It's OK to just teach a TV lesson
On shooting JR Ewing, the end of "Mad Men", and the use in conveying a lesson while telling a story
During the peak of network television dominance -- just before cable came along to ensure that there would always be at least 57 channels and nothing on -- individual scripts may not have been entirely predictable, but there was never much doubt about the direction that any individual episode might take. Problems would be solved, crises would be overcome, bad guys would be caught. The only reason it took so many months to figure out who shot J.R. Ewing was that real-world people were arguing over money. Scripts usually came across with the subtlety of an after-school special.
■ Fast-forward to the present, and it's no longer possible even to precisely quantify the number of channels available to the television viewer. Streaming especially has obliterated the old strategies. That chaos has resulted in much the opposite problem: Scripts are being written with binge-watching in mind and the specter of the second screen ever present.
■ In the realm of prestige television, an overcorrection can be seen in scripts becoming increasingly inferential -- sequential episodes skipping vital plot points in between that only make sense once the viewer attends to the context clues. "Arrested Development" did it for fun, with false promises at the end of each episode about what would happen "On the next 'Arrested Development'".
■ But serious television often now omits a lot. And though it can be hard to look away because the conflicts are so compelling, the shots so beautiful, and the actors so skilled, there's also something jarring about how screenwriting seems to have invited itself to skip a lot of details along the way to dropping heavy dramatic changes at the end of a season. Thus, viewers can find themselves drawn in by the screen presence of gifted actors on a show like "The Bear" but still reaching the end of a season and wondering why they hadn't been told any of the secrets sometime sooner.
■ Human storytelling doesn't always have to keep an explicit lesson in mind, but there's at least a little danger in surrendering so much of a story's energy to atmospherics, no matter how good they are. It's not that every scene needs to be worthy of a "The More You Know" comet trail, but audiences do deserve to know a little more about themselves at the end of a commitment to a program. High-prestige shows like "Mad Men", "Game of Thrones", and "The Sopranos" all managed to frustrate many of their fans with terminal ambiguity. Some people like to have things to wonder about after a show has finished its run, but few shows have the honesty to admit that, like "Curb Your Enthusiasm", their goal is to leave with "no lessons learned".
