This month is Power of Love month, where most of the website’s content is dedicated to those who are caregivers and romantics. They believe that those they love owe them for their constant affections. There is nothing they won’t do for love, with it be for selfless or selfish reasons. These Characters can be mentors and parents, lovers, or stalker or clingy, needy nightmares!

We will celebrate Valentine’s Day month by examining these characters. I’ll be looking at some of these examples from TV, Film and elsewhere throughout the course of February.

I recently viewed an excellent high-concept sitcom produced by NBC and Netflix called The Good Place. It’s created by Michael Schur, the co-creator of Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Parks & Recreation. Unlike, but those sitcoms, it manages to do something really original. I have to be careful how much I say because each episode is full of twists and turns I don’t want to spoil the fun.

The basic premise it this: Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) has died and gone to “The Good Place”, which is basically Heaven. But Eleanor doesn’t belong there- she was brought to “The Good Place” by mistake- and is terrified someone discovering the mistake. With the help of her friends, she tries to avoid detection until she can become a good enough person to stay.

The Good Place is managed by Michael (Ted Danson), the architect of the neighborhood and a classic Power of Ambition character, desperate to please his boss and keep the inhabitants of The Good Place happy. Eleanor’s fellow inhabitants include Chidi (William Jackson Harper), a Moral Ethics professor who couldn’t be more Power of Conscience if he tried- his constant consideration for every possible ethical outcome caused his death.

There is also couple Tahini (Jameela Jamil), a British socialite who is determined to have the best, the finest, the most exquisite things in The Good Place, and Buddhist Monk Jianyu (Manny Jacinto) a simpleton who lacks common sense – Power of Idealism and Excitement respectively- who are incompatible as soulmates. Eleanor, both before and after her transformation from a self-absorbed jerk, is Power of Love.

Eleanor very quickly attaches herself to the rest of the ensemble out of necessity, believing they owe her something as they become embroiled in her conspiracy- that Michael cannot know that she should be in The Bad Place. Power of Love characters make themselves indispensable to those around them, smothering them with affection or acting needy and possessive of them. Without these people, Eleanor faces eternal damnation.

As the series progresses, the main ensemble of characters are kept together by Eleanor as she truly learns to love them and becomes protective of them. The most selfish character becomes the most selfless, at first out of necessity, then eventually out of genuine affection for her friends. Eleanor judges herself by how her friends perceive her. Everything she does in The Good Place is for her friends, and for Michael’s self-preservation.

The show is full of ethical questions, which makes it a bit more interesting than your average sitcom. It is a Power of Love because every decision our lead characters make is out of love for the others, or because they feel they owe something to the others. They are all dependent on each other, and though it may not seem like it at the start of the show, they love each other.

I would highly recommend this show; it’s the best new sitcom I’ve seen in quite a while and provides a great example of a Power of Love character in Eleanor.   The Good Place it is a Power of Love story answering the question– what do we owe each other?

SaveSave

Heroes, created by Tim Kring, tells the stories of ordinary people who discover that they have superhuman abilities. They are people you’d never notice twice, an overweight cop, a Japanese cubical worker, a small black kid.  The plot revolves around how they find each other and work together to prevent a catastrophic occurrence.  “Save the cheerleader.  Save the world.”

The series was extraordinary as the first network series to emulate the aesthetic style and storytelling structure of American comic books.  It used multi-episode story arcs that built upon a larger, more encompassing narrative.

I found Heroes extraordinary as the first series to feature all Power of Imagination main characters. Power of Imagination characters see or hear, or can access power that others can’t. Their reaction to this unique ability is affirming and all-embracing. They never doubt their vision, special insight, unique ability, or call from beyond.

These characters are launched on a quest when something in the wider world is disrupted, thrown out of balance, or is causing danger or deep divisions. They are reluctant heroes who are pushed into their roles by larger circumstances. Greatness is usually thrust upon them via a special message, personal intuition, vivid vision, or supernatural imperative that calls to them in some deeply powerful way.

In calling others to heed their vision, these characters naturally collect diverse individuals who share a common purpose despite significant outward differences and even conflicting agendas or opposing points of view. Their goal to keep the potentially divisive group together and to restore harmony and balance to the world.

