Getting reality in your TV: characterization, continuity, and competence

by Doctor Science

It recently occurred to me that one reason people like unscripted "reality" TV so much is because it does two of the basic storytelling jobs better than scripted TV:

Characterization and continuity.

Velázquez' painting of the Spanish court shows unheroic people who aren't particulary intelligent, beautiful, or brave -- but they certainly seem real.

When fanfiction writers are working with a character from a scripted TV show, we have to figure out "what sort of human being would do these things, if they were done by a real human being?" And the fact is, after the first 20 episodes (at best) of most shows there is generally no real human being who would do all the things any given TV character would do, there are too many contradictions and implausibilities. Characterization on the show will inevitably be trumped by plot, or by "wouldn't it be neat?" plotting, or to set up exciting special effects. Fanfic writers then have to decide which parts of canon to throw out as "bad data" as we re-imagine the canon character until they're more like a real person.

For one example among legion, there's Glee. As one fan told me,

Sue ricochets from raging sociopath to total marshmallow to anti-bullying crusader, and her obsession with destroying the Glee club hinges on whatever the plot has going on this week. Will was considered one of the best teachers in the school in S1, and had won Teacher of the Year, whereas now he's apparently one of the worst (what we saw on screen was usually not-good, but the show kept saying he was great). Quinn... well, the most reasonable explanation is Multiple Personality Disorder.

Dr She Bloggo has a good rundown about How Quinn Fabray Could Be the Best Character on Glee (And Why She Isn't) -- and the answer to "Why" is characterization whiplash. I'm sure you can think of many of your own examples from shows that you've follow closely, where the characterization changes depending on the needs of the week's plot or the guest star or whether the actor is getting along with the showrunner or whether the character is popular with fans. Whatever the reason, what this isn't is good storytelling and good characterization.

Relatedly, there's character continuity: the sense that the characters we're watching are growing and changing as real people do. In most scripted TV shows, especially dramas, there's an event with a major psychological effect in every episode. If the characters actually responded to these events, if they actually made a difference as they would to real people, the characters would change hugely over the course of even a single season (before their nervous breakdown). So Hollywood uses The Reset Button or Snapback [warning! TV Tropes links!][1]

But watching someone change and grow is exciting. In most unscripted shows, the *point* is to put people in situations where they will change, and then watch it happen. They're almost the inverse of scripted dramas that way. In scripted dramas, the main characters are constantly confronted with life-changing and even life-threatening events but stay pretty much the same. In unscripted shows, real people are involved in events that are often pretty mundane, and we watch them change *anyway*. As Aaron Barnhart of the Kansas City Star pointed out:

Reality also allowed for surprisingly rich character development as viewers found the real people cast on these shows were often more entertaining than the stock characters of prime time. ... It's the People

The characterization in the "scripts" for unscripted TV is better than that in actual scripts -- subtler and more complex, like the difference between natural and artificial vanilla.

In 1884 it was Keeping up with The Misses Vickers. Your host: John Singer Sargent. source -- though the version associated with the Museum has a different, brighter color balance.

I personally don't care for the sort of reality shows that are *only* about the people -- shows like The Bachelor, the Kardashians, Real Housewives of Wherever, or Jersey Shore. Yes, the characters are real people, but to me they are *uninteresting* people. They're not trainwrecks I can't look away from, they're trainwrecks that fill me with such an embarrassment squick[2] I can only flee in horror.

I much prefer the kind of unscripted shows where the people are trying to accomplish something: the music shows, Project Runway, the cooking shows, The Deadliest Catch, the dancing shows. Part of the attraction here is seeing people actually *work*, doing jobs in a way that doesn't involve handwaving, lying, or breaking the laws of man and physics. These shows also show a lot of the practicing and making mistakes that goes into getting good at any task.

In fanficland, we call this competence porn. Competence porn is very rare in scripted TV, which generally jumps over all the boring, time-consuming bits of any task, if it references them at all. It's all about the reveal, the showdown, not about the legwork that got you there. As a result, anytime you see a job being done as part of a scripted TV show, you can be pretty certain that people who actually know about that job are gnashing their teeth. Even without expertise, most of us have enough contact with doctors to know that "House" is an extremely bad guide to medical practice (and to life in central New Jersey -- the fact that they don't complain about the traffic on Route 1 in every single episode proves this is all a fantasy). When viewers don't realize how fantastic what they see on TV is, you get the CSI effect: the expectation that real life will follow the rules of scripted TV.

