I was watching “Fleabag” with my wife. She’s watched it several times, it was my first time though.
I won’t get spoilery, in case you haven’t seen it, but there were a couple of times during the run when I’d see a moment, which I took for a subtle clue, a hint as to what was going to be revealed. In two key places, I saw what I took for specific hints of plot points to come. “Ahhhh,” I said to myself, “I see how that’s going to pay off.”
This is the danger of being a writer, or editor, or really, anyone who works in entertainment or storytelling. You spend years/decades learning the tricks of the trade, studying stories, breaking down narratives, learning planting, payoff, rules of three, foreshadowing, characterization, and a thousand other little things, and once you learn the tricks, you can’t unsee them. Whereas one person may be watching a TV show or movie on a purely surface level, trusting that what they’re seeing is nothing more than random dialogue or actions, a storyteller is weighing all of these things, balancing what they know of this particular story with what they know about storytelling in general. Quite often, our minds are leaping ahead, two, five, ten moves down the chessboard. “Ah, she said this. Usually, that means nothing, but nothing she says means nothing, so it means something, which means it’s going to be important later, so what are the fifty possible ways this could go?”
It makes storytellers very hard to trick.
Also makes it very annoying to watch things with us.
We often can’t help but turn to the person we’re with and go, “oh, that means that such-and-such is probably going to happen.” Which, sometimes is impressive, but other times, is just annoying, because sometimes, the other person doesn’t WANT to guess what’s coming, they watch to be surprised. More than once, I’ve come out of a movie complaining that the narrative was too simple, too straightforward, not clever enough, etc. And more than once, the person I was with has said, “You would think that, you’re a writer.”
I haven’t been able to watch a movie straight for something like thirty years. Our brains just do it automatically. It’s kinda like going into a car dealership to buy your seventh car, you know from the get that the salesman is trying to sell you something, to get as much money as they can squeeze out of you, and you’re trying to cut through all the glad-handing bullshit, and see how good the actual car you want to buy is. You may not be on edge - I always am, in a car dealership - but there’s probably some little part of you on constant alert, refusing to be made a fool of.
That’s why storytellers love it when we can’t guess what’s coming in stories. Or better yet, when we get so swept up in what we’re watching/reading/experiencing, we forget to the look for the trick.
And when storytellers do trick us, we applaud them, weeping with utter joy. To have caught us unaware, to have used all of our knowledge against us, to surprise us when all the clues were there, it’s transcendent. There’s almost no greater feeling than a master storyteller giving us something new, something unexpected, and yet, something so right. It’s like when magicians see other magicians do a trick, and they have no idea how it was done. There’s YouTube videos of pro magicians watching videos of other magicians, usually amateurs, do tricks, and I live for the moment when they see a trick they don’t know. They get so excited, so joyful. I watched Penn Jillette once beaming like a proud father when he saw a trick done so perfectly he couldn’t figure it out.
We want this from our storytellers. We want to be shocked. We want to be out-thought, to have the narrative go somewhere we couldn’t envision.
But, failing that, we generally want our cleverest guesses to be right.
I mean, if we can’t be surprised, then we can at least feel good about being correct, no?
Which is what I wanted from “Fleabag.” I wanted my guess to be correct, and if I was wrong, I wanted the answer to be better than I’d imagined.
It led, I’m afraid, to a bit of disappointment.
“Fleabag” is a great show, it’s as funny as people say, and smart, smart, smart. Me not guessing the actual payoff for a plot point isn’t a knock against it, and if you’ve been thinking of taking the plunge and watching it, you should, it’s delightful. And the second season is super clever. So don’t take anything I say as anything other than a wee tiny opinion.
But I thought they were headed one way, and they weren’t. What I thought was being setup for a violent rug-pull turned out to be a small building block for the narrative. And when they didn’t veer another unexpected way instead, I was a little bummed out, just because I thought my version was clever.
