‘All You Can Eat TV’

An exploration of how long form, serial storytelling for television has evolved alongside recent developments in digital television distribution platforms. This thesis also examines how these new technologies have changed the ‘rules’ of narrative, television screenwriting.

Masters of Fine Arts

by

Elise McCredie

(DipDA, BA.)

Principle Supervisor: Dr Annabelle Murphy

Melbourne University

Faculty of Fine Arts and Music School of Film and Television

April 2018 2

CONTENTS

Introduction 3

Chapter 1 5

Chapter 2 13

Chapter 3 19

Conclusion 27

Bibliography/Filmography 30

3

INTRODUCTION

“I hate television. I hate it just as much as peanuts but I just can’t stop eating peanuts.” Orson Welles1

I am sitting iPad in front of me, my finger poised over the PAUSE icon. Should I watch another episode or should I go to bed? If I don’t watch another episode will my dreams be full of all the possible outcomes for Don Draper, Walter White or Sarah Lund? Will my imagination soar with possibilities or should I give into the gnawing, addictive urge to watch just one more episode? Will I enjoy it? Or will I, in a foggy state of addictive exhaustion, only take in half of the complicated plot points?

If this is the modern conundrum for today’s viewers, then what does it mean for today’s screenwriters? How does this glut of instantly available serial content affect the way we write serial drama? In the last twenty years, there has been a revolution in viewing practices. Broadcast executives have been slowly de-throned as digital advances make viewing serial television a democratic, individualised, multi-platform and frequently illegal practice.

My thesis will explore the relationship between these technological advances in distribution and viewing practices and the extraordinary rise in complex television serial narratives. As defined by Trisha Dunleavy in her book Complex Serial Drama and Multiplatform Television, complex serial television is by its nature serial as opposed to episodic, has a genuine diversity of settings and mileux, has transgressive primary characters, and has far more explicit content than would be allowable on broadcast television. 2 The question this thesis asks, is, whether this rise in complex serial television is the result of technological advances? Or whether it has evolved from an audience’s desire for more complex, challenging narratives? Or alternatively, perhaps the two are so inextricably linked that it is impossible to tell where one starts and the other begins?

To begin interrogating this, I will look at television in an historical context, charting the seismic shifts in narrative storytelling over the past twenty years. This thesis will specifically investigate long form serial drama. Sitcoms, reality TV, web series and factual are all outside the purview of my research. Comparing pre-digital show Twin Peaks (ABC, 1990-91) with post digital Twin Peaks - The Return (Showtime, 2017) will offer an informative insight into both form and content in serial storytelling. How different is the narrative structure of a series when cliff-hangers, episode breaks, and lengthy narrative recaps are no longer de rigeur?

As a practicing screenwriter, I am particularly interested in how these technological changes have affected the writing process. As a part of this creative practice-led

1 New York Herald Tribune, October 12, 1956. 2 Trisha Dunleavy, Complex Serial Drama and Multiplatform Television (New York: Routledge, 2017). 4 thesis I have written a pilot episode and a bible of an original television series Overflow. In developing this series, I have consciously interrogated my own writing and development process. How aware am I of how my completed television series will be consumed? Does this affect my writing process? Indeed, does the knowledge of consumption methods (by which I mean streaming, binge watching, lack of commercial breaks, consumption on multiple platforms etc…) feed into the way I structure my narrative? As a writer can I remove myself from what eminent television scholar Jason Mittel calls “the historical contexts of production and consumption”?3

In his seminal work, The Medium is the Massage4, Marshal McLuhan decries that content is irrelevant and it is technological forces that dictate change. He suggests that, “Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication”.5 However, it is not form alone that this thesis is concerned with. It will also explore how the digital storytelling revolution has opened up television narratives to dark, complex characters and story worlds. Narratives that traditional ‘broad’ casting has been loath to explore for fear of alienating large sections of its audience.

Despite the paucity of recent academic research in this field, I will frequently rely upon Complex TV, the seminal work of Jason Mittel, who coins the phrase “narrative complexity” to describe “a new model of storytelling … as an alternative to the conventional episodic and serial forms that have typified television since its inception”. 6

Television, which became widely available in the 1950s, has transformed from vaudevillian shows, to soap opera melodrama, to case of the week procedural drama and finally to its current popular form - long running, complicated, searing serial dramas. In Brett Martin’s 2013 interrogation of the ‘golden age of television’, Difficult Men, he claims that complex series television “had become the signature American art form of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the equivalent of what the films of Scorsese, Altman, Coppola and others had been to the 1970s or the novels of Updike, Roth, and Mailer had been to the 1960s.”7

Is television now at the peak of its own fifty-year cycle or is the revolution only just beginning?

3 Jason Mittel, Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 7. 4 Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is The Massage: An Inventory of Effects (USA: Penguin Books, 1967). 5 Ibid., p.5. 6 Mittel, p.18. 7 Brett Martin, Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad (New York: Penguin Press, 2013). 5

CHAPTER ONE – The American Television Revolution

The world of 7:30 on Tuesday nights, that’s dead. A stake has been driven through its heart, its head has been cut off and its mouth has been stuffed with garlic. The captive audience is gone. If you give people this opportunity to mainline all in one day, there’s reason to believe they will do it. David Fincher (House of Cards Creator)8

The onset of the ‘American Television Revolution’ is accredited by Alan Seppinwall in his book The Revolution was Televised (2012)9, to HBO’s first one hour dramatic series Oz (HBO, 1997-2003), but the opening salvos of the ‘revolution’ are more widely credited to the defining moment in 1999 when Italo-American mobster Tony Soprano burst onto our small screens – larger than life and prone to anxiety attacks. The Sopranos (HBO, 1999-2007) appeared at a time when technological developments were at the brink of transformation.

The arrival of the Sopranos marked a tipping point in the television industry whereby the cable and satellite sector overtook the broadcast networks as the primary producer of break out scripted programming. HBO emerged as the most innovative and influential channel on all of TV.10

In Jason Mittel’s seminal book, Complex TV, he argues strongly for any investigation of modern serial storytelling to be based firmly in the “poetics of television”. By this he means we cannot divorce televisual storytelling “from issues of content, context, and culture.”11 Drawing on film scholar David Bordwell’s12 studies on narrative form, Mittel picks up the idea that formal developments in film (or in this case television) are firmly situated within specific contexts of production, circulation, and reception. He argues that:

We need to contextualize [television’s] development within the technological, industrial and reception shifts of the 1990s and 2000s, functioning not as straightforward causes of these formal innovations but certainly as essential factors to allow particular creative strategies to flourish.13

8 Robert Abele, "Playing With a New Deck", Director's Guild of America (2013), https://www.dga.org/Craft/DGAQ/All-Articles/1301-Winter-2013/House-of- Cards.aspx 9 Alan Sepinwall, The Revolution was Televised: The Cops, Crooks, Slingers and Slayers Who Changed TV Drama Forever (USA: What’s Alan Watching? 2012). 10 Gary R. Edgerton, The Sopranos (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013), 92. 11 Mittel, p.4. 12 David Bordwell, “Historical Poetics of Cinema,” in The Cinematic Text: Methods and Approaches (New York: AMS, 1989).

13Mittel, p.6. 6

In counterpoint to this, is the humanist approach of Raymond Williams, who believed in the power of humanity to dictate the trajectory of technology rather than fall victim to it. Opposed to concepts of technological determinism, Williams held to the belief that technological advances arise from human need and not the other way around claiming that, “viewers have the power to disturb, disrupt and to distract the otherwise cold logic of history and technology.” 14

Although Mittel does not fully subscribe to Marshall McLuhan’s controversial claim of 1967, that content is irrelevant and “the medium is the message”,15 he is, however, unconcerned with the interpretation or the cultural impact of a television series. What interests Mittel is context. Interestingly, he points out that a decade earlier television scholarship was largely concerned with meaning and cultural impact. Cultural studies departments were awash with critical feminist readings of Alias (ABC, 2001-06), or racial representation in The West Wing (NBC, 1999—2006) or how a show like 24 (Fox, 2001-10) reflected on America post 9/11. When beginning to research this thesis, I discovered a similar thing. Nearly all my avenues of investigation led to academic papers on what a show means or what its cultural impact may or not have been. Very little scholarship was concerned with what Mittel calls the “the cultural practices within television technology, industry and viewership.”16 However, since I began my research into this topic, the landscape has begun to shift. Two books – Alan Seppinwall’s The Revolution Was Televised (2012)17 and Brett Martin’s Difficult Men (2013) – along with Mittel’s Complex TV (2015) have directly explored the issues that fascinated me three years ago. How are technological developments connected to this extraordinary rise in complex serial television?

