Sunday, January 27, 2008

You stupid #%&!, I can't believe she did that!

I was halfway through the second season of Grey's Anatomy when I realized that I pretty much hated all the characters in the show (i.e. after Meredith slept with George). In some cases, television presents us with characters and situations we can relate to somehow, and the writers strive to bring things around to a basic theme that can often be inspiring. However, I found myself feeling that the theme of "just be yourself" on Grey's Anatomy was being diluted by all the unbridled emotional infancy most of the characters were displaying. But then again, maybe it's not the characters or the writers. Maybe it's me.
In most situations on television, it is always best to level the playing field in the end. The characters strive for a higher standard. They come around and realize that life's biggest tangles are often ones they have constructed for themselves.
And the sad thing is, I can appreciate this kind of message that one should: Live life to its fullest. The writers suggest being a "doer" in life, taking risks in order to beat the odds, and brushing yourself off to fight again if you have a misstep.
The ever-so elegant illusion that is Scripted Acting is that all of the characters are able to engage others with great conviction. In television, people respect what the other characters stand for, accept them for who they are, engage them in solutions for progress, all within about 42 minutes after the commercial breaks. Putting aside the fact that DVD boxed sets might spare us from commercial advertising, in real life things are not resolved in 42 minutes and themes do not develop in seasons of twenty-something episodes.
Unfortunately, this fact is all so painfully obvious to most of us, which could very well be the reason we just want to plop down on the sofa once in a while and divulge ourselves in a drama that seems to resolve itself. Just as you can feel you don't like all the characters in a television show, sometimes the same thing happens in real life. You can't believe a friend or relative is acting a certain way and you wish they'd just snap out of it. You feel some acquaintance is practically wearing his or her faults on their sleeve, and that person is so naive. You imagine a better script for situations somehow connected to your life, and you try to cope with the fact that someone decided to finalize a very different turn of events.
And then we place our stethoscope upon our own chests and ask ourselves: Am I the sort of main character I would write into a television series? Putting Sandra Oh's frantic drive for success aside and Patrick Dempsey's hair out of our minds for a moment, a good main character is troubled, divided and always has some glaring fault. We create our own personalities based on a perception of what the ideal main character should be in any given situation. But in the end, we do slip up, we give into our faults, we feel divided, and somehow we don't possess that conviction that comes with scripted lines. And at that point, it is time to recognize that we might not like the script that the people on the screen in front of us are reading, but it really is up to us to write a better one.
And for what it's worth, by the season finale of most shows, I'm usually still planning to watch the next one. Yeah, you know, we're all suckers for television.