The first season of Heroes was a ratings powerhouse for NBC.  The first season stuck to the Power of Imagination structure and theme. As the show moved further away from finding others and joining together on a grand quest to fighting villains, weaponized viruses, and switching identities the show, in subsequent seasons, spiraled downward in the ratings.  It was no longer the global phenomenon it was when it debuted.

Once you’ve established the emotional playing field for a show, you move off it at your peril.

SaveSave

The lesson here is FaceBook and Zuckerberg’s deft handing of The Social Network movie.  Despite being a fictional and immensely unflattering protrait, Zuckerberg wisely refrained from going ballistic in the press– which wouldn’t have helped and would have only made him look worse.  Now he is at the point of being able to laugh at the whole thing and wins points for not taking himself too seriously.

In my opinion, that’s why Arnold Schwarzenegger is a much bigger star than Steven Seagal.  Schwarzenegger doesn’t take himself too seriously and Seagal takes himself way too seriously.  To survive and thrive in the entertainment, lighten up and and don’t be afraid to share a laugh at your own expense.  The ability to do that shows a touch of humility and vulnerability– and that is always appealing.

The future is arriving faster that anyone expected.  It is playing out in the biggest pay-TV provider, Comcast’s  takeover of NBC and Rupert Murdock’s battle with Time Warner cable.   Here’s an interesting article from the Hollywood Reporter on how the TV business model is unravelling in front of our very eyes.

For more than 60 years, TV stations have broadcast news, sports and entertainment for free and made their money by showing commercials. That might not work much longer.

The business model is unraveling at ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox and the local stations that carry the networks’ programming. Cable TV and the Web have fractured the audience for free TV and siphoned its ad dollars. The recession has squeezed advertising further, forcing broadcasters to accelerate their push for new revenue to pay for programming.

That will play out in living rooms across the country. The changes could mean higher cable or satellite TV bills, as the networks and local stations squeeze more fees from pay-TV providers such as Comcast and DirecTV for the right to show broadcast TV channels in their lineups. The networks might even ditch free broadcast signals in the next few years. Instead, they could operate as cable channels — a move that could spell the end of free TV as Americans have known it since the 1940s.

Full article here

In creating my own online drama I took an in-depth look at other series– Why did they succeed or why did they fail.  Here are my observations about a very spectacular public failure: Quarterlife.   These are the take-aways from my analysis of the web series created by Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, the creators of television’s Thirtysomething and Once and Again and producers of My So-Called Life.  You can watch the series here:  Quarterlife on MySpace

.

Without Authenticity and Urgency the Audience Disengages

The series, Quarterlife, is named for the phenomena of the “Quarterlife Crisis.”   This is the emotional angst and anxiety that hits around age 25 – 29, when college grads wonder: “What am I doing with my life?  Why am I broke, bored and/or stalled in my career?”  The iconic television series, Friends, explored the same territory in a comedy.

There is a sense of entitlement and astonishment among the Quarterlife characters summed up by Dylan Krieger (Bitsie Tulloch), the protagonist:  “A sad truth about my generation is that we were all geniuses in elementary school but apparently the people who deal with us (now) never got our transcripts because they don’t seem to be aware of this.”

This sense of entitlement and astonishment seemed to also accompany the series’ failure.  What went wrong?  Don’t you all know we’re television geniuses?

Quarterlife lacked the necessary authenticity and urgency to engage its core web audience.  The producers didn’t fully understand their audience and the series felt too much like a cynical ploy.  The Friends characters took themselves much less seriously.  Quarterlife simply can’t sustain all the self-important angst.

New Media Ploys Annoy the Audience

Quarterlife was originally conceived as a broadcast series but didn’t get picked up by a major network.  Herskovitz and Zwick broke the series down into 8-minute segments.  They independently financed the show and created special channels for the series on MySpace and YouTube.

Rather than creating content specifically for this new medium and this particular audience, the creators recycled a conventional series and distributed it in smaller chunks.  Their goal seems to have been to get back on broadcast television as quickly as possible.

