What Teen Wolf has taught me about the TV industry

by Doctor Science

As I've confessed before, I'm a fan of the MTV series Teen Wolf. Perhaps I should say I'm a fan of the Teen Wolf fandom, because the show itself has not improved since my last despairing post about it here.

Season 4 began last night, and I'll mostly be following it only by proxy, via recaps and gifsets, not by actually watching (spoilers are OK in comments). This highly unscientific poll at hollywoodlife.com suggests I am not alone:

Besides fanfic, discussing and thinking about various problems with Teen Wolf has taught me some things about the TV industry in general. Especially how little (ad-financed) TV actually care about telling a *story*, compared to having a series of not-necessarily-connected emotional scenes. Kind of like ads, in fact.

Edited: to give credit to specific fans for quoted material, with their permission.

My most important insights came from this character, Cora Hale (played by Adelaide Kane):

One of the crucial elements in the Teen Wolf series is that werewolf Derek Hale's family is dead, killed in a fire some 6-10 years before the start of Season 1.

This leads him to brood in the burnt-out ruins of his childhood home. Actor Tyler Hoechlin is so good-looking that watching him do so is no hardship.

Early in Season 3A (the first half, 12 episodes that make up a story arc), Derek is re-united with Cora, who turns out to have survived the fire after all; she was only about 10 years old at the time.

Except.

Except we never learn how she survived the fire, where she's been all this time, or what made her come back. And none of the other characters ask her, either.

While 3A was airing, some fans theorized that Cora was introduced to fill the gap left by Gage Golightly, who had played werewolf Erica Reyes in Season 2 but didn't want to come back for Season 3. As SZ Grey said, Cora had no real characterization:

there's nothing there but a hollow girl-shaped frame hastily painted-over to conceal the fact that it used to be wearing erica's face.

And in fact, at a con this spring, attending fans reported:

Basically, the writers confirmed that Cora wasn't conceived as her own character, but rather as a stand-in for Erica after Gage left the show. They didn't bother to actually come up with any backstory for her or to develop her at all—either her character or her relationships with any of the others—because they were literally just writing her as Erica with a different name.

I was struck with the realization that no-one tells a story like this. No one. Look, 15-year-old fanfic writers who don't know how to use punctuation still know enough about story-telling not to do things like "introduce long-lost sister without saying where she's been, and without anyone being *interested* in where she's been." So how can a bunch of well-paid adult professionals not seem to know any better?

The only explanation I can think of is that the Teen Wolf writers and showrunner (TPTB) aren't actually trying to tell stories. I think they're creating snapshots or brief scenes, little dioramas or vignettes, where the aim isn't to tell a *narrative* (= events in time[1]) involving *characters* (=virtual human beings instead of hollow frames). Instead, they want emotion-laden pictures, where all that matters is how things look, how competently that hollow frame is painted, and how much emotion the actors can put into today's lines.

Why would even marginally-competent professionals do such a thing? I think it's because the purpose of (this kind of) TV isn't to tell a story, it's to sell ad space. Viewers aren't the customers, they're the product. And the kind of viewers who don't think very hard, don't care about continuity, and are just here for visually striking scenes of high emotion are just the kind of audience -- the kind of *product* -- advertisers are looking for. A show that is attractive nonsense is a better wrapping for ads than a better *story* might be.

Now, it's pretty clear that neither showrunner Jeff Davis nor his staff are at the top of their field, but I don't think they're necessarily at the bottom either. Most of the other ad-financed shows I've watched in recent years (e.g. Stargates, Hawaii 5-0, Elementary) have *also* had crappy narratives and continuity. AFAICT, Teen Wolf's level of storytelling nonsense is pretty much bog-standard for American TV, and I think it reveals at least as much about TV as an industry as it does about their particular limitations.

Not that they don't have them! Fans who've worked in TV say that the Teen Wolf writing process seems messed up even by the standards of the industry. It's not just script re-writes that are last-minute (that's a given), but first drafts. Actors don't know important things about their characters, or only find out when they see the scripts. Yet when Davis admitted that a lot of the continuity problems are because he writes the scripts at the last minute, he laughed about it, seeming almost proud of himself for his sloppiness.

