by Neil Landau
Man against multiple forces. As evidenced by some of the preceding examples, antagonistic forces can intersect. The more obstacles, the better, so long as they’re organic to the story.
Intersecting antagonistic forces are most effective when they’re thematically linked. In The Sopranos, Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) is constantly at odds with law enforcement and rival families, but he’s also at war with himself. The constant threat of losing his family is the source of his panic attacks, which is what causes him to find a therapist.
As obstacles intensify for your characters, so should the stakes or consequences for inaction and/or failure. Determine what they value most and put it at risk. Without the potential for loss, there is no substantive conflict, and without conflict, there is no dramatic tension (which is essential in comedy, too). If dramatic tension is M.I.A., there will be no suspense, and a series with no suspense will be D.O.A.
Interview: Tim Kring
Tim Kring Credits
Best known for:
Touch (Executive Producer/Writer) 2012–2013
Heroes (Executive Producer/Writer) 2006–2010
Crossing Jordan (Executive Producer/Writer) 2001–2007
Providence (Co-Executive Producer/Writer) 1999–2001
Chicago Hope (Producer/Writer) 1996–1997
NL: This chapter is all about stakes—physical, emotional, and spiritual consequences for characters—and will also encompass sources of antagonism. I’d like to begin by discussing Touch. Are you in production yet for season 2?
TK: We’re in preproduction. We’ve written the first couple of episodes and have broken a few others.
NL: You wrote the pilot, did you reverse engineer? Did you start knowing how the season would end?
TK: I knew that I wanted the first season to center around this child custody issue that Keifer Sutherland [as Martin Bohm] and his son [Jake played by David Mazouz] have. His son is in a board and care facility. And, in this board and care facility, we start to feel that something is not right—that there are other secrets there. We were asked by the network to not introduce any serialized element for the first six episodes to give the audience a chance to sample. A lot of statistics have found that there would be large groups of new viewers who would come in to watch a show within the first six weeks. To not alienate them, you would have a stand-alone episode. So, we didn’t introduce a serialized element until we killed off Danny Glover’s character [Arthur Teller]. There were little questions in the first six episodes in that there were strange things happening in the basement of this place behind room number six. But there was very little you would have to know in order to watch those first few episodes. Once that serialized engine started, we slowly ramped it up until the final three episodes until it is very clear that there is something up in the board and care and that people are interested in Jake. There’s a mysterious corporation called AsterCorp who clearly have some designs on Jake. This all ramps up to an exciting season finale where Martin takes Jake and runs. We are able to end the season with them landing in California. We introduced also late in the season the idea of Maria Bello’s character [Lucy Robbins] as a satellite story that you didn’t know how to connect at all. Only to find out that she is the mother of Amelia [Saxon Sharbino] who was the girl in mysterious room six and those two stories collide in the last thirty seconds of the finale. That will hopefully propel you into the second season that takes place in Los Angeles. The first season was all about this board and care and the introduction of these antagonistic forces. The second season is all about finding Amelia.
NL: Do you already know if she’s alive? Or who has her?
TK: Yes, we introduce all of that into the season premiere of the second season. We tell you where she is and we tell you who the major antagonists of the second season are. We put a face to the AsterCorp villains. It turns out to be more complicated than that because it turns out to not be necessarily AsterCorp, but one person inside the company who is a younger genius who has made AsterCorp a fortune by producing these algorithms that have predictive qualities for customers and various shipping routes that are shortened. So we introduce that character whose name is Calvin Norburg [Lukas Haas] who had sold his algorithm company to AsterCorp for quite a bit of money a few years ago. He’s the one who’s been interested in Amelia and Jake. We’ve also introduced the idea, in a spiritual way, of the idea of “The Thirty-six.” That there are thirty-six chosen people which comes from the Kaballah, the lamedvov tzadikim [spelling from Wikipedia], which are the thirty-six righteous ones. It says that at any time are on the planet there are thirty-six people who keep the world from spinning into evil. They are righteous people unaware of their own position and power in the world. Humble usually. It’s not necessarily heads of state. It’s the butcher down the street who doesn’t gyp you for two cents a pound on ground chuck. We introduced this through the character of Avram [Bodhi Elfman], a Hasidic Jew. It turns out that there is something to that and something that Calvin is interested in. He has Amelia and is using brain mapping to figure out these algorithms. He’s twisted, but he starts off with some very altruistic motives thinking that he’s going to make the world a better place by taking these abilities that people like Jake have and make it a better, more connected place.
There are two antagonistic forces: one represented through the corporate idea of Calvin with resources and money and the other is a fallen version of one of these thirty-six who is a former priest and has decided in a twisted way that there will be no other idols before God. So he is trying, one-by-one, to kill them. So that is a tangential force that is going to be a threat.
NL: So you have a central mystery from the past that is always running through, but you also have central questions regarding the present.
TK: One of the truths about working in television—especially when you introduce a serialized engine that depends on you having things mapped out many, many episodes ahead—the truth is that things change for any number of reasons. And sometimes it’s for reasons you never saw coming.
NL: Like you have to write an actor out.