Despite the social networking aspects of the Quarterlife website, it seems the creators did not fully embrace (or fully understand) their audience and this new storytelling medium.  After a much-hyped launch, viewership dropped precipitously.

“Podcasting News, for example, gleefully pronounced the web series a bomb in December, running a chart of each episode’s views on YouTube that looked like a graph of Ron Paul’s 2009 delegate count, noting that the show was getting fewer web views than ‘sleeping kitties, graffiti videos or even a clip of Sims in labor’,’” wrote Los Angeles Times media columnist Patrick Goldstein.

Goldstein also suggests that Quarterlife served as a magnet for web devotees’ scorn for all the Old Media Titans who’ve been invading their turf, hoping to turn the new medium into another profit center.

Herskowitz didn’t help matters when he wrote in Slate:  “Most of it (web entertainment) is simply incompetence and ignorance masquerading as an ‘Internet style.’ And until now no one had tried anything that would actually engage the emotions of an audience.”

It’s ironic that Quarterlife doesn’t engage the emotions of their audience in a way that is authentic or that rings true.

Emotions Not Experienced Directly Distance the Audience

Protagonist Dylan Krieger narrates the series via her video blog.  She is a would-be writer stuck in an assistant’s job at a woman’s magazine, working for a boss who tries to steal her ideas.

The creators assume that video-blogging is the same thing as writing.  The key difference, as a commentator on New TeeVee pointed out, is:  “A writer wants an audience for her ideas and observations; a video blogger wants an audience for herself.”

This personal performance aspect is the narcissism of “Watch me – Look at me – I am what’s important here.”

In her video-blog, Dylan says that her “curse” is to see what people are thinking and feeling. In the visual language of storytelling, that is the reaction shot that shows the audience a character’s thoughts and feelings writ large on the actor’s face.

When Dylan narrates, as video blog performer, she prevents the audience from experiencing these emotions, thoughts and feelings directly with the characters.  Her performance distances us from the characters and is a classic violation of the “show don’t tell” rule of storytelling.  Her narration tells us what we’ve already seen or should have already seen ourselves.

If, however, personal narration directly contradicts what we have seen (or will see) then that shows us something new and interesting about the narrator and/or the other characters.   This counterpoint works wonderfully in the classic Herskovitz and Zwick produced series (created by Winnie Holtzman), My So-Called Life.

That show’s high school protagonist, Angela Chase (Claire Danes), is hopelessly infatuated with Jordan Catalano (Jared Leto).  She remarks romantically that he is always closing his eyes as if it hurts to look at things.  Later, we see him dousing his eyes to get the stoner-dude red out with Visine.

There is no such ironic or poignant counterpoint in Dylan’s narration.  She tells us what we should see for ourselves or repeats what we already know.

Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) muses publicly about personal concerns via her newspaper column in Sex and the City.  The opening image vividly shows the contrast between the public and the private in Carrie’s life when she is splashed with dirty water as a bus plastered with her glamorous billboard image roars past. Sex and the City uses humor and irony to illuminate the disappointments, anxieties and dissatisfactions of a slightly older age group than Quarterlife.  Carrie, the wry witty writer, is not the self-conscious performer that Dylan is as a video-blogger.  The Friends characters also took themselves much less seriously.  Quarterlife simply can’t sustain the self-important angst.

Boredom, Stasis and Frustration Aren’t Urgent

As a friend has pointed out, “there is a reason so many serial dramas are set in hospitals and police stations, these environments provide an automatic sense of urgency, conflict and high stakes to a story.”

Articulate, over-sensitive, highly-educated, middle class white kids bemoaning the lack of a “special and gifted” life track (which is their due) doesn’t provide much emotional urgency.   There is little at stake if they can fall back on Mom and Dad, as one character does.

Fans watch football matches or basketball games because there is a sense that if you aren’t present or watching, cheering as hard as you can for your team, something terrible might happen.  The strength of your passionate concern will somehow help to put your players over the top.

Serial drama fans need to feel the same passionate concern and  personal involvement with the characters whose lives they follow.  What is the worst that can happen? Why do we have to watch to prevent that terrible outcome?  Why must we yell at the screen:  “No, no, don’t do that!”  What do we fear for our characters?  Why is it urgently important that we watch?