The pilot episode of The Sopranos is an interesting illustration of the transformation in televisual storytelling that was about to occur. What is striking about this pilot is not its forgettable, convoluted plot about a hit due to take place in Tony’s Uncle’s restaurant. What grabbed the audience’s attention was the character of Tony Soprano. Would we remember the plot of this episode a decade later? No. But would we remember Tony in his psychiatrist’s office trying to make sense of his anxiety attacks? Most likely yes. In this ground-breaking series, television storytelling began its shift away from an over reliance on plot and began to embrace complex character. Tony Soprano tells his psychiatrist he doesn’t want to talk about his personal life. But clearly David Chase (writer/creator of The Sopranos) felt differently and audiences were quick to agree. Previously, in depth exploration of the psychology of character had been the provenance of feature films, but we only have to look at Tony Soprano, and the hundreds of serial shows that followed, to see how the exploration of character, complete with flaws and moral ambiguity, came to

14 Raymond Williams, Television Technology and Cultural Form (UK: Routledge Edition 3, 2003), 64. 15 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London: Routledge, 1964), 15. 16 Mittel, p.2. 17 Sepinwall. 7 define all the successful serial shows of the new millennial. Dean De Fino in the HBO Effect defines this shift thus: “In the world of these stories, characters are cut adrift from the sorts of easy virtues and ideals that traditionally define people’s choices. They are forced to chart new territory. And despite their families, their faith, their enterprise or their education, they chart it alone.”18

It is vital to look at the rise of HBO (Home Box Office), an American cable channel and subsidiary of Time Warner, to understand this transformation. Oz, and The Sopranos, which was to follow swiftly on its heels, heralded the beginning of a massive shift in televisual storytelling. Episodes of these shows were still only aired weekly so viewing methods were not yet dictating change but because these shows had minimal network input and were, to a large degree, free of commercial interest, it meant that for the first time, screenwriters had the freedom to write a full 50 minutes of uninterrupted drama. Oz, set in a maximum-security prison with a rehabilitation unit entitled Emerald City, and The Sopranos, following Italian gangsters in New Jersey, were series exploring worlds not yet seen before on television. According to Leverette et al, “HBO’s brand identity, technological innovations, and original programming had taken hold of the public imagination and emerged as unique in television’s cultural production.” 19 Audiences and critics responded rapturously to HBO. Both Oz and The Sopranos ran to six seasons and won multiple Emmy and Writer’s Guild Awards.20

Prior to these two ground-breaking shows, the vast majority of television drama shows were ‘case of the week’ or ‘procedural dramas’. These shows relied on unchanging ‘good’ heroes who solved the crime, or cured the disease within the neat space of the fifty-minute TV hour (with ad breaks). Or as Alan Seppinwall puts it they were, “simple, easily digestible stories . . . featuring clear good guys and bad guys, that played on your emotions but rarely taxed your brain or your moral compass.”21

The critical success of Oz and The Sopranos changed this landscape and buoyed by the success of their new model, HBO moved fast, commissioning new shows Six Feet Under (HBO, 2001-05), The Wire (HBO, 2002-08) and Deadwood (HBO, 2004-06), amongst others. All these shows had long story/character arcs spanning multiple seasons and all were set in unique story worlds – respectively, a funeral parlour in Los Angeles, the gritty streets of Baltimore and a gold mining town in nineteenth century South Dakota. Thematically these shows were also radical. They explored dystopian views of society, their story arcs were unpredictable and, more often than not, they were peopled with morally dubious characters. In his book Difficult Men,

18 Dean J. Defino, The HBO Effect (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 153. 19 Marc Leverette, Brian L. Ott and Cara Louise Buckley, It’s Not TV: Watching HBO in the Post Television Era (Hoboken: Routledge, 2009), 8. 20 Emmy Television Academy, accessed November 14, 2017, https://www.emmys.com/awards/nominees-winners 21 Sepinwall, p. 8. 8

Brett Martin quotes an NBC memo and audience poll’s reaction to the 1980 cop show Hill Street Blues (NBC, 1981-87):

The most prevalent audience reaction indicated that the program was depressing, violent and confusing. Too much was crammed into the story. The main characters were perceived as being not capable and having flawed personalities. Professionally they were never completely successful at doing their jobs and personally their lives were in a mess. Audiences found the end unsatisfying … too many loose ends etc.22

Seen by executives as a negative indictment of the show, it is clear, in retrospect, that this internal memo could read as a blue print for the shows HBO was commissioning twenty years later.

By the early 2000’s, the serial television revolution had spread beyond HBO. Other networks couldn’t ignore the success of HBO shows and started to model their own series along a similar vein. These included The Shield (FX, 2002-08), Lost (American Broadcasting Corporation , 2004-10), and 24 (Fox, 2001-10), to name a few. Interestingly, these ground-breaking dramas were pre-mainstream Internet downloading and yet they have all the hallmarks of shows that succeed in this format. Perhaps this can be linked to the first DVRs (Digital Video Recorders) and DVD series ‘box sets’ appearing in 2000. Suddenly audiences had the technology to record or purchase whole seasons of their favourite series to watch in one hit. The seeds of binge watching had been sown. “The revolution in what we watched was inseparable from a revolution in how we watched… Now you could watch an entire series in two or three multihour, compulsive orgies of consumption.”23 These innovations in technology enabled fan bases for drama series to grow, forcing programmers to take note of how the reception of television series was shifting away from week to week viewing.

The digital revolution officially hit the television industry in February 2008 when iTunes opened its doors to film and TV downloads.24 The first series offered for download was ABC’s Lost. Downloading televisual content was almost immediately surpassed by subscription streaming services with the advent of Netflix in 2007 and its rapid expansion across the globe. In Australia, The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s iView launched six months after iTunes in July 200825 with other free to air stations rapidly following suit. Appointment viewing had become a thing of the past.

22 Martin, p.29. 23 Martin, p.14. 24 Apple Press Release, “Apple Premieres iTunes Movie Rentals with all Major Film Studios,”January 15th, 2008, https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2008/01/15Apple- Premieres-iTunes-Movie-Rentals-With-All-Major-Film-Studios/ 25 Wikipedia, accessed November 15, 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_iview 9

Originally a streaming service for outsourced content, in 2011, Netflix made the move into commissioning original content. Their first series, House of Cards (Netflix, 2013- Present), like Oz fifteen years earlier, heralded another ambitious leap in the development of complex serial television. An adaption of the 1990 British Broadcasting Corporation’s miniseries of the same title, Kevin Spacey and David Fincher originally pitched House of Cards to networks, all of whom wanted to fund a pilot episode. Giving the keynote address at the Edinburgh Television Festival, Spacey said:

It wasn’t out of arrogance that we (sic) were not interested in auditioning the idea, it was that we wanted to tell a story that would take a long time to tell. We were creating a sophisticated, multi-layered story with complex characters who would reveal themselves over time and relationships that would need space to play out.26

Traditionally, a pilot drama episode introduces all the key characters, creates cliff- hangers and works more as a promotional reel than an introduction to long form storytelling. Netflix were the only company who agreed to fund House of Cards without a pilot. In fact, they commissioned two seasons on spec. Kevin Spacey jokes that the writers on House of Cards got lucky because they were the first original show Netflix commissioned and there was no office and therefore no script notes. During his Edinburgh address he quipped, “Can you imagine the notes we would have gotten if we were at a network that didn’t support us artistically?... ‘Umm we are very concerned about the fact that Kevin strangles a dog in the first five minutes … we are afraid we’re going to lose half our audience…’” (MacTaggart Lecture, 2013).

