a character talks directly to the camera (aka the audience). Modern Family uses this technique to great comedic advantage in its confessional interviews as commentary on the present action; in many cases, two characters will participate in these interview segments. The Office also uses this device. The benefits of this type of storytelling are twofold: one, it allows the audience to see characters “captured” in moments when they don’t think they’re being filmed, which gives the audience a true sense of the characters, and second, it provides an important counterpoint to when they are “interviewed” and shows us how the characters want to be seen.
In House of Cards, we get a different, more theatrical commentary from Francis Underwood (Kevin Spacey) who will often “spontaneously” turn to the camera—just as he’s about to enter the action of a scene and/or in the middle of a scene—as an ironic, wry “wink wink” aside to bring the audience in on his Machiavellian agenda. It’s an artificial, stylized approach that suits the often duplicitous, insider world of D.C.
Omniscient POV
In Desperate Housewives, a dead woman, Mary Alice Young (Brenda Strong), narrates the show, aware of all that’s happening on Wisteria Lane.
In Joan of Arcadia, the title character, Joan Girardi (Amber Tamblyn), is a teenager who can speak and see (an all-knowing) God.
In Gossip Girl, the show is narrated by an omniscient blogger “Gossip Girl” (Kristen Bell). While the voice is a woman’s, the blogger is ultimately revealed on the series finale as Dan Humphrey (Penn Badgley). Talk about unexpected.
External Narrator from the Future as V.O. Observer Looking Back
In How I Met Your Mother, the show is narrated from the future as a man looks back on his life, ostensibly telling his kids (and us) the story of “How I Met Your Mother.” Narrated by Ted in voice-over by Bob Saget, but portrayed in “present time” by Josh Radnor, the device allows the audience to hear the wisdom gained after an event, along with the event itself.
The Wonder Years was famous for using this device which worked perfectly for this story of a man (Daniel Stern) looking back with nostalgia on his coming of age during the late 1960s.
Playing with Time
The series 24 is famous for condensing an entire season into a story that takes place over the course of only twenty-four hours. Thus, each episode is told in the near-real-time of one hour, compressing events and heightening the stakes.
In Early Edition, Gary Hobson (Kyle Chandler) mysteriously receives an edition of the Chicago Sun-Times one day before it’s actually published, so each day, he makes it his mission to stop terrible events before they happen.
Lost uses flashbacks (to provide character motivation) but also uses flash-forward (to show the future) as well as flash-sideways (which were alternate realities based on the actions the characters took in the present).
&nbs
p; Once you have a unique, original, inventive, and provocative idea for a TV series that’s populated with cool people doing cool stuff, your next big challenge is to find your way in to the series. And that means point of view.
Interview: Alex Gansa
Alex Gansa Credits
Best known for:
Homeland (Executive Producer/Developer/Writer) 2011–2012
Peabody Award 2011
AFI TV Program of the Year 2011
Emmy Winner (Outstanding Drama Series) 2012
Emmy Winner (Outstanding Drama Writing) 2012
Golden Globe Winner (Best Drama Series) 2012
WGA Award Winner (New Series) 2012
WGA Nominated (Drama Series) 2012
24 (Executive Producer/Co-Executive Producer/Writer) 2010/2009
Entourage (Consulting Producer) 2007
WGA Nominated (Comedy Series) 2008
Numb3rs (Executive Producer) 2005
Dawson’s Creek (Executive Producer/Writer) 1999–2000
Maximum Bob (Executive Producer/Writer) 1998
The X-Files (Supervising Producer/Writer) 1993–1994
Sisters (Supervising Producer/Writer) 1991
Beauty and the Beast (Producer/Co-Producer/Writer) 1989–1990/1988–1989
Emmy Nominated (Drama Series) 1989
Spenser: For Hire (Writer) 1986–1987
NL: Because Homeland is based on an Israeli series, Hatufim, what are the primary differences between the source that inspired it and where it’s gone?
AG: I think the first major difference between the source material and Homeland is the genre. Hatufim is very much a family drama and Homeland is a psychological thriller. That’s a huge difference. At the same time though, there are many things we borrowed from the source material that are central to the story, so we owe a huge debt to that show. But, there are significant differences. The main one being that returned prisoners of war in Israel are national figures from the moment they’re taken prisoner to the moment they’re exchanged and returned home. When Gilad Shalit was returned, he was traded for, I think, about a thousand Palestinians. The calculus that goes into making that political decision in Israel is enormous, and so once those people are returned, they are at the least the center of the debate and at the worst in the middle of a firestorm. There was a certain charged quality about the prisoners of war coming back to Israel which we knew would not hold in America. A prisoner of war who comes home to America would be on the twenty-four-hour news cycle, and then everyone would forget about him. Our feeling was that we had to introduce another element into the show, so what we did was reduce the number of prisoners of war coming home. In Hatufim, it was two and in Homeland, it’s obviously one. In place of the second prisoner of war, we added another point of view character and that was Carrie Mathison [Claire Danes].
NL: And, obviously the whole CIA and the structure of that organization, so it’s a whole new series inspired by the germ of Hatufim.
AG: I’d say that’s true. There is an intelligence apparatus in the Israeli version, but it’s much more in the background. The thrust of the Israeli intelligence aspect in Hatufim was, “Did those guys give up any information seventeen years ago when they were captured prisoner?” And obviously the thrust in Homeland is, “Is this guy going to commit a terrorist attack on American soil right now?”
NL: Since the main focus of this chapter is on point of view, did you start with Carrie as your way in to approach the material or did you start with Brody (Damian Lewis) as the prisoner coming back?
