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Plus Ça Change…
How lazy scriptwriting and audience lethargy rob us of meaning
It’s a cliché that today we live in a world of entertainment abundance: we can gawp for hours thanks to streamed content. As best as I can tell it would literally be impossible for any one person to consume all the entertainment available today, even if we restrict the domain to own-language output.
Unfortunately this doesn’t imply anything about the value of that content. In fact, when we step back a moment and consider the question of quality rather than quantity, we get a rather bleak picture.
US content has always been excessively formulaic, pandering to lowest-common-denominator audiences with highly predictable plot lines and characters. We’ve had the endless procedurals, the endless telenovela daytime soaps, and the endless brain-dead “comedies.” The seven-series story-arc and character-arcs are taught rote fashion in scriptwriting school and the end-of-season cliffhanger finalé is de rigueur.
Audiences don’t want originality, so the same themes are endlessly recycled. And if that wasn’t making life easy enough for everyone concerned, we can always rely on the two stock elements beloved of lazy scriptwriters everywhere: the supernatural, and guns.
Need to add some mindless drama? Pull out a gun!