Technology had evolved enormously since 1997 and Netflix went one step further than the cable channels could have even dreamt of. In 2013, Netflix released the entire first season of House of Cards online. This was a radical, ground-breaking move. One that could have backfired disastrously and whilst their reasoning was, most likely, to avoid illegal downloading and create ‘buzz’ for their platform, it was a move that was embraced whole heartedly by the viewing public. Supporting Kevin Spacey’s argument that, “If you give people what they want, when they want it, in the form they want it in, at a reasonable price – they’ll more likely pay for it than steal it.” (MacTaggart Lecture, 2013).

Like the cable channels before it, Netflix understood that a mass audience had changed to a fragmented audience. With no ratings to deal with and a non-existent schedule, House of Cards is not a series desperate to hold its viewers at all cost. The story and character arcs are complex and take their time to unfold. There is an implicit trust that an audience has invested in the show and will stay the distance.

26 Kevin Spacey, The Guardian Edinburgh Television Festival, “2013 MacTaggart Lecture”, accessed November 14, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/media/video/2013/aug/23/kevin-spacey-mactaggart- lecture-video 10

House of Cards has run for six seasons and been nominated for multiple Emmy and Golden Globe awards. Given that Netflix now has over 100 million subscribers, worldwide,27 in 190 different countries, including Australia, and in 2016 spent a staggering $5 billion on original content,28 we can probably safely assume that the Netflix model is here to stay – at least until the next revolution in technological change rears its head.

The rise of cable, followed by the explosion of VOD (Video On Demand) services and finally the Netflix model all contributed to liberate television serial storytelling from its traditional constraints. Premises had become more original, plots more complex, and characters more flawed. Because viewers no longer had to wait a week for a new episode, writers could layer their work with a web of meaning and interconnected narratives knowing that viewers would not only have the capacity to follow the story but would start to demand this level of complexity.

Jason Mittel argues that these new technological forms gave birth to a whole new television audience, claiming that our ability to search, bookmark and navigate the web allowed viewers, to become “amateur narratologists.”29 Mittel claims that complexity, problem solving, and emotional engagement with character are all aspects that the new technologically literate viewer brings to a show. Aware of this involved, literate and frequently critical audience, writer/creators were forced to stay on top of their game. As Thomas Doherty states, “viewing on mobile devices . . . not only helps aficionados connect dots and track motifs across a season but encourages artists to more carefully embroider the details of their product.”30 The ‘water cooler’ effect of traditional television, where people gathered together to discuss ”Who killed Laura Palmer?” or “How it was possible for Kimberley from Melrose Place (FOX 1992-99) to rise from her grave?” had been replaced by a global community of fans who set up online fan-sites and created ongoing discussion and conjecture about their favourite shows. In Kevin Spacey’s words, “The water cooler had gone virtual.” (Mactaggart Lecture, 2013).

Lost is a perfect example of this early interchange between creators and audience. Spawning dozens of fan-sites, including the hugely popular Lostpedia, subscribed to by fans who officially named themselves ‘Losties’, people now had a global meeting place in their communal quest to unpack the mythology of the show. Carlton Cuse, Lost’s showrunner, tells us:

27Statista: The Portal for Statistics, accessed November 15, 2017, https://www.statista.com/statistics/250934/quarterly-number-of-netflix-streaming- subscribers-worldwide/ 28 Lucas Shaw and Michaela Ross. “Netflix’s $5 Billion Budget Is Setting off an Arms Race in Cable”, Bloomberg Technology, March 2, 2016. 29 Jason Mittel, “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television”. The Velvet Light Trap, Number 58, Fall (2006): 33. 30 Thomas Doherty, “Storied TV: Cable is the new novel,” Chronicle of Higher Education, (2012): 44. 11

What we never could have anticipated was that the show would debut just as social media came into existence. So, there was this unforeseen confluence of events where we were making a show that was perfect for discussion and debate just as the internet was evolving.31

However, what the makers of Lost were to learn was that as quickly as a fan base can embrace a show, they can turn on it. As seasons dragged on and plots got wilder and the mythology of the island failed to add up to the scrupulous decoding of the fans, the creators were accused by both critics and fans of being as Lost as their characters. And yet, as Mike Hale point out in his New York Times review of the Season 6 finale:

As “Lost” bogged down and its audience shrank… an interesting thing happened: a core of viewers emerged for whom the endless complications, which were ruinous in any traditional dramatic sense, were the basis of a new sort of fandom. In this sideways universe, making sense of the show became the responsibility, and even the privilege, of the viewers rather than the producers. Every question about the show had to have one true answer, and discerning it — or asserting your version of it the loudest — wasn’t the stuff of water cooler chatter, it was blood sport.32

The audience was no longer passive. Creators of television were beginning to learn that fans could both deride your show and recreate it to provide their own meaning. In both senses the question of authorship was shifting. As Hale goes on to say:

The contract between author and audience is being rewritten throughout our culture. Certainly, we have always expected the satisfaction of resolution and revelation in our fictional narratives, but we had to let creators provide it on their own terms and then judge the overall result. ‘Lost’ is a sign that that’s not so true anymore, at least with regard to television. Now that the public conversation about how a work should play out can be louder, and have greater impact, than the work itself, the conversation will inevitably begin to shape the work in ways that earlier television producers — or, say, Charles Dickens — never had to reckon with.33

If Lost was a trial by fire for a show just dipping its toes in the water of the internet age then the shows that followed were to learn from its mistakes. Nowadays “virtually all showrunners follow these threads and most admit to being influenced by strong viral reactions to their series’ latest plot developments.”34

31 Seppinwall, p. 172. 32 Mike Hale, “In ‘Lost’ Mythology Trumps Mystery,” New York Times, May 20, 2010. 33 Ibid. 34 Neil Landau, TV Showrunner’s Roadmap: 21 Navigational Routes to Creating and Sustaining a Hit TV Series (Burlington MA: Focal Press, 2014) 13. 12

McLuhan, prior to the internet, was prescient when he referred to television as an “extension of our nervous system.”35 In fact, to read the commentary on fan-sites is indeed to see an audience’s fervour and passion extending into the global community. But McLuhan was also correct in a quieter way. In 2013, Netflix did a study into why 73% of viewers felt overwhelming feelings of comfort when immersed in television dramas. The company sent an anthropologist, Grant McCracken, into viewers’ homes to discover the reasons for this:

TV viewers are no longer zoning out as a way to forget about their day, they are tuning in, on their own schedule, to a different world. Getting immersed in multiple episodes or even multiple seasons of a show over a few weeks is a new kind of escapism that is especially welcome.36

Who amongst us has not felt this rush of quiet pleasure, curled up with our favourite series? The internet, usually attributed to a fracturing of attention, has provided, through serial narrative, something far more complex and satisfying.

In less than twenty years, the revolution in television content and viewing practices, has wrought such significant changes to serial storytelling that the landscape is barely recognisable from that of the previous century. Traditional TV viewing practices have been turned on their head. Audiences now have the power to comment and possibly even affect the trajectories of their favourite shows and characters. Even more critically, audiences are no longer held hostage to the capricious scheduling of networks, and can take viewing patterns into their own hands and watch what they want, when they want to. McLuhan might have just as easily been discussing serial narrative viewing practices when he commented in 1967 that, “Electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of “time” and “space” and pours upon us instantly and continuously.”37

35 McLuhan, Understanding Media, p.11. 36 Quoted in, Tim Adams, “Secrets of the Writers’ Room: Inside Narcos, Transparent and Silicon Valley,” The Observer, September 24, 2017. 37 Mcluhan, Medium is the Massage, p.11 13

CHAPTER 2 – Pre-Digital Vs Digital Storytelling

“I’ll see you in 25 years.” Laura Palmer (Twin Peaks, Episode 23)

In this chapter, I will attempt to elucidate the differences between pre-digital and digital televisual storytelling, by comparing the network drama, Twin Peaks, created by David Lynch and Mark Frost, and its digital sequel Twin Peaks – The Return.