Interpersonal relationship can have that kind of emotional tension and urgency.  The stakes just have to be high enough.  The conflicts have to be intense and personal enough to evoke our deepest concern.  We have to be worried about the characters!

Weak Conflict Undercuts Urgency

The biggest potential conflict and most interesting social question in Quarterlife is weakened if not completely neutered.

Dylan’s friends don’t seem to care that she is violating their privacy, disclosing intimate information, betraying confidences and spewing interpersonal revelations to anyone who has access to a computer.

She names names.  She distributes secretly recorded videos.  She commits the emotional equivalent of a physical violation.  Outside of a minor emotional hissy-fit, this potential conflict quickly passes by the wayside.  Nobody really pays attention to Dylan’s video blog.

Her revelations cause little conflict within the group.  They cause no conflict outside the group (no outsider causes a problem for the characters because of information learned through Dylan’s blog).

It is very startling and disconcerting when strangers know the intimate details of your life and remark on them to you.  What happens when everyone knows your whereabouts and/or your personal business?  How does that cause problems and create conflict for the characters?

What are the limits of personal privacy and the ethics of personal disclosures about others?  All those questions are interesting opportunities for conflict that could come from who the characters are as individuals and how they might view the world (or privacy) differently.

If Dylan’s blog has no effect on the other characters, what is the dramatic point other than to show her on a web cam?   This feels like the creators trying to be hip but it comes off as empty, false and inauthentic.

When It Isn’t Urgent It Has to Be Funny

The characters in Quarterlife are remarkable for their lack of humor or any wicked sense of fun.  They take themselves and their lives way too seriously.  The series doesn’t have a vivid appreciation of the absurd.

The classic series, Friends, mined this age group’s anxiety, boredom and frustration brilliantly.  The theme song by The Rembrandts sums up the same storytelling territory:

“So no one told you life was going to be this way.

Your job’s a joke, you’re broke, your love life’s DOA.

It’s like you’re always stuck in second gear,

Well, it hasn’t been your day, your week, your month, or even your year.

I’ll be there for you…  And you’ll be there for me too.”

Friends had wit, warmth and sense of the absurdity of life (and lasted many years past the characters’ “Quarterlife Crisis” because the fans weren’t willing to let the characters go).  Contrast this with the previous quote:

“A sad truth about my generation is that we were all geniuses in elementary school but apparently the people who deal with us (now) never got our transcripts because they don’t seem to be aware of this.”   (Poor me!)

Which show would you rather watch?

Seinfeld, originally featuring the same or slightly older age group, totally lacked urgency and was proud of it.  That show was about nothing more critical than finding a parking place, making a reservation at a restaurant or buying soup at a lunch counter.  The series had a wicked sense of humor; made us laugh and we were satisfied and came back for more.  If it’s not emotionally dramatic then it must be laugh-out-loud funny.

What Was NBC Thinking?

Quarterlife was picked up by NBC at a time when broadcast dramas were running out of stockpiled scripts and scripted shows were shutting down all over Hollywood during the strike.   It seemed like a slam-dunk opportunity.  Then, just like the story concept for the series characters, reality hit and it was nothing like anyone imagined.

The show only had 3.1 million viewers in its NBC broadcast debut, the worst in-season performance in the 10 p.m. hour slot by an NBC show in at least 17 years. The series also got hammered in the adult 18 – 49 demographic, where it managed only a 1.3 rating.  The show was pulled from NBC’s schedule after only one episode.

Why would NBC think that a series allegedly conceived for and widely available on the web would attract the same audience age group in a repeat on broadcast television? Everyone who was interested had seen the show already.

If viewers can watch on their own time on the web why should anyone watch the show on NBC’s time? What was new, different or added to the viewing experience during the rebroadcast?  The network didn’t seem to understand the core audience either.

There is an element of condescension (or maybe contempt) in all of this exemplified by the words the creators put in Dylan’s mouth:  “We blog to exist, therefore we… we are idiots.”  A show on any media platform is really in trouble when the creators have contempt for or belittle their own characters.