One fan noted:

I've found that white dudes are often proud of being sloppy and last-minute because they've never experienced any negative consequences for it. Meeting tolerance for their sloppiness and mistakes everywhere ("Boys will be boys!")("Oh well, it's readable, wouldn't want to embarrass him when he's probably already aware of all these typos"), they mistake their noticeably error-ridden efforts for essentially meeting expectations. They then imagine that this nonexistent ability (to carelessly and quickly meet expectations which other people would have to work carefully to meet) is a sign of how they're so rebellious (read: cool) and amazingly talented and ~good under pressure~ (because they imagine that lesser creative beings would be incapable of producing at the last minute, or would be even lower quality).

The fact that power in Hollywood is concentrated among white dudes who do think they're cool, talented, young at heart, and good under pressure will tend to entrench this kind of aristocratic sloppiness, make it part of the culture.

But it's also that Hollywood's social forces keep runners for a successful show from even thinking about noticing their own mistakes. They're surrounded by desperately eager sycophants, and the only people they're truly accountable to — the network execs — care about nothing besides ratings.[2] As long as the ratings are coming in — due to e.g. the actors working their butts off with mediocre material — and they're staying more or less on time and on budget, the showrunners will keep being praised for half-assed work. It's a position of monstrous privilege, and it takes someone with a hell of strong character to not believe their own hype.

---

[1] As I've said before, the Teen Wolf timeline is non-Euclidian at best. There's no clear indication when various past events (crucially, the Hale house fire) occurred or how old the characters are.

During Season 3A, Jeff Davis was answering questions submitted to the official Teen Wolf tumblr account:

Q. okay seriously how old was derek when his house burned down does anyone know?? do you know?? does jeff know?? will we ever know??
A. you guys are obsessed with the ages. is there a reason?

....

Q. will we ever get a full explanation of how werewolves age?
A. okay, someone explain the thing with needing to know ages to me. pleeeease.

...

Q. people need to know ages so they can write fanfiction and know wether or not they need an underage warning xd
A. ahhhhhh

It's not just because of underage warnings, of course. Human beings (and werewolves!) change over time, and writers need to know what life-stage their characters are at, to understand how events will effect them. Even fanfic writers who can't spell know that a timeline is important for storytelling, but the showrunner doesn't. This was a big part of my realization that Davis' goal isn't actually storytelling, but something else.

[2] Not 100% true, I believe -- I think they also care about being cool, and about being able to claim they had some creative input. Hence the hell that are network notes.

Comments

[medie]

You know reading this reminded me of NYPD Blue. When the showrunner there got to the point of handing out scripts at the last minute and such, he lost lead actors and ended up losing his job. It was this big industry MESS (and I think it was when Jimmy Smits quit)

Funny how a decade or so changes things huh?

[cleek]

it's soapy, is what it is.

pile up the characters and coincidences and retcon the backstories; turn the characters into pure id; make all motivations all-consuming and completely irrational and short-lived. keep the short-term drama as hot as you can with just enough continuity so people will gasp when you have that character from last season (the one you killed!) step into the light, holding a gun.

my wife has me watching Vampire Diaries and Revenge. i know me some teen soaps.

[Nombrilisme Vide]

The only ad-driven shows from the last decade that I've watched and enjoyed have been procedurals, so some of what you describe as authorial misbehavior would be genre norms in them. E.g., (some) characters can show up out of the blue w/o explanation because the job is what's important, so it's implicit that there's plenty of plot-irrelevant social interaction happening off-screen. Admittedly, I'm also watching shows with older audience demographics, and as curmudgeonly as it sounds, I have to assume that really does make a difference.

[Gianduja Kiss]

Honestly, I think Teen Wolf is so far below ad-driven show standards it's ridiculous. I mean, I watch lots of ad driven shows, including bad ones and other ones aimed at teens - none of the kind of complete lack of concern for continuity that Teen Wolf has. It's in a surreal class of its own.

-GK

[e313]

teen wolf is reaching a level of non-connected mess of overemotional, overdramatic little scenes, abstract nonsense that surpassed ridiculous these days...
but hey! stargates weren't that bad! sure, it wasn't the best writing but there was a continuity, there was a timeline, the characters have some consistency in their characterization and cause and effect existed in that verse.
elementary is pretty ok too.
no comment on hawaii 5-0; never watched.
but the other two (stargate and elementary) cannot be compared to teenwolf. nope. especially after the end of s2 (it more or less had managed to have a sloppy but clearly visible story up during s1 and s2). s 3a and s3b was the kind of absurd train-wreck that i can't compare to anything. ever.

