On exposition.
One of the side-effects of me being transient for the fat end of half a year (and so not in a position to do anything especially productive) was using my cousins’ Netflix account to binge watch a few American series that I might not have bothered with otherwise.
One of the things that is really noticeable about network shows (rather than cable) is the constant insertion of expository dialogue just to remind viewers what happened the previous week. I mean sentence of a sort that no human would ever utter for fear of sounding like Cletus The Slack Jawed Yokel stupider cousin, but which are fine coming from the lips of a fictional lawyer/ cop/ teacher/ high school senior(1).
While I sort of understand why cautious networks do this, it really is writing for the slowest kid in the classroom. I’m more a Maggie Walsh “Talk fast, set a lot of work and expect you to keep up” kind a chap.
And it is not as if breaking the fourth wall is a new device. In the mid-1980s Moonlighting blew our socks off (and made a star of Bruce Willis) the moment he winked at the camera and spoke to the viewer (singular – that’s the key). From House of Cards, through Hustle to House of Lies, we really should barely even notice it these days. And, of course, William Hartnell famously did it on Who. It’s canon, and that is all the wriggle room anyone needs.
And it is so much better than having a character say words to the effect of: “Isn’t that the guy we saw when we went to the art show on B’s birthday a few weeks ago when that big storm hit and knocked the sheriffs car off the road, just before the power lines came down and we got lost in the zoo?”
Of course, as a device it has a history as long as storytelling. That’s why it is called storytelling and not storyshowing.
(1) Notwithstanding this, Pretty Little Liars is a surprisingly good study in how to spin out a shaggy dog story beyond the high concept, relying only occasionally on Plot Demanded Stupidity, or the Sod It Let’s Make X Stupid Rather Than Smart But A Bit Gauche, We Can Reset Later ploy (or the At Some Point Every Character in Battlestar Galactica ploy, to give the SF variant). What I like about Moffat – and, of course, Whedon – is that his characters generally change for a reason, not because the plot demands it).