Unscripted shows, in contrast, are often about performing an actual task, and one of their selling points is that we all love to watch other people work, to see what they do and learn something about how they do it. Humans are the kind of monkey that learns things by watching other monkeys, and we have a natural taste for competence porn.

Only a few writers of scripted shows have figured this out; one is John Rogers, showrunner for Leverage. Rogers blogs about most episodes after they've aired, and in talking about one second-season episode, he reported:

we wound up with one of the most sedate first acts we've ever had. Good Lord, how we agonized over spending so much time in the briefing scene in this ep. Ironically, this episode arrived just as we were collating feedback off the 'net and found, stunningly, you people love the briefing scenes. For we writers, it was always X pages of pipe we tried to make as entertaining as possible and move past to get into the plot. For the audience, watching competent people banter and plan was a big part of the appeal. "Competence porn" as we started calling it.

The term "competence porn" was already in fannish use at the time (2009); I don't know if Rogers picked it up from fandom, or if it's convergence.

Watching the blacksmith is a historically popular activity, for the way it combines the instinctively-entertaining "watching someone else work" with "staring at the fire". The Blacksmith's Shop, by Joseph Wright.

It's surprising that this came as a surprise to Rogers, because I suspect that part of the huge and long-running appeal of "CSI: Kalamazoo" and other forensics shows is competence porn, because they show people doing technical jobs with skill and insight. Or at least they purport to: CSI's portrayal of forensic science is more like "high-tech magic" [pdf] than actual, ya know, science.

I don't know if it's too difficult or expensive for scripted TV shows to include better characterization, continuity, and competence, or if they aren't even trying. I do know that as long as viewers get more of these storytelling values from unscripted shows, scripted shows (which are always much more expensive to produce) will remain at a disadvantage when renewal time comes around.

---

[1] TVTropes.org is, technically speaking, one of the "stickiest" sites on the Internet. Be warned.

[2] Embarrassment squick is that feeling when someone is doing something that *you* would find embarrassing, but they just keep doing it. To me it always feels as though there's some kind of objective quantity of embarrassment generated by their actions, and if they don't feel embarrassed it's still got to go *somewhere* -- so it picks me.

Neither my husband nor I ever liked "I Love Lucy", for instance. Embarrassment squick *central*.

Comments

[liberal japonicus]

Interesting post. This is stuff vaguely remembered, but a number of years ago some science fiction great write about how (and I think he talked specifically about Star Trek) the characterization trajectory was essentially a circle. I can't remember if it was an angry essay or not, but it pointed out that with episodic TV, you had a requirement to put the characters back where you found them. Again, maybe not remembered correctly, but I've heard that the standard contract for writing a novelization has that specifically written in (and if that's the case, I think you might be able to find it) that you won't do anything that will substantially alter the characters.

I'm surprised a bit about the revelation of competence porn, as I thought it was a basic component of any 'man facing a challenge' (and it is usually a man) show. It's something that is in a huge number of martial arts films (a genre that I have a particular weakness for) Actually, now that I think about it, it is most commonly found in Western boxing movies so you have Rocky chasing the chicken to get faster than Apollo Creed. You either have a movie where the hero is so badass that he takes down anything in his way (the template for the typical Steven Seagal movie), or the hero gets busted and thru his will to improve, reaches the point where he can inflict a beating on the guy who originally had his number (Rocky, Karate Kid, etc). I suppose that the CSI competence porn allows a fusing of the two, where your character has some sort of superhuman power AND you can vicariously experience that competence watching them work thru it.

Of course, a third factor is the revelation of the secret, so that a character, after doing this long hard slog suddenly 'knows' what is the most important thing. The other way this is done is by having the hero hold back until the bad guy does something so bad that the hero is released. My favorite example of that is a Chuck Norris movie where the villain does pretty much everything possible to ruin Norris' life, but it's when he shoots his dog that Chuck explodes.

I know, I need a life.

[Chuchundra]

I can't abide reality television. Mainly, I think, because there's very little reality involved. Almost everything on the screen is a story created in the editing room whose relationship to the truth is dubious at best.

And, although that's certainly true of scripted shows, it's not the same thing at all. When I watch an episode of, say, Chuck, I know that Chuck is a fictional character portrayed by Zachary Levi. When I watch a reality show about Joe Smith, I'm meant to take the portrayal of Joe Smith on the screen as the actual Joe Smith, even thought the two may have nothing in common besides looking the same.