AG: It’s so interesting because the point of view question was the question that perplexed [Executive Producer] Howard [Gordon] and me as we began to develop the show. There was a lot of debate and a lot of very vigorous disagreement about that. On the one hand, can you tell a story with two points of view? What kind of show was this going to be? Was this going to be a show about a CIA intelligence officer chasing a bad guy or was this going to be something a little more interesting? Those debates took place among many different people—not just Howard Gordon and me, but also the studio and the network, regarding where we were going to wind up. Were we going to be on FOX or Showtime? I honestly think that if we had wound up on broadcast television that it would have been a much more straight ahead story with a single point of view—with the good guy, Carrie, in her point of view, chasing the bad guy, Brody. Luckily and through serendipity, we ended up on Show-time and were able to tell a much more nuanced, binary story.
NL: The gray areas are so pronounced in the direction that you went because you’ve created sympathy for Nazir (Navid Negahban). It’s a very controversial element. And the vice president becomes the villain in a way. What was your approach to antagonists?
AG: We always felt that our antagonist remained Brody. So, if we were trying to develop sympathy for him, we did that by inhabiting his point of view and making his reasons for turning and carrying out an attack against America as understandable as we possibly could. You could look at the season of Homeland as two parts: the first part with the central question: “Was he or was he not turned in captivity?” Then, once we answered that question, the second question for the remainder of the season became, “Is he or is he not going to go through with what he’s agreed to do?” The second question, in my opinion, was the more interesting one because now we were able to inhabit Brody’s point of view. We had to make the reasons for his action legible and sympathetic. That was our mission as storytellers: To get inside Brody’s brain to understand why he had chosen this path and watch him wrestle with the decision to actually go through with it or not.
NL: In your mind, does he suffer from Stockholm syndrome? Was he literally brainwashed—like in the classic film, The Manchurian Candidate? Because one of the things that I loved about the season finale was how his daughter and his paternal familial responsibilities were the things that thwarted that suicide bombing.
AG: I don’t think he was brainwashed. We didn’t want to tell a psycho-tropic, unintelligible brainwashing story. We thought that would be dishonest, but we did want to believe that he was a broken man. By that I mean, years and years of torture and psychological abuse will strip you down to the studs, and Nazir did that through this extreme capture and torture. And then re-humanized Brody, in a way, by introducing him to his son Issa. It was that human relationship and the introduction of religion through the Koran which built Brody into something different than he was before. We didn’t view that as brainwashing. We viewed it as Nazir searching for a way to use this man as a political tool in this world. And, Nazir wasn’t aware that Issa was going to be killed. He didn’t sacrifice his own son to do this. Nazir used what happened in that drone strike to radicalize Brody in a way that he probably wasn’t aware he could have before that. Nazir was improvising at that point. And, Brody was probably on board to do something that Nazir didn’t think he would ultimately be able to do.
NL: Brody is split in half between his American identity and his Muslim extremist identity, so I’m wondering if there was a parallel to his dual identity and Carrie’s bipolar disorder? How was she conceived?
AG: Initially the show was written on spec, but Howard had a big deal at FOX. We were servicing that deal by writing this pilot. So, it was originally written with the intention of selling it to a broadcast network. Not that we wanted it to go to a broadcast network, but that was our first mission statement.
NL: Like a follow-up to 24?
AG: Yes. So the first iteration of the pilot was much more along the lines of what I told you earlier. Carrie was an intelligence officer. She had some problems, but she was not bipolar. She was just a little reckless and unreliable. She was chasing Brody because she believed he had been turned overseas. And then, once we realized we could do this show for cable, the whole world opened up for us. Actually, Showtime was the first to say, “We love the story. We love the setup, but we’d really like the character of Carrie Mathison to be more cable-worthy. She doesn’t have to be such a
straight-ahead hero.” But, they had no idea what that should look like. Was she a sex addict? Was she a pill popper? In what context were we going to make her a cable heroine? Howard and I wrestled with that for a long time. And, ultimately, we began to see the merits of making both characters unknowable and damaged in a way. To put them on equal footing in that sense.
We look at Brody as someone who is damaged by his experience as a soldier and prisoner of war, and Carrie as someone who is damaged by her experiences overseas as well, but mostly because of her disease. She’s reckless and unreliable on one side, and he’s unknowable on the other.
NL: Once you had the pilot written, did you map out the arc of the first twelve episodes?
AG: We did. Howard and I had a very clear idea of the first twelve and what they were going to look like. We knew that Brody was going to perpetrate some terrorist action against America. But we didn’t, for example, know that he was going to put on a suicide vest. We went through a litany of other options: Were there other targets? Was a drone center a target? Was there a particular drone pilot who was responsible? We didn’t know. Was it something bigger? Was it a State of the Union thing? Was he going to kill [Vice President William] Walden [Jamey Sheridan]? We just didn’t know, and ultimately, the vest became very iconic. But, we all shied away from it at the beginning because it’s such a signature of a terrorist. We were always a little unsure if a United States marine would go to those lengths.
NL: And, what about Carrie ending up with electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)?
AG: That was less clear when we arced the episode. In fact, every episode after the pilot, we were asking ourselves: “Is this the episode where Carrie has her manic breakdown?” And, we pushed it every single episode. So, by the time we got to episodes 10 and 11, we thought, “Well, this is perfect.” Because here we are at the end of the season, just when the event is going to happen, and that’s the time to make Carrie as unreliable and as reckless and as crazy as you could have her because her fellow intelligence officers were going to dismiss her. But yet she’s carrying the truth.