Not “better.” I don’t know that my way would’ve done anything but be what I imagined it to be: a yanking out of the rug from under the characters. Sometimes that’s what called for, and sometimes, it’s really not. And I’m not considering the dozens of threads it would possibly unravel somewhere, just to give a good POW moment. Better to serve the entire story than to have one big moment that, again, might ruin the rest of a good tale.
But when it turned out to be more or less what they set it up as (again, in itself, a good story), I still felt the letdown.
Hazards of the trade.
I’m betting you know what I’m talking about. You’ve seen thousands of stories, and formed your own internal barometer for greatness. You may not be picking apart every movie you watch, but on some level, there’s part of you that subconsciously says, “Wait. I’ve seen this before. I do/don’t want it to happen in this story.” And you’ve probably watched a movie or a show, waiting to be stunned by the ending, and find yourself disappointed.
Dan Harmon once described audiences as “giant render farms.” Meaning, if you give an audience enough time and hints, they’ll figure out what you’re doing, and a thousand other amazing ideas beyond. So if you’re a creator, it’s not a great idea to knock around the fan sites, reading the different ideas, because you’re almost guaranteed to find somebody who’s guessed exactly what you’re up to. They probably have a hundred other guesses as well, and the one they’ve accidentally discovered probably isn’t even the most interesting to them.
Some creators get tripped up when somebody thinks ahead of them. They then get tempted to change their story, to try and find a solution that nobody has guessed, which usually is the worst reason to change something. The reason somebody guessed what you’re up to, is probably because you’ve set it up, you’ve laid out the clues, you’ve created the proper narrative. If you’re doing your job correctly, somebody is going to figure it out. I mean, that’s the goal, right? To create a story that follows its own logic to the conclusion?
Endings are especially hard for this kind of thing. We, the audience, LOVE a great ending. A great ending can forgive a lot of missteps. I’d say the very last shot of “Fleabag” is a great ending. It honestly comes a little out of nowhere for me, but the charm and subtlety with which it’s handled is lovely.
But sometimes, the story can be so good, the journey so amazing, that no ending can hold up against the rest of it. This is the trouble many long-running TV shows have. Many times, the last episode repeats something that’s already been said, or worse, is a dim reflection of the rest of the work. Sometimes, a creator has already done too well for the ending to be satisfying. I’d argue that’s what happens to shows like “Lost” or “Game of Thrones” (I have very specific opinions on both those shows; one day I’ll write them down). Both these shows reached a fever pitch of quality and audience engagement, only to see both diffuse alarmingly. The first time I read Stephen King’s “The Stand,” I felt that way, like we’d had a thousand pages of amazing lead-up to a kind of “eh” climax.
It does make you appreciate the great endings, especially of long-running shows. “The Wire,” “Breaking Bad,” “The Leftovers,” “Six Feet Under,” the list goes on. I was on the edge of my seat for all of these, watching the magician do their trick with wide-eyed amazement, and was overjoyed when the trick worked, and I had no idea how.
That’s kinda the best part of doing this for a living. Sure, we may see a thousand things that disappoint us, or sorta do exactly what we expected. But then, we’ll see something great, something unexpected, and I’d argue we get even more excited than the average person, because we know all the effort that went into it, all the hurdles to leap, and all the barriers that stood in the way.
Our lows may be multitude, but our highs can be truly outstanding.
(And if you’ve seen “Fleabag” and want to know exactly which spoils I’m not spoiling, put a comment below or write me!)
Got a new “Hold Up!” We’re doing “Coal Miner’s Daughter” with special guest Glenn Morgan, who has amazing stories to tell about the early days of MTV and music videos. And a new “Sensory Overload” drops soon! (We just need to, um, record it first.)
See ya soon!
© 2024
I’m not a writer, so I’m sure there are many details I miss. The one television series finale that I howled with laughter at was Newhart! My bet is that not many saw that ending coming!
I related to this so much. It's why I love films like The Lobster, Poor Things, and American Fiction - I could not guess where they were going.