Twin Peaks first aired on the ABC network in 1990. Lasting only two seasons, it finished airing in 1991, but despite being made seven years before the ground- breaking Oz, it bears many of the hallmarks we’ve come to associate with serialized storytelling – a unique story world (a small lumber town in upstate Washington), multiple characters and storylines, a serialised mystery/crime that runs across both seasons, paranormal overtones and dark and complex themes. Television scholar, David Bianculli, assesses its impact thus:

Never before in the history of television, had a program inspired so many millions of people to debate and analyse it deeply and excitedly for so prolonged a period…. Twin Peaks generated the kinds of annotated scrutiny usually associated with scholarly journals and literary monographs.38

Although the term was not in general parlance at the time, Lynch and Frost were the showrunners of Twin Peaks. Landau defines a showrunner as such:

In movies, the director is king. In the television series business, the showrunner calls the shots. A showrunner is almost always a head writer and Executive Producer on the series…(they) will also be the last and final word on all production decisions, including casting, locations, art direction, the hiring of directors for each episode, and all final cuts in postproduction.”39

Both Lynch and Frost wrote and directed episodes as well as creating the story arc for the show. Twin Peaks was the first television show where the creator was as famous as the actors. As TV critic, Emily Nussbaum, writes, “it was the first time I’d watched a show while thinking — with worship and anxiety and eventually a twinge of betrayal — about the person who had created it.”40

Frost and Lynch got the show green lit after a twenty-minute pitch to studio head. According to Frost:

38 David Bianculli, Teleliteracy: Taking Television Seriously (New York: Continuum, 1992) 271. 39 Landau, p.xvii. 40 Emily Nussbaum, “Emily Nussbaum on the New Interactive Showrunner,” New Yorker, May 15, 2011. 14

We told them we were going to give them a two-hour moody, dark soap- opera murder mystery set in a fictional town in the Northwest, with an ensemble cast and an edge. And very early on, after we delivered the pilot, they said that we'd given them exactly what we said we were going to give them. And that what we'd done was so foreign to their experience that they couldn't presume to tell us how to do it any better or any different. Basically, they said, "Guys, you go make the series, and we'll be real anxious to see what it looks like.41

On paper, this sounds almost identical to Netflix’s response to Spacey and Fincher’s pitch for House of Cards. Yet, the way in which events were to unfold is informative to this comparison. Twin Peaks was released an hour a week, creating around it a firestorm of conjecture and hysteria. The tagline, ‘Who Killed Laura Palmer?’ propelled the series, despite Lynch’s insistence that it was merely a MacGuffin and the show was really about the interactions between the townsfolk, Indeed, “Lynch and Frost wanted to mix a police investigation with a soap opera.”42 Yet the network struggled to let Twin Peaks settle into a timeslot and, to avoid competition with the popular Cheers (NBC 1982-93), continually moved its timeslot during the short eight episode run of its first season. Twin Peaks was widely credited with inventing ‘water cooler TV’, with the following quote from Frost indicating just how critical timeslot was to a show whose fan base was around a concrete ‘watercooler’ "Our audience doesn't stay home on Saturday. We'd like to be on a week night - that gives people a chance to talk about it the next day at the office."43

The audience however were loyal and Twin Peaks consistently won its ratings. The first season was nominated for 14 Emmys.44 However, the network was cagey. They commissioned a second season on the proviso that the creators solved the crime. Backed into a corner, Frost and Lynch agreed.

LYNCH: When we wrote TWIN PEAKS, we never intended the murder of Laura Palmer to be solved.... Maybe in the last episode.

FROST: I know David was always enamoured of that notion, but I felt we had an obligation to the audience to give them some resolution. That was a bit of a tension between him and me.... It took us about 17 episodes to finally reveal it, and by then people were getting a little antsy.

LYNCH: I think a lot of people put pressure on ABC to get it solved because they felt they were being strung along.... All I know is, I just felt it – that once that was solved, the murder of Laura Palmer, it was over. It was over.45

41 John Leonard, “Twin Peaks Cover Story,” New York Magazine, May 7, 1990. 42 Robert B. Durham, Twin Peaks The Unofficial Companion (US: Lulu.com, 2015), 4. 43 Mark Harris, “Saturday Night Dead,” Entertainment Weekly, March 8, 1991. 44 Emmy Television Academy. 45 Troy Patterson and Jeff Jensen, “Our Town: An Interview with the Makers of Twin Peaks,” Entertainment Weekly, Spring 1990. 15

Indeed, Lynch was right. Once the murderer was revealed (in Season 2, episode 14), as possessed Leland Palmer (Laura’s father), ratings plummeted. Stuck with eight episodes that no one wanted to watch, the network pulled the show off air. Only after a concerted effort of letter writing, spear headed by Frost and Lynch, did the network agree to broadcast the remaining episodes. But it was too late. In little over a year the show that Time Magazine had heralded as "the most hauntingly original work ever done for American TV,”46 had become an unwanted and embarrassing child.

Watching Twin Peaks in a digital format is an informative experience. Its style is so removed from the fluidity of post-digital narratives. Episodic flow is constantly halted by imposed and often melodramatic ‘cliff-hangers’, complete with lingering close-ups and suspenseful music. Inherently part of pre-digital, commercial television structure, each episode obeys a four-act structure dictated by the necessity of ad breaks. What had started out as a series almost identical in concept to a post digital show, became through network meddling and commercial interests, a shadow of itself. Twin Peaks paid a heavy price for being a decade ahead of its time. As Frost puts it, “We kicked open some doors. We didn’t get the full benefit of then bursting into the room. A lot of other shows benefited from those doors being opened. That’s the way things happen. The fact that you kicked those doors open is not a cause for regret.”47

Indeed, to see how far those doors were kicked open we only have to compare the original Twin Peaks to its long-awaited revival in 2017. Twin Peaks – The Return is a vastly different show from its predecessor. The vagaries of network heads moving a show’s timeslot or threatening cancellation are no longer present in this digitally streamed format. Ratings do not exist, ad breaks no longer dictate episodic structure, and there is no incentive to solve the crime quickly to keep an audience engaged. In fact, a digital audience, educated in immersion and patience, can happily hold on for twenty plus episodes before the killer is revealed – for example in The Killing (DR 2007-12)or 24). Most streaming services also now ‘auto’ play the next episode of a series immediately after the last one has finished, bypassing the viewer’s need to even push the play button. As one episode flows seamlessly into another, ‘cliff hangers’ become obsolete and clunky recaps, in the form of writerly exposition, become unnecessary. An unspoken pact is made between viewer and creator – “Trust me, stay the distance and you will not be disappointed.” Exactly the mantra that I suspect David Lynch would have liked to whisper in the 1990’s Twin Peaks’ audience’s ear.

With all these constraints removed and the creators/showrunners given complete creative control over their product, how does Twin Peaks – The Return shape up? Imbued with the stylish brilliance of Lynch, watching this series felt like a ride to a

46 Richard Zoglin, “Like Nothing on Earth,” Time Magazine, April 9, 1990. 47 Michael Giltz, “Twin Peaks Revisited: Maybe We Shouldn’t Have Solved the Mystery,” LA Times, August 23, 2010. 16 new frontier. A frontier where not only the constraints of pre-digital storytelling had been discarded, but so too had many of the tenets we have come to associate with complex serial television.

