A Defence

I need a project. Or, more precisely, I need to choose one of the ones I already have in preproduction. I've spent a lot of time catching up on my absorption of drama, contemporary and period, written and acted, all along telling myself that it serves a higher purpose: bolstering my own creative pool. I'm watching what I consider to be the best of the best, striving to avoid sullying my memory with even mediocre scripts and acting. Unless there is a prolific application of explosions – looking at you, Crysis 2.

I get something from each of these series that makes it in my eyes a paradigm. Whenever I let anyone know I watch one in particular, I'm usually replied to with a repulsed screwing up of the facial features:

Desperate Housewives is a masterclass in how to sculpt a solid episode with a rigid core and flamboyant affectations, rather than to piece together a haphazard twist in an overly complex narrative that can come tumbling down if one loose string is toyed with. It's too easy to pull strings in today's drama, as producers (I hesitate to say writers, because I don't believe we do the following) underestimate their audience and straighten out plots with a blow dryer rather than an iron to satisfy the bare minimum in viewers and hurry out television to protect their bottom line. Desperate Housewives takes a theme, lays out that theme at the beginning of each episode and concludes it at the end, cohesively and convincingly. Every narrative step it takes is within that theme, while simultaneously satisfying the larger story, leaning out of the theme to join hands with the next episode, but never straying. It teaches me how to break a story down into chapters, how to tell a contained narrative in each, with the same characters that I used in the last, while continuing a overarching plot, and not just adding arbitrary end points to help the pace.

I was worried that when I thought about this I'd come to the conclusion that, actually, I'm lying to myself and that all it does is act as a guilty pleasure, but it simply isn't true. Is it entertaining? Hell yes, or I wouldn't watch it. But I don't just derive entertainment from it, I derive education.

The catch is in a question: Have I put into practice what I've learnt? No. Not yet. I've not tried to write anything from the roots since I started watching it a year ago. All my projects are either scribbles that I'll probably never return to, or primed and ready to skyrocket, if I give them the time of day. So there's definitely potential. Styx, for instance, would benefit enormously from a structured approach. Treat the plot as the story I want to tell over a series. Chapter by chapter, episode by episode, build the tension, lay the foundations, explore concepts of Greek myth: treachery and betrayal, antitheses and companions, et al.

Maybe I should move onto structure next, justify the time I've invested in Desperate Housewives.