[dr ngo]

Somewhat curious: how does one determine what is an "ad-financed" (or "ad driven") show? As opposed to what? Surely not just PBS or HBO or some version of Pay TV?

I seem to be missing some key modern meme here, because I don't see what Teen Wolf, Stargate, Hawaii 5-0, and Elementary have in common except that they're not on paid cable television. But if that's all, that would put them in the same category as about 90% of all television over the last half century, which is not a very sharp distinction.

(I'm not trying to start an argument here; I genuinely don't get it.)

[Doctor Science]

dr ngo:

Yes, that's exactly what I mean. The vast majority of TV has historically been ad-financed, but now there are alternatives like Pay-Cable and Pay-streaming.

"Orange Is the New Black", for instance, is not ad-financed: the viewers are the customers. I've been watching "Orphan Black", paying for it directly by streaming from Amazon.

I'm theorizing that ad-financed TV has become more emotional and incoherent over the years, evolving to be a more perfect setting for ads. Paid-cable and paid-streaming are re-discovering that they can and must deliver more coherent *stories* to their viewers, because the audience is the customer, not the product.

[Tsam]

The "ad-financed" series that I consistently watched that last two years are Elementary, The Americans, Murdoch Mysteries, and Arctic Air. The last pair are on CBC, so you likely missed them, but they do have good continuity between episodes. And although mystery series have self-contained plots to most episodes, Murdoch and Elementary certainly care about the characters they introduce and develop them over time.
For a show you might be more familiar with, why would you say that The Americans is not credible at continuity and overall story-telling?
(BTW, I am feuding with my daughter about Elementary. As a devoted Doctor Who fan, she sees it as a ripoff of Steven Moffat's Sherlock, so she refuses to watch.)

[wj]

What distinguishes a good TV series, whether ad-financed or otherwise, doesn't change:
1) interesting (i.e. not 1 dimensional) characters.
2) characters who develop over time.
3) good stories. That is, stories which have a beginning, middle, and end in each episode.
4) a story arc that crosses episodes. Thus there are events which occur in one episode which build on events in previous episodes and continue into future episodes.

A show can, perhaps, be adequate without all four. But probably not without at least two.

[Yama]

I hear you Cleek, my wife has me watching those shows as well. Sometimes entertaining, but they sure do churn away. Utterly non rewatchable.

On the other hand, I have found Reign to be more entertaining than Game of Thrones, even though I am a diehard GRRM fan. I get a little sick of the HBO show runners budget cop outs.

[DavidTC]

How on earth did Stargates have bad continuity? Stargate was really good at continuity for a non-arc-based show.

I mean, SG1 is the show that when they actually did commit a continuity error (they needed a real DHD instead of their hacked computer interface in one episode, so had to go through all sorts of hassle to get the one from the Russians...but the writers forgot America already had an extra real DHD, from the Antarctica Stargate, sitting around), the fans complained so much they wrote in a line in a later episode about how the Antarctica DHD had died almost immediately after they recovered it, to explain why no one tried to use it during that other episode. The fans had come to expect continuity so much that a slip-up needed an *on screen* explanation.

I think perhaps you've confused continuity with 'arcs'. Pretty much all of Stargate's episodes were standalones or two parters, with a seasonal enemy but very little seasonal story. But continuity is simply 'a consistent universe'. Stargate had that.

Obviously, a show where the entire season, or even the entire thing, is written out in advance, is going to have *better* continuity, but Stargate, SG1 at least, was much better at continuity than pretty much any non-arc-based genre show. I mean, for God's sake, look at the X-Files.

The other Stargates were also fairly consistent, as far as I recall. Not that that they were particularly *good* shows, but they had reasonable continuity. (Of course, the *movie* didn't have continuity with the series, but that's because the movie pretty clearly wasn't in the same continuity as the series.)

[cleek]

I have found Reign to be more entertaining than Game of Thrones

definitely.

GoT is just too huge a universe for TV. there are too many characters and too many plotlines, IMO. S1 was interesting because it was new. S2 had me reaching for my iPhone so i could play some games because i got tired of trying to figure out who was doing what and i what i was supposed to think about it. i'm completely uninterested in starting S3.

Reign is very condensed and simplified (by comparison), and has better background music.