Certainly, Twin Peaks – The Return, has none of the clunky ‘cliff hangers’ and melodramatic close-ups of the original, but it has gone one step further than most digital series and discarded cliff hangers all together. Whilst most examples of complex serial television do still aim to hook the audience at the end of each episode, Twin Peaks – The Return has seemingly no interest in this, creating, I would argue, an entirely new form of serial drama – one that is episodic simply in form but could easily be watched as one continuous whole. In The Hollywood Reporter, Fienberg commented, "It's obvious this Twin Peaks is going to be an 18-hour unit. There was no discernible separation between hours and if credits hadn't rolled, the second hour could probably just as easily have flowed into the third. This isn't episodic TV. It's another thing."48

Twin Peaks – The Return employs long, uninterrupted takes, sequences of stillness or repetition, often with no, or minimal, dialogue, extended fantasy sequences, and a meandering plot. Episode 8 is possibly the most disturbing, mind bending and ambitious hour of television I have personally ever seen. It is part Fritz Lang, part student film, part experimental music video, part B-grade schlock, part fifties instruction video and full tilt Lynchian horror at its non-sequential best. This is about as far from Mittel’s ‘narrative complexity’ as it is possible to get.

David Lynch and Mark Frost’s revival of Twin Peaks has defied all expectations, daring viewers to rethink the way they discuss television. It is a theory-proof show, a mystery series that works beautifully in the moment but laughs in the face of traditional TV theorizing.49

The first season of Twin Peaks captured an audience with an unsolved crime and an array of small town characters, delightful in their originality. With a strong mystery and a localised setting, Twin Peaks had all the hallmarks of today’s successful serial crime shows, Broadchurch (ITV 2013-17), The Bridge (DR 2011-Present), The Kettering Incident (Foxtel, 2016). The new incarnation of Twin Peaks has none of these ballasts to hold it up and I have nothing but admiration for its boldness in discarding the tropes that so clearly worked the first time. Twin Peaks – The Return is a series that has not been meddled with by executives and networks, and as such it is a work of singular vision. It does not fall apart half way through its season because the creator has been forced against his will to make creative decisions he despises. Twin Peaks – The Return is nothing if not utterly consistent in its vision throughout, and yet, to my mind something is missing. If Twin Peaks – The Return is the zenith of where the digital storytelling revolution is going to take us then I’m not sure I want to go there. As a viewer, I still want/need some of the conventional elements of

48 Daniel Fienberg, “Twin Peaks: TV Review,” The Hollywood Reporter, May 21st 2017. 49 Brian Tallerico, “Our 5 Biggest Questions After Twin Peaks-The Return Episode 8,” Vulture, June 26 2017. 17 serial storytelling. I want to be valued as a viewer, I want to be invested in the characters, I want to wonder about what is happening or what is about to happen. I feel none of those things watching Twin Peaks – The Return. Maybe I even want to be invited back at the end of each episode with a ‘cliff hanger’? As Emily Nussbaum argues:

There is something to celebrate about the cliff hanger, which makes visible the storyteller’s connection to his audience – like a bridge made out of lightning. Primal and unashamedly manipulative, cliff hangers are the signature gambit of serial storytelling. They expose the intimacy between writers’ room and fan base, auteur and recapper – a relationship that can take seasons to develop, years marked by incidents of betrayal, contentment, and, occasionally by a kind of ecstasy.50

I would argue that this second incarnation of Twin Peaks has both lost and gained something from the original and is therefore a fascinating example of the pros and cons of digital narrative storytelling. What it has lost, in my opinion, is attention to its audience. By discarding all the tropes of pre-digital short-telling, Lynch has ostensibly created an eighteen hour ‘art film’ that is not particularly interested in whether or not the audience stays or leaves.

Comparing the two series of Twin Peaks made me wonder if something else has been lost in our complete embrace of streamed/binged serial storytelling? So much of the pleasure of the original Twin Peaks was what Megan Garber calls, “the anticipatory act of waiting … the agony of time-bound suspense, leaving you thinking and wondering and waiting and wanting ... until next week. ”51 The individualized nature of viewing series television, (everyone watching to their own schedule) means there is no longer a communal response to narrative drama. There is no space for an audience to conject, to discuss with friends, to revel in possibilities. ‘All you can eat TV’ has removed this communal pleasure from the landscape of narrative television. Interestingly, HBO recently recognised this and subverted the popular Netflix model of releasing an entire series in one go. Instead they released the last series of Game of Thrones (HBO 2011-Present) one episode a week, creating amongst fans a renewed fervour and anticipation. Similarly, The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu, 2017-Present), drip feeds an episode a week to its audience. Both shows have powerful ‘cliffhangers’ at the end of each episode to keep us wanting more.

Clearly the digital revolution in complex serial television has afforded both losses and gains to the audience’s viewing experience. Taken to its extreme, digital storytelling can become obtuse and forgetful of its audience, and the individualized model of viewership means the communal act of shared viewing has been replaced by a highly subjective experience. That said, I still believe the gains do outweigh the losses. The tragic story of the original Twin Peaks demonstrates how all-powerful the

50 Emily Nussbaum, “Tune In Next Week”, The New Yorker, 30 July 2012, Vol.88. 51 Megan Garber, “Serial Thriller: From Literature to Appointment Television, Serial Storytelling is Flourishing,” The Atlantic, March 2013. 18 networks were in determining the fate of a brilliant, original show. Regardless of my subjective opinion of Twin Peaks – The Return, what this new model allows is creative freedom.

To quote film auteur Jane Campion who recently made the move into serialized storytelling:

The really clever people used to do film. Now, the really clever people do television. I’d been feeling, in the film world, that if you come up with ideas, and you share them, the first concern is: how is the audience going to react? Cinema in Australia and New Zealand has become much more mainstream. It’s broad entertainment, broad sympathy. It’s just not my kind of thing. As a goal, to make money out of entertaining doesn’t inspire me. But in television, there is no concern about politeness or pleasing the audience. It feels like creative freedom.52

The networks are no longer the Gods. The shows’ creators have usurped them. Lynch finally got the chance to make his series unfettered. Showrunners are now trusted auteurs and, increasingly, household names. Fifteen years ago, would we really have known the names of those creating our favourite shows? Yet now Mad Men (AMC 2007-14) is almost indistinguishable from Mathew Weiner, Vince Gilligan from Breaking Bad (AMC 2008-13), JJ Abrams from Lost, Jenji Kohan from Orange Is The New Black (Netflix 2013-Present).

As a screenwriter, this is a significant shift. Instead of a network head’s limited and commercially driven taste dominating the writers’ room, we are witnessing an era in which creative storytellers have seized the mantel. The landscape is broadening, so that the unique and extreme Twin Peaks – The Return can sit comfortably alongside the crowd-pleasing Game of Thrones. This paves the way, I believe, for even more diverse storytelling as women and minorities begin to take up the creative reins. The showrunner, an auteur model that was once the domain of the feature film, has now become the blueprint for successful series television.

For the first time in history a writer/screenwriter has real creative rights and power: she can have a vision and follow it through; a project can be funded on the basis of a writer’s name, and critics, scholars, funders, and the audience know who she is.53

52 Simon Hattenstone. “Jane Campion: The clever people used to do film. Now they do TV,” The Guardian, July 22, 2017. 53 Christina Kallas, Inside The Writer’s Room: Conversations with American TV Writers, (US: Palgrave Macmillan 2014), p.157. 19

CHAPTER 3 - OVERFLOW - A Writer’s Journey

When I sat down to write my original series, Overflow, my head was full of the television shows of the past twenty years. I am an experienced television screenwriter for hire but what would happen, I wondered, if I could play ‘God’? Could I really create a show from the ground up, and if so, what sort of show would it be? The one thing I was certain of was that the protagonist of my series would be a woman. In the first two chapters of this thesis it is glaringly apparent that women barely rate a mention in America’s ‘Golden Age of Television’. In his book Difficult Men, Martin dissects this:

Though a handful of women play hugely influential roles in this narrative – as writers, actors, producers, and executives – there aren’t enough of them. Not only were the most important shows of the era run by men, they were also largely about manhood – in particular, the contours of male power and the infinite varieties of male combat.54

While the vast majority of producers and studio/cable heads are white men, the stories they commission are likely to reflect their own experience. In one of her caustic attacks on ‘auteur theory’, film scholar Pauline Kael decries it as “an attempt by adult males to justify staying inside the small range of experience of their boyhood and adolescence – that period when masculinity looked so great and important …”55

Whilst much of this thesis has been concerned with the so called ‘American Television Revolution’, it is critical for both the history of serial storytelling and for my own inspirations and influences to draw attention to another revolution in serial storytelling that was occurring on the other side of the world – in Denmark.

