Ron D. Moore, creator of BSG and long time Star Trek writer came onto the Voyager writing crew shortly after turning DS9 from a boring, mediocre show and making it’s final 3 or 4 seasons into some of the most consistent, entertaining and insightful episodes of Star Trek ever made. On one of his first days, as he tells the story, he was working with the other writers trying to figure out who the main characters are on the show. He asked the writers about B’leanna wondering who she is and why she behaves the way she does. She’s a conflicted character because of her half-klingon half-human genetic structure, but Moore was curious as to how she felt about he genes, and how it affected her psychology. He put up the question, “If she was in such and such situation, how would she behave.” Allegedly his fellow writers said (I’m paraphrashing) “We don’t really know. She usually behaves how we need her to for the story.” The talented Moore was unsurprisingly frustrated working for that show and left quickly to showrun BSG (this story may be apocryphal because I can’t find it, but it stuck with me because it makes so much sense).
The best tv shows are driven by strong characters. In sitcoms these characters tend to be groups of people who make us want to spend time with them. Good ensemble sitcoms make us want to hang with the group at Central Perk, drink with Norm at Cheers, work under Michael Scott at Dunder Mifflin, or hit on girls with Barney at Maclarens. TV dramas rely on their characters too. What would House be without Hugh Lauries titular character? Mad Men has a host of characters that, over time, viewers have become fascinated by. Lost spent 3 seasons developing their characters through flashback. People come back week after week to see the enrichment of these characters, and to understand who they are. Serialized entertainment nearly requires interesting characters because it’s longevity makes even the most interesting jobs of being doctors or ad execs or living on a paranormal island grow wearisome. Even in serialized literature, War & Peace uses the backdrop of the war as a playground for its ever memorable characters, and Dickens’ work is similar. Movies and shorter pieces do not require them to be compelling. Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata and The Death of Ivan Ilych have forgettable characters yet both are great books. Movies sometimes use leads like those in Rear Window or Synecdoche NY, where the cast is used as mirrors for the viewer to observe himself.
Good serialized entertainment eventually gets comfortable with its premise, and relies on what remains interesting: the people it has created. This isn’t a criticism. The marathon that is TV makes it possible to have long emotional arcs ending in overwhelmingly cathartic moments. Spending so much time with these people allows us to know them more intimately than many friends because we see them in their weakest moments. We see the sides of themselves they try to hide, and knowing them so well makes these characters mostly predictable. Sometimes they defy expectation, but they surprise themselves in doing so.
Real people too, are mostly predictable. The reason we become comfortable around people is because we rely on them to react to jokes or conversational topics in expected ways. Good characters, tv or otherwise, are the same. Predictability is often thought of as boring, or a path to dystopian futures, but in reality, it adds to our enjoyment of life rather than taking away from it. People complain about their marriages and work life as routine and plain, but there are plenty of other options available to them. Divorce or new career paths are commonplace and socially acceptable today, but many stay on a particular path because their other choice is unpredictability, which is stressful and frightening. Conversations with strangers, while engaging, lack the heights of banter between two people who know the rhythms and cadences of their interlocutor. Much like sex, a good conversation starts out slowly and gains both volume and speed until a final big moment (often a laugh) is reached followed by an awkward pause for the people to catch their breath. Yep… It’s knowing people, and knowing what you expect of them that makes good conversation/sex possible.
Being predictable isn’t bad. People strive for it. The fact that people love TV so much is proof. Tv is stable for the most part. If we want unpredictable things we can watch movies which are capable of shaking us up and making us feel uncomfortable (Many movies are predictable, especially Action movies and Rom-Coms, which often follow the same rigid plot points and are populated by cliché fictional characters like Jennifer Aniston). Serialized entertainment survives by being mostly predictable, but all of the best shows offer us interesting characters who we can fall in love with because even if they are predictable in many ways, their personae remain interesting enough for us to come back to over and over again. Even when routines get dull and tired, the people who we let live in our lives, fictional or not, keep it interesting.