It seems wrong to me...abusive, even.

I watched the first two seasons of Project Greenlight, because it was about something that interested me. It's clear, in retrospect, that the winners of the contests, the ones who got to make/direct the movie were set up to be the bad guys from the very beginning. They were the ones in the equation with no power and so the crap rolled down on them.

[liberal japonicus]

Chuchundra reminds me that the main subject of the post was reality tv. Japanese reality TV is actually quite different from what I've seen of US reality TV. The nasubi program is an example, but I don't think it was the first.

Tomoaki Hamatsu is a Japanese comedian who was locked up in an apartment for "Susunu! Denpa Shōnen" (January 1998—March 2002), a Japanese reality television show on Nippon Television after winning a lottery for a "show business related job". He was forced to enter mail-in sweepstakes until he won ¥1 million (about $10,000 USD). During this time, he was made to wear no clothes, was cut off from outside communication and broadcasting, and had nothing to keep him company except magazines.

Having watched bits of various reality shows, perhaps the Japanese style should be imported into the US?

[liberal japonicus]

My kingdom for a preview function!

[wj]

It is, perhaps, a comentary on the impact of CSI that we now gripe about the unreality of the technical aspects. And they are, no question, unreal. (Not to mention having a pernicious effect on the justice system, as people on juries start worrying about why they don't see all of the scientific evidence that CSI led them to expect would be routine.)

But consider where television was before CSI appeared. CSI was a hit, in part, because it was the first to show actual technical people doing their jobs. And making a difference. Today, that kind of stuff is routine in everything from NCIS to Castle to Hawaii 5-0. They aren't as heavy as CSI wherever, but they at least acknowledge that solving problems might require some input from someone other than the detective.

For a parallel, consider what science fiction made it onto TV pre-Star Trek. Engineers? Nope. Science Officers? Nope. At most, it was naval stories with rockets. Frequently it was just space westerns. Since Star Trek, anyone making a science fiction show feels compelled to at least acknowledge from time to time that science is important to the plot. Star Trek looks, from a modern perspective, pretty simplistic. But at the time, it too was a big step -- not just forward, but into the unknown.

The plots may be simplistic. But at least reality gets acknowledged more than it once did. And the characters are more like sane normal human beings than any I have seen in "reality TV".

[wj]

lj, we've got a preview function. What you want is an Edit function.

[liberal japonicus]

doh!

[bob_is_boring]

Isn't part of the appeal of live sports -- baseball, for some reason, seems especially apt -- explainable via the 'competence porn' theory?

[Doctor Science]

That's a great point, bob. In fact, you might look at live sports as the first big genre of "reality TV", one centered on competence as well as competition.

Someone else pointed out that there's one movie genre where showing someone learning a job is important and respected: sports movies, especially boxing (or martial arts). I don't know if that's for some psychological reason, or if it's just that every step forward for a boxer involves a *fight*, which is dramatic and filmable.

[Model62]

But consider where television was before CSI appeared. CSI was a hit, in part, because it was the first to show actual technical people doing their jobs. And making a difference.

Once again we're reminded that there's nothing new under the sun: Quincy, M.E.

[Model62]

"Competence porn" was a big part of E. Hemingway's method, too. Cormac McCarthy goes there quite a bit, as well (or maybe inevitably).

Which is not to say that Hemingway invented it or McCarthy extended it. One summer long ago I spent several afternoons tucked into a back booth at Phillipe's in downtown LA -- where the french dip sandwich is supposed to have been invented -- reading a fascinating 19th century American textbook on Sperm whaling.

If you're trying to build authentic characters, you have to put them in motion, doing stuff with things. Real motion, real things. Plus you gain access to wonderful vocabularies. Good, solid nouns and colorful active verbs which with to punch up your prose.

[bluefoot]

Sporting events are definitely a form of competence porn, and maybe that's why we get obsessed about the Olympics, even for sports we don't care about in between.

Perhaps it's also why there are such heated arguments (at least in my circles) about sports coverage. Hockey broadcasts that show plays developing, rather than just following one or two guys, or football games spending time showing the entire field of play seem to be increasingly rare which makes the sports less interesting to watch. There are few things I hate more than a race broadcast that shows only the leader car in closeup (it's why I can only watch non-American F1 broadcasts). You can't see anything that makes racing interesting - the strategy, team vs. individual, etc.

