27 October 2013
Quote of the day: io9
Scifi website io9 has posted a great article called How to Make Your Ridiculous TV Show Work, which basically explains why Sleepy Hollow is so watchable, when other shows (Grimm, Agents of SHIELD, etc) aren't. I agree with all their points, but these two are the ones that stand out the most to me:
Make your characters likeable.
First and foremost. Your show can be the silliest, dumbest thing on TV, but as long as people enjoy watching the characters, they’ll probably still stay tuned. The best example of this right now is indeed Sleepy Hollow, as Tom Mison’s delightfully bitchy Ichabod Crane is just wonderful to watch, no matter how absurd everything else is. Agents of SHIELD, plot-wise, has been pretty ho-hum, but Clark Gregg is carrying most of the show‘s weight on his shoulders through his charm as Agent Coulson.
Play by the rules you’ve set.
Your show can be as completely insane as you want it to be. You want to take the legend of Sleepy Hollow and have the Headless Horseman be one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and also there’s a demon named Moloch in charge who’s decided a small town in New York is ground zero for Armageddon? That’s completely fine. But once you establish what you’re working with, you’ve got to play by the rules you set, because other you break the covenant you have with the viewer. They’ve agreed to suspend their disbelief for your premise — there’s a little bit of wiggle room there — but something that directly contradicts what’s come before is a dealbreaker. For instance, as insane as Sleepy Hollow is, at no point are aliens going to be able to show up. A good example of a show that fucked this up is Alias; it was a very ridiculous — and fun — spy show that required a fair amount of disbelief, with ridiculous double-crosses, insane plans, and assassins modified to look like other people. But then Alias somehow became about zombies, and it was dumb. Not that there can’t be shows about zombies, obviously, but you can’t throw them in season 4 of a non-supernatural show and expect people to keep watching.
Make your characters likeable.
First and foremost. Your show can be the silliest, dumbest thing on TV, but as long as people enjoy watching the characters, they’ll probably still stay tuned. The best example of this right now is indeed Sleepy Hollow, as Tom Mison’s delightfully bitchy Ichabod Crane is just wonderful to watch, no matter how absurd everything else is. Agents of SHIELD, plot-wise, has been pretty ho-hum, but Clark Gregg is carrying most of the show‘s weight on his shoulders through his charm as Agent Coulson.
Play by the rules you’ve set.
Your show can be as completely insane as you want it to be. You want to take the legend of Sleepy Hollow and have the Headless Horseman be one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and also there’s a demon named Moloch in charge who’s decided a small town in New York is ground zero for Armageddon? That’s completely fine. But once you establish what you’re working with, you’ve got to play by the rules you set, because other you break the covenant you have with the viewer. They’ve agreed to suspend their disbelief for your premise — there’s a little bit of wiggle room there — but something that directly contradicts what’s come before is a dealbreaker. For instance, as insane as Sleepy Hollow is, at no point are aliens going to be able to show up. A good example of a show that fucked this up is Alias; it was a very ridiculous — and fun — spy show that required a fair amount of disbelief, with ridiculous double-crosses, insane plans, and assassins modified to look like other people. But then Alias somehow became about zombies, and it was dumb. Not that there can’t be shows about zombies, obviously, but you can’t throw them in season 4 of a non-supernatural show and expect people to keep watching.
Labels: scifi/fantasy, Sleepy Hollow
# posted by mamurd @ 8:01 PM 