Funded by DR, Denmark’s public broadcaster, the shows of the ‘Nordic Noir’ revolution were global hits and redefined serial storytelling in a different way to the Americans. In the mid-nineties, DR sent producers and writers to LA to observe shows like NYPD Blue (1993-2005), LA Law (1986-94) and 24. They returned to Denmark with new concepts – writers’ rooms, showrunners, multi-episode series etc. As Danish showrunner, Gjervig Gram (Borgen DR 2010-13), puts it, “We said we’re going to do it the American way, but it took some years to find the Danish way to do it the American way.”56

The Danish way, as it turned out, was intrinsically linked to a progressive society where more than seventy per cent of women work and ninety-seven per cent of children attend day care. What successful shows like The KiIling, The Bridge, Borgen,

54 Martin, p.13. 55 Pauline Kael, “Circles and Squares,” Film Quarterly, Volume 16, Issue 3 (April 1, 1963): 12-26 56 Lauren Collins, “Danish Post Modern,” New Yorker, Vol.88, Issue 42 (July 1, 2013): 26. 20

The Legacy (DR 2014 – present) etc., represent are strong female leads, gender equal casts and a slew of female creatives behind the scenes. Or as Pia Majbritt Jensen and Ushma Chauhan Jacobsen state in their 2017 essay, Danish TV Drama: Behind the unexpected popularity, perhaps it is “the intrinsic textual and aesthetic properties of the drama series themselves such as innovative and demanding plots, double-layered narration, strong female characters and gloomy settings” that have led to their global success.57

When I sit down to write I have both these revolutions fighting for space in my head. As a female creative I am inspired by the plethora of shows that spearheaded the ‘American Television Revolution’ but I am equally inspired by the gritty, truthful, more female focused shows of the ‘Danish Television Revolution’. To merge these inspirations into an unlikely alliance and then mix in my own quintessentially Australian voice will be my challenge.

Crime has always been a staple of television drama, but in the new digital age of storytelling it is a genre that has flourished. My intent with Overflow is to write/develop a mystery-crime drama with a complex story and characters that will evolve across a fixed number of episodes. Twenty years ago, the series I am envisioning would have been unheard of. In fact, to write a series like this for Australian television is still highly problematic. With the ABC swamped by a heavy diet of British crime and Australian procedurals – Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (ABC 2012-Present) and The Dr Blake Mysteries (ABC 2013-Present), SBS (Special Braodcasting Service) cash strapped beyond 4 episode runs, and the commercial networks moving further into reality TV and light weight adult dramas, for example The Wrong Girl (Playmaker 2016-Present), House Husbands (Playmaker 2012- Present) etc. – there is little interest in commissioning the long form crime dramas we are accustomed to watching from overseas. Although Australia is a long way behind both the American and Danish models of serial storytelling, there are, however, beacons of hope that change is on its way. The Kettering Incident (Showcase 2016) and Top of The Lake (BBC 2015-Present) have ushered in a new era of serial Australian crime dramas that can compete on a global stage. Interestingly, both shows are driven by female showrunner/creators - Vicki Madden and Jane Campion respectively.

Both The Kettering Incident and Top of The Lake are prime examples of crime- mystery series employing ‘narrative complexity’. They are enigmatic, cinematically stunning explorations of geographic worlds with strong crime narratives at their spines. They also both firmly follow in the footsteps of Danish serials by focusing on complex female protagonists with powerful backstories.

It is this model that I aspired to as I began to develop Overflow.

57 Pia Majbritt Jensen and Ushma Chauhan Jacobsen, “Danish TV Drama: Behind the unexpected popularity,” Critical Studies in Television, Vol.12(4) (2017): 326. 21

I start with two things – a strong female lead and a crime that somehow connects to Melbourne’s Yarra River. I am, unashamedly, inspired and excited by many of the Scandinavian shows that employ landscape as a character. I am also inspired by series like True Detective (HBO 2014-Present) and Broadchurch that locate their crime stories firmly within very specific worlds that both contain and illuminate character. I chose the Yarra River not only because I grew up nearby but because I love the oppositional nature of its two sides. Like the series, The Bridge, I wanted to explore a theme of worlds divided and I liked the strong visual symbol the river gave to an exploration of class.

Of course, a visual world is only a starting point and I quickly became bogged down in the mind bending and difficult work of devising a crime story that would carry across 6-8 episodes. Developing a narratively complex, serial drama is a double- edged sword for the screenwriter. In procedural drama, the writer sets up the crime, proposes a few suspects and neatly solves the crime within the television hour. In serial drama, the canvas is much broader, the opportunities for character and story much greater and subsequently the writing process is far more intricate and involved than writing a procedural drama. The writer must create multiple characters and story arcs that intrigue and beguile an audience without giving too much away before the final episode.

The rise of complex serial television has also given birth to an extraordinarily literate audience who don’t just expect great storytelling but assume it. As a professional screenwriter, I am aware that as narrative storytelling has evolved, so too has the expectations of the audience. This requires a writer to be consistently on top of their game. To constantly challenge early ideas, to keep pushing the boundaries of their own imagination, to expect the audience to be always ahead of them so they must be doubly clever and calculating to pass them. This pressure can be overwhelming, particularly when working within a genre. A consistent voice in the writer’s head will always be asking – “Has this been done before?” “Will an audience see this coming?” “How can I be original within such a clearly defined genre?” Subsequently, the development process is a marathon of U Turns, dead ends, freeways that have no end, and punctured tyres.

After several months of tearing my hair out in solitude, I realised that, whilst I had a rough first episode of Overflow written, the draft lacked depth, and the series I had envisioned was not leaping off the page. What was wrong? Was the idea flawed? Was my writing just not good enough? It was with a jolt that I realised that I had set myself up to fail by employing the process I would use to write a feature film or a self-contained episode of a procedural drama. Writing complex, serial narrative drama required a completely different process. In fact, it was not possible to write a decent first episode of Overflow without brainstorming the entire series and this inevitably required a collaborative process far removed from the model of the writer shut away alone in their room. My process needed to adapt to the form. This was my first clear signpost that the craft of television screenwriting had significantly evolved in its quest to develop and deliver complex serial narratives.

22

Television writers’ rooms are now a staple in the development of all Australian narrative television shows, but this is a relatively recent development. Soap operas and comedy shows traditionally had writers’ rooms, but procedural drama shows were plotted by producers and story editors and episodes allocated to specific writers. Showrunner, Vicki Madden explains it thus:

The way of creating a strong, powerful voice (for a show) is to have one very strong voice at the head. Traditionally we’ve had long-form drama (in Australia); we still have it on commercial TV. And nobody actually owns that voice; we have a bible we all work to… So, there’s nothing of me, as a writer, really coming to the table. All you can do us try it adopt the feel of the show.58

Developing series television is, almost without exception, a collaborative process and the writers’ room has become integral to the success of serial drama. Over the past five years I have been involved, as a writer, in over a dozen writers’ rooms. Four of the shows I have brainstormed, plotted and written have gone into production – Nowhere Boys (Matchbox, 2013-Present), Sunshine (SBS, 2017), Jack Irish (ABC 2016- Present) and Secret City (Foxtel 2016-Present). Serial storytelling requires multiple writers and therefore one of the functions of the writers’ room is to keep all the writers across storylines, character arcs, and the themes/style of a show. In serial drama, there is nothing self-contained about the episodes, constant conversations are at play about what happens in episodes prior to and post the one you are writing. A small character change in the episode before yours can have major ramifications for your episode. A writer on a serial drama must be constantly available and adaptable.