TK: Exactly. Or someone you’ve hired that you thought was going to be great is terrible or difficult. The relationship you were going to hinge a tremendous amount of story on—you get the actors together and they have no chemistry. You’re a heat-seeking missile. You go where the heat is. You want the show to speak to you as much as you speak to it. And it will tell you what it wants to be. It’s a very organic process that is a river that’s taking turns that you’re not fully in control of. That’s part of the excitement, but part of the challenge as well.
NL: Like writing yourself into a corner and not knowing how to get out?
TK: You try not to write yourself into a corner, but sometimes there are some shows that turn on that idea. There are some shows where you want the audience to go, “How are they going to get out of this one?” And the audience has almost a gladiatorial relationship with that show. They want to see it get to the brink of jumping the shark and then somehow pull itself out of it. There’s a thrill ride quality to that. As much as you hope that you can avoid those things, you really can’t.
NL: I had that feeling when I thought: “How is Martin going to get Jake out of the facility?” You always had Clea [Gugu Mbatha-Raw] in the gray area of wanting to be loyal to Martin and yet also trying to do her job. It was totally organic. Almost all of your stories have to hinge on what is considered a bad word for screenwriters: coincidence. And yet the whole theme of the show is that synchronicity exists that these are not really coincidences that we are all connected by this thread. Do you have certain rules for writing this way? For example, I believe that coincidence can work best in fiction if it makes things worse for the protagonist; but if it helps or makes things easier for the protagonist than it can feel forced. Your thoughts?
TK: I actually wish that I could be more articulate about it. It’s one of those things that we looked at so hard that it stopped having rules.
It’s like when you stare at something too long; it loses its essence. We did so much talking about whether this is coincidence or synchronicity. Is this sentimental or sappy? I’ve never worked on such a show that had such a thin rail that you ride on. One degree to the left sentimental becomes sappy and one degree to the right and magic becomes coincidence. It was a very hard thing. It was really just a gut reaction in the editing room and a pulling back. It’s a very nebulous thing that happens in the editing room. You get the right piece of music and the right shot and the right performance with the right take. You cut it the right way and you do a digital push-in at the right moment, and it somehow works. Take one of those elements out and it falls apart. This was one of those shows where there were not a lot of rules. You just had to go into the editing room and see whether it landed or didn’t. I think there were times on this show when it worked really well. That moment of coincidence felt less convenient and more magical. And those were the ones that worked for us. One of the things about the show is, as you said, it boldly states from the outset that this is what the show is about. Then you get a little bit of license when it happens in the fifth act. Part of the fun of the show is that it is like a procedural in that way. When I did Crossing Jordan, you had a dead body that you rolled into the show in the teaser and somebody did that body wrong and you had to figure out who. So you would introduce three suspects. In the end, you hoped that you would have that moment when the audience says, “I never saw that coming. I thought it was the brother-in-law.” And, in a way, Touch does very much the same thing. It introduces threads of stories, and you don’t have any idea how they are going to come together. Everything hinges on that moment where you say, “I didn’t see that coming.” That sense of never seeing it coming hopefully trumps the coincidence factor because in reality it’s a show about how coincidences are real. And if you know how to look at them, then metaphorically they start to become a valuable tool in your life. Hopefully, if the show has said anything, it’s that the smallness of your own life, or what you think is insignificant, actually has great significance. That everything matters, and if that’s the case, then maybe you’ll live your life in a more conscious way.
NL: There’s a great sentiment in one of Jake’s voice-overs where he says, “We’ll send three billion e-mails and 19 billion text messages and yet we will still feel alone.” So on the one hand, we’re all seeking connection, and on the other hand, we all feel separate.
TK: Yes, and I think that’s a sentiment that the audience is feeling very much right now. They feel very connected, but that communication doesn’t give them a sense of community. The technology that’s allowing us to be that connected has the dual effect of making us feel more isolated. We can retreat into Facebook, but we don’t go out to eat with our friends any more.
NL: Crossing Jordan was very localized and Heroes was very global. Is Touch going to continue to be global?
TK: Yes. One of the issues we did have production-wise is doing the number of worlds we did. While that’s fun and exciting for the audience, it’s very hard to produce. We’re going to try in the second season to do one less story each week. But it will continue to still have these satellite stories that give you a sense that these things are connected. In many ways, the show taught the audience very slowly how to watch it. It crept up on people; ramping up to a very serialized finale. The second season will start with that same serialized energy. We’ve earned this new engine.
NL: If it’s going to be more serialized, is it going to be contiguous? Where you start up exactly where you left off?
TK: At times. The first season was only over a few week period. I think the second season will follow that same model. I think what happens when you inject too much time into a story is that the audience starts to feel that. They start to feel the pressure deflate. The shortening and compressing of time really does help to put tension on things.
NL: Will the voice-overs continue?
TK: Yes.
NL: It’s so great because you have a character who doesn’t speak on screen, who only speaks in voice-over to us. And his words are so poetic and wise. When you constructed the pilot in terms of stakes, Martin’s antagonistic forces were his son who he’s not quite sure how to handle; you also have Child Protective Services who wants to take him away; and Martin is trying to keep his job, and then you bring in the corporation.
