Serial drama

Back on my hobby-horse once more... post-network serial drama... and I am tagging these blog entries for those wishing to follow me in this exploration.

Offline conversations have seen me obliged to defend my bias towards 'fast turnaround production' of video fiction. "How can a weekly output of 115 minutes of television storytelling in any way be compared with a two-hour motion picture crafted after six months of shooting?" 

It is a question I had to answer quite often when I was producing soap opera in the nineties, sometimes posed by affronted cinéastes, more often by actors worried that signing up for a soap could somehow be detrimental to their reputation.

My response was based on my reading of an aspect of the history of the arts and entertainment, harking back to the time of the troubadours, mummers, guisers and such. 

From the commedia dell' arte of the fifteenth century to the twenty-first century soap opera is not such a big jump. The characters represented fixed social types, stock characters, such as foolish old men, devious servants, or military officers full of false bravado. Characters such as Pantalone, the miserly Venetian merchant; Dottore Gratiano, the pedant from Bologna; or Arlecchino, the mischievous servant from Bergamo, began as satires on Italian types and then became the archetypes of many of the favorite figures of later European theatre.  

Does soap opera not rely on archetypes, with every ensemble of fictional characters required to have the standard complement of types? The underdog... the super villain... the girl next door... the rebel...  the straight-laced 'good guy'... the 'bad girl'... the matriarch.

More important... history speaks of this form of entertainment as being above all for the people, for those crowding the market square, going about their daily business but welcoming the divertissement provided by the travelling jugglers, acrobats and players.  

However the town had not only a market square but also an imposing castle, the preserve of the formally educated, the sophisticated refined, the powerful. And among them are the patrons of the higher entertainment arts. Performances at court may be of the works of playwrights, composers, librettists, choreographers... of creative artists whose names remain revered in the chronicles of European culture.

I would argue that with soap opera we are more true to tradition, more witness to the evolution of a form of entertainment that has stood the test of time.

Today there are also, on the other hand, creative artists whose work is seen as being of higher cultural significance, often speaking an audience as small as those assembled at the princely court in ages past. But in the context of cinema... and here is the paradox... the culturally significant work is most often to be found on the indie margins of the established film industry. A six-month shoot is not the guarantor of cinematic high art. 

Mega-billion dollar blockbusters are, I believe, a temporary aberration. And it is amusing to note that many of the most costly movies made recently have been dependent on exactly the same range of archetypal figures as there are in a low-budget soap opera.

And so I would tell hesitant actors that joining the cast of a soap is certainly no worse for their reputation than appearing in the fourth or fifth sequel of a soul-less franchise in which the true stars are, in any case, the digital special effects! Take the work before the job goes to a virtual actor! 

[This explains the image above, from the 2002 movie S1mOne.]

I would even now go a step further. My conviction is that 'fast turnaround production' of video fiction can be combined with the avant-garde creativity of independent filmmakers to result in something quite new and wonderful.

There will be applause both on the market square and in the castle.