In accordance with this model, I set up a writers’ room for Overflow with three collaborators and a note taker. Shutting a group of people away in an airless room for hours is a certain way to either madness or successful cross pollination of ideas. Whilst writers’ rooms are egalitarian by nature, they do require one person to steer the ship. As a writer for hire I had never been in this position before. Although taking this role for Overflow was a terrifying responsibility, it afforded me clear authorship of the project and allowed me to direct the flow of ideas. Christina Kallas describes the role of the showrunner thus: “It’s all about his taste, point of view, his voice, his eye, he’s the architect of this great big beautiful house with many rooms.”59 To further her analogy, the other writers are there as interior designers not architects.

To analyse a writers’ room is no easy task. These rooms are a cavalcade of ideas, anecdotes, personal confessions, revelations, and hard headed structural debates. I had only the resources for a three day writers’ room, (normally development of an Australian drama series would have a minimum of two weeks) so inevitably discussions were curtailed, plots left hanging and character arcs left unformed.

58 Jackie Keast, “Vicki Madden on Bringing the Showrunner Model Down Under,” If Magazine, July 25, 2017. 59 Kallas, p. 157. 23

However, in line with the premise of this thesis, what quickly became apparent to me, was how many of the tenets of complex serial drama; in depth exploration of character, strong location based story world and an innate understanding of viewing practices, were accepted as ‘givens’ by the team.

I chose to provide the participants not with the limited first draft script I had written, but with notes on style, themes, character and geography. I thought long and hard about this but ultimately decided I did not want the room analysing a half-baked script. Instead, I wanted the notes to serve as a leaping off point for provocative and creative discussion. This proved to be a good decision. The room immediately embraced the series holistically. The setting of the series was discussed in great detail. One of my initial inspirations for Overflow was the image of a river rising in the middle of a drought stricken city. This intrigued people and opened up discussions about the Yarra and its original Indigenous inhabitants. The mystery of the show, it was proposed, could well be connected to the bloody colonialism of the early settlers. I had originally written the character of Alfie and his family as white, but after this discussion it became clear to me that they should be Indigenous.

Exploring the Yarra rising also gave way to an intense discussion about climate change and the perils we face. How could I explore a rising river during drought without linking this to climate change? The Yarra’s resident colony of bats was also a strong visual inspiration for me. We discussed their disappearing habitat and the sense of menace and foreboding they could endow the series with. The thematic of water and rivers was embraced. The Vietnamese writer involved, Khoa Do, talked about his family’s arrival via boat. Google maps provided us with a clear understanding of the Yarra’s beginning and end. Suddenly the opening scene and closing scene of the series were clear in my head. We would open with our protagonist, Sophie, at the head of the Yarra, determined to rent a property in the Yarra Valley and make a new start away from the pain of her past. And the series would close with her almost drowning in the river at the foot of the property she never managed to move into.

As discussed in Chapter One of this thesis, a benchmark of all successful digital series is in-depth exploration of character. I was adamant in wanting to explore the complexity of a female character. How could I create an interesting, intriguing character? I wanted an audience to be drawn as much to Sophie Kowitz as they were to the drama of the crime. In the writers’ room, we discussed the trend towards the ‘pathologised’ female protagonist – Carrie Mathison in Homeland (Showtime 2011- Present), Kahina Zadi in Midnight Sun (Sveriges Television 2016), Saga Noren in The Bridge, etc. I decided I was more interested in exploring Sophie as a morally challenged character with a complicated backstory than a character who had a pathology. And so, we began to throw around ideas related to Sophie’s character – her backstory, her family situation and her morality. By exploring Sophie’s character this way, a strong and morally complex backstory emerged. The inter-twining of character trajectory with plot revelation is common in digital crime narratives (Breaking Bad, Top of The Lake, Broadchurch, etc.). In keeping with this, I knew that 24 the secrets Sophie was determined to protect would ultimately be inextricably linked to the unfolding crime story.

I was also keen to explore the character of Anh and was fortunate to have Khoa in the room. I did not want this character to be ancillary and was determined to give him a strong back story and home life. Khoa was indispensable to the development of Anh, providing anecdotal detail and challenging my limited knowledge of the Vietnamese migrant experience. Anh emerged from the writers’ room as a funny, burdened, well rounded character – a far cry from his thinly drawn initial incarnation.

Another important function of the writers’ room was to investigate plot across the entire series. My stumbling block in writing the first draft was that I could not see the big picture and therefore could not, as Doherty suggests, “embroider the details.”60 Inspired by the Danish model of large canvas storytelling, I was interested in multiple satellite worlds. I brought to the writers’ room eight different satellite worlds, which broke down roughly into – Sophie’s personal world, Tom and Abbotsford High School, Matt Kowitz in prison, Anh’s personal home/life, Whipper’s criminal world, St Kelvin’s School, Alfie’s life/family, and the Abbotsford Police Station. Within each of these satellite worlds existed multiple characters and sub- worlds. In the writers’ room, we explored these worlds and discussed the connection each world had to plot.

Once the writers’ room was over, I went back to the quiet cell of my own brain, but now I was armed with new ideas, new story threads, and an infectious vigour created by my generous colleagues. The model of collaboration had worked and broken open the series in my head. But the serious work was still ahead of me. As David Chase comments:

Other people have good ideas. And they’re hard to come by. But in another sense, they’re a dime-a-dozen. Turning an idea into an episode – that’s the grunt work. Eventually, the showrunner’s the one who has to look at his watch and say: ‘How do we fill up 42 minutes?’ We can all sit around and decide we want to make a Louis XIV table, but eventually somebody has to do the carving.61

I threw out my first draft, and with a clearer idea of both character and plot, I started again. In breaking down ‘narrative complexity’, Mittel suggests that, “serial narratives are composed of the four main elements of story world, characters, events, and temporality.”62 As I began to write the second draft I realised how much the collaborative exploration of these key areas was informing my writing process. Investigating story world had opened up the geography of the series, broadening the canvas of the show and offering rivulets of potential for plot and character. My

60 Doherty, p. 61 Adams, Tim. 62 Mittel, Complex TV, p.22. 25 biggest revelation however, was that Overflow had to ultimately be about climate change and the damage denial does to us. This would play out both in plot revelation and in Sophie’s personal refusal to acknowledge her own past. Linking, as all complex serial narratives do, the plot of the series with the protagonist’s personal journey.

The discussions about character and backstory had excited me in the writers’ room and now, as I delved into the writing, I found the character of Sophie much easier to realise. She was a controlled and controlling character. She had lied to her son in order to protect him. She would risk losing everything before admitting to her own failures, but her lie was too big and her denial would ultimately almost destroy her. The stakes of the series had suddenly skyrocketed. When introduced in the opening episode, Sophie would be professional and controlled but a ‘digitally literate’ audience would notice the cracks, giving them an inkling of where the character and series could take them.

Serial ‘narrative complexity’ is often an elliptical mode of storytelling where plot relevance is not explained up front. In procedural drama, notes from producers or network executives often demand that every line has to count, and every scene has to have forward momentum. In writing a first episode of a serial crime series, the writer, in my experience, walks a tightrope between intriguing an audience and confusing them. Ultimately the challenge for the writer is to avoid confusion by linking the satellite worlds and story threads in a satisfying and enriching way. The writer is like a weaver of a large tapestry, where the viewer’s eye can be drawn for periods of time to a small detail but will ultimately come back to embracing the whole.