He’s a very put upon character from the very beginning. He’s having trouble making ends meet. He’s having trouble keeping his kid in school and loses custody because of it. His resources are cut off. And you’re right, that’s an antagonistic force in itself—just the sheer weight of pressure on him.
Having a child who you can’t communicate with becomes the central goal of the show. It’s a quest for communication. Little by little, he begins to read these small signs that his son has. Actually in the pilot, he learns a very big one that his son is actually trying to communicate with him through these numbers. It’s that revelation that is the big engine of the show: “My son is trying to tell me something, I therefore must be his eyes and ears in the world and go out and do what he is trying to tell me to do.”
NL: Martin mentions that “bad things will happen if he ignores the numbers and Jake will suffer,” which adds another element of stakes.
TK: We introduce this idea that he was in a type of psychic pain, if these numbers were not remedied. The premise is basically that Jake can see the patterns in the universe and when all is status quo, the numbers all line up, and when they’re not, there’s an anomaly. The anomaly presents itself as a number and you must go out into the world and try and find out why that particular number is anomalous in that episode. Until that number is righted and rectified, Jake is feeling some kind of psychic pain for the world. That’s the spiritual essence of the show. He is clearly a mystical connector that has some greater purpose in the world. Housed in this frail, seemingly insignificant, disenfranchised person, is someone who holds many of the secrets of the universe.
NL: What attracts you to characters with extraordinary abilities? It seems like that in itself creates this conflict between the thin line of what is a blessing and a curse.
TK: That’s it, actually. I had a long freelance career before I did series television. I did any number of genres from horror to teen comedies to thriller, so I didn’t move into this superhero thing until Heroes. So I haven’t always had this fascination, but I have to admit when I did think about people with extraordinary abilities, it wasn’t about the genre, it was about the struggle it presents for a character. The conflict that it presents. If you are someone who has a job which you are struggling in or a woman you are trying to get to fall in love with you or a dying parent that you are dealing with or a brother you have to take care of because he won’t grow up—and you think you can fly. That to me was what was interesting. You take this world with problems that we can all relate to and you add a layer of an extraordinary calling and it is in that conflict of how to live your life while having a calling is, I think, the stuff of great drama. The whole idea of Heroes was based on that idea of how you take ordinary people—the guy you went to high school with or the person you see at the laundromat when you take your shirts in to be cleaned—how do you take those people and layer on top of it a kind of mystical calling to do something great. Inside of that is also a postmodern view that we are not going to find the answers to the big questions of our world in the normal institutions that we’ve always put our faith in—it’s going to come from a grass roots, ground up solution—from an ordinary person who has something extraordinary to say. When you look at the way technology is working now, it’s coming from two guys in a garage who come up with something or it’s an Arab Spring—it’s people taking to the streets or the Occupy movement. As for Jake, I was much less interested in where he placed on the level of Autism, but in the idea that someone who has this extraordinary ability is one of the most disenfranchised people on the planet. He’s small, he’s meek, he
can’t speak. He’s perceived as being severely on the spectrum of Autism. He is the least likely candidate and the most disenfranchised person on the planet. And yet, inside this person is this most extraordinary human being…
NL: … who just might end up saving the world.
12
Mine the Mystery
As recounted in TV critic and author Alan Sepinwall’s exceptional book The Revolution Was Televised, AMC was very interested in Mad Men after HBO ostensibly passed on it. AMC was getting into the original scripted one-hour drama business, and being a period piece, Mad Men seemed like a good companion to AMC’s slate of classic movies programming. AMC executive Rob Sorcher read the pilot script, penned by Soprano’s alumnus Matthew Weiner, and wanted to make it.
According to Sepinwall, Sorcher liked the script so much that he only gave Weiner one significant note:
“Don Draper Needs to Have a Secret”
The rationale behind this note—which one of my UCLA colleagues refers to as “the note beneath the note”—was that Don Draper, like Tony Soprano, needed a vulnerability.
As a mafia kingpin, Tony Soprano routinely commits terrible acts—and yet we were compelled to care about him because he suffers from clinical depression. We aren’t asked to forgive Tony for his trespasses, but we are asked to relate to his struggles (panic attacks) and empathize with his secret shame that comes in the form of a pill (Prozac) and a shrink (Dr. Melfi).
Like Tony Soprano, Don Draper is an adulterer, a manipulator, a liar, and a self-centered narcissist. Don may have cold blood running through his veins, but he’s not (as far as we know) a cold-blooded killer. In fact, Don is a total charmer: dashing, irreverent, rebellious, debonair, handsome, whip smart, a romantic—not to mention a brilliant ad exec. In the Mad Men pilot, we first meet Don on a train bound for the city, and we follow him on his daily routine—which includes a visit to his sexy, bohemian girlfriend’s artist’s apartment. We’re impressed and envious of Don’s seemingly perfect life—the guy seems to walk on air. It’s not until the end of the pilot episode—when Don returns home to the suburbs and we discover that he’s actually married to a gorgeous blonde and has two young children who worship him—that our perception of him completely changes.