[hairshirthedonist]

Hockey broadcasts that show plays developing, rather than just following one or two guys, or football games spending time showing the entire field of play seem to be increasingly rare which makes the sports less interesting to watch.

That, and all the extraneous information, often from the sideline commentator, leaving you scratching your head as to why someone thought you would care that one of the coaches gave some vague and uninteresting response to an insipid question. And why do you need to cut to someone on the sideline to report on an injury? Can't the guys in the booth just provide such updates?

I have no experience in the TV industry. Is that stuff over-production or over-direction or what?

In any case, I agree that I would like to be able to yell at the quarterback for not throwing the ball to the open guy he's not seeing while the play is actually happening, rather than being told about it after the fact and seeing it only in replay, because the camera was following the ball too closely during the play. Or not have to wonder "where did that guy come from?" when someone makes hit or an interception. Or miss a really good down-field block.

Basketball and baseball don't seem to suffer from this stuff nearly as much.

[Countme-In]

The writer Thomas McGuane (novels "92 In the Shade", "Nobody's Angel", many more) is a master at competence porn in the areas of breaking horses, calf-roping, permit and bonefish fishing in the Florida Keys and trout fishing in, well, everywhere.

He's such a superlative writer that I have migrated to reading his non-fiction essays on horses and fishing, and despite my complete lack of interest in both, I can't imagine anyone describing the experiences better --- he combines the technical jargon and vernacular of both subjects with extraordinary description that invokes deeper meanings.

His writing alone is "competence porn".

[hairshirthedonist]

I find highly technical music to be competence porn. Some if it even sucks as music, but still makes for great competence porn.

I know some people who get so caught up in it that they can't appreciate simple music that's still very good at conveying a feeling or creating an atmosphere. It's like the only point of music for them is to demonstrate how well the musicians have mastered playing their instruments.

There's a place for that, I guess, but it can get tiresome. Sometimes, you just need to groove.

[liberal japonicus]

I can't remember when I first started reading the New Yorker. but that magazine seems based on the notion of competence porn.

[Julian]

What New Yorker tics do you have in mind when you say that?

In The Wire the briefing scenes were among my least favorite, actually, but that's because I do like good comp porn and I thought the briefings were too expository.

[DCA]

Thanks for explaining to me (or at least giving me a name for) what I liked about the second half of (nearly) every Law and Order episode: lawyers doing their job, whether strategizing, talking to a judge or (least interesting) talking to a jury. Actually, I'd say that the first half was pretty good too--and it wasn't all about the detectives. My favorite characters ended up being the forensic pathologists.

[Countme-In]

To the small extent that I've watched Law and Order or the CSI shows, which isn't much, I find the competence porn to be glib abbreviation, in which clues to murders or methods of extracting confessions from the accused are arrived at in 90 seconds of jaunty back and forth.

I need a little romance in the build-up to the money shot.

I like my police work to be a little incompetent and haphazard with long time lines of gray evidence-gathering, ratiocination, and gradual insight.

Not unlike the spy work in "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy".

[Julian]

The wire was great and largely unimitated in providing competence porn from the criminal side too.

I think "competence porn" should be defined more narrowly to avoid swallowing up the entire category of watching people do clever or difficult things.

Maybe use it to describe cheap and dirty imitations of true competence, for example Nicolas Cage in National Treasure - "Tower of power? The Eiffel Tower? Jenga ... Ikea! The treasure is underneath the Brooklyn Ikea!"

[Countme-In]

This next is only barely related to competence porn, which is new term for me, and thus I keep writing it, kind of rolling itover my tongue to internalize it.

Also, perhaps only Russell and lj will find what follows interesting.

I've been reading Walker Percy for years and several months ago I started re-reading the six novels and the three books of essays.

As an aside, I appreciate writers whose characters are well-read and drop names of books into their stories - sort of competence porn wherein we find out the ideas in the piece of fiction have well-grounded antecedents.

At any rate, fairly early on in "Love In The Ruins", the hero (anti?) Thomas More mentions that he has been reading Stedman's "History of World War I", with weeks spent poring over the section on Verdun (Percy alights on the slaughter in World War I as the beginning of the end for the worn-out symbolic coinage of Christendom and the old, highly educated, Western world and the beginning of something new and not very good).

Years ago, maybe 30, I made a mental note to read that book.

So recently I started reading Peter Gay's works on Weimar Culture and I remembered the Stedman opus, which I imagined was a magisterial work of history.

Local fairly large city library: nada.

Amazon: nope

Internet searches galore: zilch.