As I re-wrote the first episode, I quickly realised that, plot-wise, I was more concerned with the series arc than the episodic arc. Knowing that an audience would, most likely binge watch the series as opposed to watching an episode a week had profound effects on the writing process. As discussed in the previous chapter, digital storytelling does away with the imperatives of commercial breaks, expositional writing (to remind an audience of important plot points) and to some degree cliff-hangers. Whilst I did think about cliff-hangers at the end of each episode it did not occur to me that my audience would need to be reminded of events. Rather than spoon feed them, I took for granted the fact that they would be fully immersed in the complexity of my story.

I think the fact that the audience can take it all in one go if they want to and really go into their own experience with it shapes what we do a little. It is a much more involved experience, when it comes to watching and bingeing. We try to think about when people might stop and when they might keep going, in a natural way. (Jill Solloway, Showrunner Transparent)63

63 Adams, Tim. 26

Recently I co-created and wrote a crime series Sunshine, where our plotting process was dictated by commercial breaks. We were instructed to write each episode as four blocks of: 20 minutes + 11 minutes + two blocks of 9 minutes. Each block needed to end on a mini-cliff hanger as we headed to an ad break. I found this process blocked the narrative flow of the story-telling and felt old-fashioned in a digital world. In developing Overflow, I was keen to avoid the stilted nature of this style of plotting and instead fully immersed myself in the creative process of untempered narrative ‘flow’.

What perhaps was most telling in my development of Overflow, was that the process had shifted as much as the product. To write an original, complex, multi episode television series was not possible using the old model of a ‘bible’ and directions from a producer/story editor. Complex serial storytelling required a writers’ room and collaborators to break open the original idea and kick start the process. The showrunner may be the ‘auteur’ but it is not the same model as the solitary ‘auteur’ of the feature film. The showrunners is the conductor of an orchestra, the ring master of a circus, the heart that requires multiple arteries to pump its creative blood.

Although I write organically and instinctively, for the purposes of this thesis I was keeping a watchful eye on my creative process throughout. What I realised was that subconsciously all my creative decisions and thought processes were intrinsically linked to Mittel’s hallmarks of digital narrative storytelling. My first inspiration is discovering a story world that has narrative and thematic scope; I explore character in all its moral complexity; I am not interested in linear plotting but rather broad non-sequential story-telling that encompasses multiple worlds; I am absolutely influenced by digital modes of reception and I craft a series with a strong sense of the modes of consumption now available to television viewers. After finishing the second draft of Overflow, I realised that my approach to story world, character, plot and audience reception were innate to my process. Without me even realising, the televisual revolution has taken place under my skin.

27

CONCLUSION

There is no doubt in my mind that television’s revolution of the past twenty years has incalculably altered the craft of screenwriting. Whilst I was not a screenwriter twenty years ago, I was a working television actor and somewhere, deep in a closet, I have piles of yellowing scripts from the numerous procedural dramas I acted in. The craft and scope of these fading scripts is light years away from the complex, broad reaching dramas we are beginning to finally embrace in this country.

As outlined in this thesis, televisual storytelling has undergone a seismic transformation in the last two decades; from the early days of HBO through to DVD box sets, internet downloading, to the proliferation of streaming services. Technological advancement has taken creative power from networks and executives and placed it firmly in the hands of both showrunners and audiences.

The ballooning growth in original serial drama shows no signs of slowing. The move away from ‘broad’ casting continues to foster niche, original, programming that can, as Seppinwall puts it, “be watched by 3 million people if they are the right 3 million people.”64 This fragmented landscape of creative possibility allows the showrunner/auteur model to flourish and has seen an exodus in writer/directors from the film industry. As Seppinwall suggests:

…where once there had been blockbusters, art films, and a large swath of movies in between – the 21st century slowly saw the extinction of the middle class movie . . . if you wanted thoughtful drama for adults, you didn’t go to the multiplex; you went to your living room couch.65

So, is it solely technology that has affected this dynamic change in television? Prime face one could answer ‘yes’. In fact, it could be argued that the history of the past twenty years of television clearly supports Marshall Mcluhan’s idiom that “the medium is the message.”66 As discussed in this thesis, recent technological advances have pushed storytelling in innovative and undreamt of forms. And yet, my exploration of this area leads me to believe that there is more to the television ‘revolution’ than simple technological change. As David Hesmondhalgh in The Culture Industries puts it:

We need to be particularly cautious in addressing technology as a causal factor, for technologies are themselves the effects of choices, decisions, contingencies, and coincidences in the realms of economics, politics and culture.67

64 Sepinwall, p. 65 Sepinwall, p. 5. 66 McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage. 67 David Hesmondhalgh, The Culture Industries. (UK: SAGE Publications, 2013), p.112. 28

HBO was delivering complex serial narratives like Buffy (Fox, 1997-2003), The X Files (Fox, 1993-2002) and Twin Peaks before digital downloading was readily available. Raymond Williams argues strongly in favour of human agency over technology, believing that technological advances arise from human need and not the other way around; “Viewers have the power to disturb, disrupt and to distract the otherwise cold logic of history and technology.”68 In short, I would rather suggest that the question might be, ‘Did the revolution of television narrative occur because of digital advances or did digital technology catch up to an audience’s desire for complex storytelling?’ Upon consideration, my feeling is that the answer lies somewhere in between. One informed and feedback into the other. To quote Mittel, any analysis of complex narrative televisual storytelling must acknowledge the concept that “form is always in dialogue with cultural contexts, historical formations and modes of practice.”69

Developing my series Overflow for this thesis has been very informative. In analysing my process I can see how far the writing process for series television has evolved. As a series drama writer/showrunner, I have the license to develop complex intriguing characters that do not have to be ‘morally good’, I can think cinematically in terms of landscape, and I do not have to write exposition to remind an audience of what they may have forgotten in the intervening week between episodes. I can also play with genre, explore difficult subject matter, and leave plot points open ended. There is great creative freedom in writing series drama when you have neither the dramatic constraints of procedural drama nor the economic constraints of required ad breaks.

Analyzing Twin Peaks – The Return whilst developing Overflow has been a very interesting exercise. Twin Peaks – The Return is such a clear example of a series with none of the constraints of pre-digital series television. Yet I realised when watching it that I am not prepared to throw all these constraints away. A clear plot, relatable characters, even the odd cliffhanger are important to the way I develop a show. While pre-digital series television is out of fashion, and often maligned, it still provides screenwriters with strong foundations of storytelling that, perhaps, should not be discarded too recklessly.

This is an extraordinary time to be a screenwriter. The television revolution, I believe, will continue to evolve, pushing serial drama in innovative new directions. The history of television’s two-decade transformation is largely male dominated but in developing Overflow and looking at more recent international and local offerings, I am confident that the changes that have been wrought on series drama have paved the way for a diversity of gender, race, class and sexuality (both in front of and behind the camera) in a way that was hitherto undreamed of in a pre-digital world. The success of recent shows like The Handmaid’s Tale, Big Little Lies (HBO, 2017), Glow (Netflix, 2017-Present) and Orange is The New Black, show that women’s voices are finally being heard and that new stories of diversity are beginning to crowd out dominant ‘white dude’ television.

68 Williams, p.64. 69 Mittel, Complex TV, p.4. 29

Every age creates its signature way of telling and consuming stories. The Jacobeans had the blood and lust of popular tragedy. The Victorians had the great social novel. The 1960s had new journalism. The chosen form of our own age is the downloaded serial drama.70

As I embark on developing my own series it is with a sense of thrill and intrepidation. As a writer, whose ambition once lay in feature film I see there only stasis, whereby in television I see progression, thrill and possibility. Would I have the passion to write for television if the revolution spearheaded by HBO had never happened? Probably not. Can I capitalize on these new advances and possibilities by developing a television series that explores a complexity of human emotions and characteristics but still intrigues and delights an audience? Stay tuned ...

70 Adams, Tim. 30

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Minerva Access is the Institutional Repository of The University of Melbourne

Author/s: McCredie, Elise

Title: All you can eat TV

Date: 2018

Persistent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11343/219274

File Description: Thesis text

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