Regular readers of this blog know that I don’t like any TV or movies. I am Entertainment Scrooge, except worse, because I’m certain that not even a supernatural intervention could convince me to like Somebody, Somewhere. I hate everything, and I can’t tell if that’s because my soul is broken or because Hollywood sucks. (It’s probably both.)
I do like Severance, though. I like everything about it: The premise is interesting, the world is fun, the cast is outstanding, and — this is such an underrated factor — the jokes work. It’s also part of a genre that hooks me just about every time: The “what the fuck is going on here?” genre. I’m a sucker for a mystery, and I’m game for a tantric plot, which is to say: I’m down for things being dragged out for an absurdly long time in anticipation of a mind-blowing payoff at the end.
But I’ve been burned by this genre before. In my opinion, the ending of Lost underwhelmed, the ending of Game of Thrones downright fucking sucked, and there is no hell hot enough to torment the makers of Westworld. I didn’t watch Battlestar Galactica, but I have enough nerd friends to know that that finale didn’t exactly boost everyone’s midichlorian count. Why do these shows — which are always well-crafted and occasionally brilliant — mostly struggle to script satisfying conclusions?
I used to wonder that. And then I worked in TV, and now I don’t wonder it anymore. TV saddles the creative process with constraints that are either insurmountable or almost insurmountable. Consider some of the challenges that Severance is facing that would make a satisfying ending a truly remarkable feat.
One challenge is obvious: It’s make-believe. You can’t actually neatly divide a person’s consciousness like they do on Severance. I’m embarrassed to admit that before I dipped my toe into the world of fantasy writing,1 I expected airtight explanations for sci-fi bullshit. For example, it used to bother me that Marty McFly’s parents never said “You look and act a lot like this guy we used to know!” Of course, the problem there isn’t the writers; the problem is that time travel isn’t fucking real. Some phenomena in entertainment get less-than-satisfying explanations because they have no explanation in real life, and viewers can either bake that reality into their expectations or be disappointed.
Other limitations stem from the fact that entertainment is a business comprised of people and all the bullshit that people carry with them. Lost’s mysticism got seriously waylaid by reality — remember Walt, the little boy with special powers? That plot fizzled out because the actor who played Walt hit puberty, and it’s hard to do a story about a little boy when the alleged ten year-old is six-foot-five with a beard. The “Mr. Eko” character got axed because the actor who played him didn’t like living in Hawaii, and Charlie was written out largely because he was played by a movie star who wanted to go back to making movies. Actors are people, only worse — they’re people whose only discernible traits are vanity and pettiness.2 And even shows set in mystical fantasy worlds have to deal with that reality.
Another hard truth is that fully imagining a mind-blowing scenario to be revealed bit-by-bit like an ancient city being excavated by archeologists is really, really hard. A more practical way to do things is to throw some weird shit out there and hope to explain it later. This, I’m convinced, is how the Lost writers painted themselves into a corner. Even things that were eventually explained weren’t always satisfying — remember the ship that was found inexplicably far inland? That was a big mystery; the characters wondered out loud “How could a ship get so far from the shore??” Well, we eventually got the answer, and the answer was: A wave. Not so inexplicable after all. In truth, there is no Big, Profound Explanation hiding beneath the surface, and clearing away the dirt can only reveal that fact.
And the final nail in the creative coffin is the fact that anyone who wants to develop a mind-blowing reality to be slowly revealed will probably need to do so for free. Hollywood loves free work: If they like your pitch, they’ll ask for a treatment. If they like your treatment, they’ll ask for a script. If they like your script, they’ll ask you to beat out all of season one — if you’re nobody, you’re not collecting a cent for any of this. So, you basically need to come up with the entire mind-blowing reality on you own, and if you do that and then the producer says “eh, I’m not feelin’ it” — or “the actor we wanted booked another gig”, or “another network is doing a similar thing”, or “our money guy got MeToo’d”, or one of a billion other things — you wasted that effort. The “figure it out as you go” approach dominates because only a masochist would develop a fully realized mind-bending reality on spec.
Interestingly, though, Severance creator Dan Erickson might be exactly that masochist. Producer/Director Ben Stiller said that Erickson has “always had” an idea for the show’s ending. We don’t know how elaborate that idea is — it could be The Big Reveal or an idea for one character or even just: “It ends with me, Dan Erickson, getting rich.” And I say: Mass respect if it’s the first or the third thing, and even the second thing could be good.
If Severance executes this sci-fi quadruple backflip and sticks the landing, IMHO, it will be the first show to ever do so. The realities of television make it definitely impractical and maybe impossible to have the Earth-shattering conclusion in mind from the start. We’ll see what the people making Severance come up with — I’m rooting for them. And I’ll be massively impressed if they pull it off and completely unsurprised if they don’t.
In Hell, I Will Be Forced to Assign Pronouns to Fictional Characters All Day
Imagine you’re writing a movie script. This movie takes place in the near future. In your script, Character 1 — a superhero — looks at Character 2 — also a superhero (a 2016 FCC rule requires that all movie scripts be about superheroes) — and says: “Gee, I’m glad we saved the world. And now we get to meet the president! I’m really excited to meet…”
I once worked on a script that I considered sprinkling with supernatural elements, but I decided against it largely because of the challenges I’m describing.
I’m 60 percent joking here.
In my opinion, The Americans not only stuck the landing but knocked it out of the park. It was the best possible ending; we were wondering how it would end and when it ended, I thought: of course this is the only way it could have ended.
I get nervous when a show like Severance does ostentatiously weird things, like staging a waffle party with masked erotic dancers, or revealing the existence of an indoor goat ranch. Are the writers slowly uncovering a strange yet cohesive world that will eventually be revealed to the audience, or are they just screwing around? I, too, remain concerned that in Severance's case it will be the latter.