I found a series of books by a Stedman on the various battles of World War I on Amazon but this Stedman was born in 1949 and would have been 22 years old the year (1971) Percy published the novel.

So I started looking for reference works about and interviews with Percy and finally ran across one from years ago in which the interviewer mentions the Stedman history and Percy, (you can tell) pauses and then blurts out that he made the book and the author up!

I went back to "Love In the Ruins" and Percy even quotes the phantom Stedman: "The men in the trenches did not hate each other," wrote Stedman. "As for the generals, they respected or contemned each other precisely as colleagues in the same profession."

A false quote. But containing truth .... and thus, well, competent. Soft competence porn.

Incidentally, the very next line of Percy's novel is "Comes a tap at the door. Is it guerrilla, drughead, Ku Kluxer, Choctaw, or love couple?", in which he catalogues in a pop culture sort of way the catastrophic divisions that this way come for late 20th and early 21st century America.

[liberal japonicus]

Julian, don't get me wrong, I like competence porn (unless we define it in your more narrow definition) so I didn't mean it as an insult to the New Yorker. I was just thinking of those articles like How To Make A Pencil (I just made that up, but a book about that subject got its start from a New Yorker article, though I'm sure that wasn't the title)

Count, you had me at reading Walker Percy...

[Harald Korneliussen]

Competence porn is a great word, but I think it would be best to separate it from competition-related activities and epic deeds-style activities. I think those have forms of appeal rather independent of the participants' competence.

When I think competence porn, I think more craftsmanship videos on YouTube (a really fascinating genre), and people displaying unusual, yet everyday skills.

[hairshirthedonist]

"Alone in the Wilderness," anyone? I find an element of competence porn in that, which I was reminded of by Harald K's mention of craftsmanship videos.

[cleek]

there used to be entire TV networks devoted to (or at least known for) competence porn. TLC used to be more of a DIY home-improvement network where you could watch skilled craftspeople build things before your very eyes. and "Food TV" used to be 24/7 stand-up chef shows, where you could watch talented chefs cook things.

now they're all contests and attention whores screaming at each other : reality shows.

[Countme-In]

Cleek, that's absolutely accurate about the Food Channel -- they've ruined their franchise as far as I'm concerned.

I hate this posing, dissing, arms-crossed-"you-lookin-at-me"-bullying- you're fired-crap with the loser dragging his suitcase on wheels to the studio's limo with a camera stuck in his face to record the last bit of humiliation.

As Tom McGuane wrote somewhere about the tawdry little reality show that America has become in all of its aspects: "America is a dildo that has turned berserkedly on its owner."

Meanwhile, sticking with the competence porn theme, I found this excerpt from an essay on Thomas McGuane's works by Mark Kamine.

"Also admirable—and clearly admired by McGuane—is the sheer skill involved in doing something well, in knowing something through and through. He explains to the Paris Review interviewer that in his third novel, Ninety-two in the Shade, he explored “the preoccupation with process and mechanics and ‘doingness’ that has been a part of American literature from the beginning—it’s part of Moby-Dick. The best version of it, for my money, is Life on the Mississippi, which is probably the book I most wish I’d written in American literature.” The “doingness” in Moby-Dick (sailing, whaling) and Life on the Mississippi (piloting steamboats) becomes, in Ninety-two, guiding skiffs for tourist fishermen pursuing the skittish bonefish and permit found off the Florida Keys. Here Thomas Skelton, a masterful student of the pursuit, has recently become a guide. On his first job, he has trouble coping when an inept nabob accidentally hooks a rare prize, “a fish that was exactly noble, thought Skelton, who began to imagine the permit coming out of a deep-water wreck by the pull of moon and tide, riding the invisible crest of the incoming water, feeding and moving by force of blood, only to run afoul of an asshole from Connecticut.” McGuane’s rhetorical skill—moving from the lyrical evocation of “moon and tide” and “the invisible crest of the incoming water” into the clunky, comic “asshole from Connecticut”—underlines the point: the inexpert man sins against nature. McGuane included the scene in the 1975 movie he made of Ninety-two, allowing us to follow Skelton as he hops off the skiff and traces fishing line into a mangrove creek. The image of concentration on the actor’s face (Peter Fonda played Skelton), the mangrove branches he ducks his way through, and the careful way he handles the trapped fish once he reaches it convey nicely Skelton’s skill. The surreptitious freeing of the fish, out of sight of the asshole from Connecticut, perfectly punctuates the scene.[3]

Expertise also attaches to ranching and all its chores and offshoots. McGuane has lived on Montana ranches for almost as long as he’s been a published writer, and the processes of maintenance and improvement feature frequently in his fiction and nonfiction. In Nobody’s Angel (1981), the troubled and aimless protagonist has only his horsemanship as bedrock: “Patrick used spurs like a pointing finger, pressing movement into a shape, never striking or gouging. And horseback, unlike any other area of his life, he never lost his temper, which, in horsemen, is the final mark of the amateur.” Some Horses (1999), a nonfiction look at training, using, and competing with cattle-ranching horses (known as cutting horses), contains some of McGuane’s most meticulously descriptive and effortlessly analogic writing, in which the lessons of horse riding seem to stand in for lessons of life."

[Ugh]

a fish that was exactly noble, thought Skelton, who began to imagine the permit coming out of a deep-water wreck by the pull of moon and tide, riding the invisible crest of the incoming water, feeding and moving by force of blood, only to run afoul of an asshole from Connecticut.

Hmmm...I like this.

[Roger Moore]

Basketball and baseball don't seem to suffer from this stuff nearly as much.

I have to disagree for baseball. They focus so much on the pitcher/batter confrontation that you usually can't see what the fielders are doing. You almost never get a chance to see whether an outfielder got a good break on the ball, which makes it very hard to judge the quality of their play. Even in the replays, they rarely isolate the fielder from the pitch to the catch so you can see how he did what he did.

My gut feeling is that routine use of instant replay has a big effect on the style of the broadcast. Before instant replay, they had to use wider angle views so they could be sure to include all the action when it was happening. As replay became common, they switched to narrower views with the knowledge they could go back and show alternative views if necessary. Now football and baseball at least see replay as a way of filling dead airtime between plays, and I think they deliberately choose angles for the live play that cut stuff out so they can be sure there will always be something new to see on the replay.

[Ugh]

Basketball and baseball don't seem to suffer from this stuff nearly as much.

On basketball, I'd like to watch a game from an "endzone" camera (for lack of a better term), so you can see what players see as they come up the court. It's great that basketball is alone in all the major sports where you generally can see all the players all the time, but the "sideline" view gets a little tedious at times and you miss some of the nuances. Basketball broadcasts could also benefit from one of those overhead wire cameras used for NFL games.

[liberal japonicus]

Related to that is this WSJ article about the All 22 view.

[russell]

on the topic of competence porn, I just want to say that Sargent has a way of making the women he painted incredibly radiant.

they turn my head every time.

also:

in which he catalogues in a pop culture sort of way the catastrophic divisions that this way come for late 20th and early 21st century America.

"Love In The Ruins" is, frankly, uncanny.

Although the opening to "92 In The Shade" is pretty good, too:

Nobody knows, from sea to shining sea, why we are having all this trouble with our republic

Almost 40 years later and we still don't have a handle on it.

[Countme-In]

I just saw this above, lj.

"My favorite example of that is a Chuck Norris movie where the villain does pretty much everything possible to ruin Norris' life, but it's when he shoots his dog that Chuck explodes."

Chuck Norris is so tough that when he found out his dog had voted for the Kenyan/Muslim in the White House, he shot the pooch himself.

Norris is a species of competence porn wherein the music is a mind-numbingly egregious loop of three-chord progressions on the wrong guitar distortion setting, the plots are designed around the typical right-wing American male's flaccid, 20-minute masturbatory cycle, recorded in slo-mo, including the obligatory snooze afterwards, the female cast members have to inflate themselves beforehand, and the smallest dick on the set is Norris', while the biggest dick on the set is Norris himself, unless it's one of those vacant-eyed man/dog buddy flicks in which the canine gets the girl.

I think it's the "reality show" our fellow American murderer in Afghanistan was watching in his head when he shot people in their beds in the middle of the night-envisioned night.

But then, Norris doesn't need night-vision. He knows a darky with his own eyes when he sees one, even on a moonless night.

[hairshirthedonist]

I have to disagree for baseball. They focus so much on the pitcher/batter confrontation that you usually can't see what the fielders are doing. You almost never get a chance to see whether an outfielder got a good break on the ball, which makes it very hard to judge the quality of their play.

This may be more of a problem with national broadcasts, which means it's thereby also more of a problem in the post season. I find watching the local broadcasts of my home team not to be nearly as close-up obsessed. I don't know how local broadcasts are elsewhere.