Let’s (Not) Do the Time Warp Again: Origin Stories
I know, let’s remove any lingering mystery surrounding our characters!
Recently, my wife The Duchess said something to me that was utterly shocking and unexpected, words that no sane person ever wants to hear: Let’s watch “Grace & Frankie.1”
Okay, it’s not quite that dramatic. But it was unexpected, for the simple reason that I had never, not once, considered watching this series2. For no particular reason; it was just one of the apparently billions of scripted programs dumped onto the streaming servers on literally a daily basis. There are so many shows that are just ... there. You neither have interest in them or no interest in them3, you simply ignore their existence.
Which is odd, only because it stars Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Martin Sheen, and Sam Waterston, as well as a host of less famous but still somewhat famous people4. Jane Fonda! There was a time when Jane Fonda appearing in a TV sitcom would have been big news. Now she’s starring in the 456th most-watched show in America. Time is truly a hideous bitch goddess5.
Anyway, after I recovered from my shock, we did indeed start watching Grace & Frankie, which is about two women in their 70s (Fonda and Tomlin) whose law-partner husbands (Waterston and Sheen) reveal they’ve been having an affair for decades and now want to divorce their wives and get married to each other. It was created by the same folks who created Friends approximately 500 years ago. It’s also an example of an old-timey trope wherein a tired, dull premise is suddenly made fresh and exciting with the introduction of The Gays, which hasn’t been a thing since roughly 2005.
And it’s fine. No one is going to be writing thinky essays about this show6, but it’s an amusing sitcom in the classic mold, with Frankie and Grace as mis-matched best friends who irritate each other as much as they love each other. In what would have been kind-of revolutionary move a decade or so ago, no one is upset about the homosexuality, they’re upset about the lying and the deceit involved with a 10+ year affair between married spouses7. It’s really all about the comic spark of Tomlin and Fonda grousing at each other.
But I’m not here to review a thoroughly middling sitcom I am shocked to find myself watching in 20228. No! I am here to talk about Season One, Episode 10, “The Elevator,” because it’s a god-damned origin story.
Previously On
Eventually any serial entertainment will be tempted by the origin story. Something non-writers don’t often appreciate is the stress of coming up with new ideas and then executing those ideas9. The necessity of coming up with new stories can lead you into some very dank places, and one of the dankest is the origin story. You might think of “origin story” as a purely superhero-centric concept, the reason why we have seen Krypton explode and Bruce Wayne’s parents murdered so, so many times10, but any serial story can delve back into the past to explain how its characters got to be who they are.
Friends did it (several times), Community’s worst episode is not-coincidentally an origin story, How I Met Your Mother did one—there are a lot of examples, really. And it is almost always a terrible idea.
I should note that if a show or serial starts off with characters meeting in the pilot, it isn’t really an origin story. An origin story pivots off of the built-up mystery surrounding characters’ pasts. Over the course of a show, characters reference things the audience hasn’t seen, hint at aspects and layers to relationships that haven’t been explained or explored, and like a horror movie monster you never get to see it, so the audience is thus free to imagine whatever awesomeness they want. Meanwhile, the untold stories that exist before the main narrative collect like flammable gas, potent in its potential energy11. Eventually the urge to burn off that energy and deliver those stories becomes almost irresistible, especially when you’re struggling to come up with new adventures for your characters.
And then you do it, and everyone has regrets12.
Unbuilding a Mystery
The reason origin stories like this work so poorly is because they take infinite potential and convert it into a disappointing story. And the stories are always disappointing, because the infinite potential of the unknown mixed with your audience’s imagination will always be better than anything you could write. That’s one of the strangest things about writing: They’re your characters and it’s your universe, but your audience will always imagine things in the margins that you can’t match, because their imaginings are unfinished, always evolving, glimpsed but never seen.
Origin stories take those potentially awesome moments and render them as plain old stories with plain old jokes and fan service. It’s never as good as people imagined it would be.
It’s also typically unnecessary—even harmful—because it’s essentially exposition. You’ve hinted at things—for example, that two of your characters had a lengthy and scandalous affair over the course of decades—and now you’re going to explain in great detail each and every step of that back story. It’s like taking a big ol’ bucket labeled EXPOSITION SAUCE and coating your story in it13.
There are few narratives that benefit from less mystery. Let’s consider a show that was built entirely from origin stories: Lost. It started off strong, then became lost in a muddle of its own labyrinthine mythology, in part because it was required to spoil the origins of every single character. The show started off life as a viral sensation, a show everyone had to watch. By the time it ended it was just this show people had invested a lot of time in, so they wanted to see the end. It had lost everything compelling about it, in large part because it gave away all the origins14.
Origin stories are easy wins for a writer, but they’re ultimately boring. It’s like when you hear about a movie or TV show that’s supposedly amazing and incredible, and when you finally get to watch it you’re underwhelmed, in large part because your imagination had built it up into something truly mind-blowing. In other words, seeing the monster is always going to disappoint—even on a silly sitcom like Grace & Frankie.
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk. Lucky for you I wake up like Frosty the Snowman every day with zero memory of my life before. Happy birthday!
Next week: Everyone a villain on Better Call Saul.
What makes this worse is the fact that The Duchess approaches series television the same way a Cocaine Monkey approaches cocaine: Once she decides she likes a show, she wants to watch all 27 seasons and 567 episodes in about 3 weeks. Frankly, it’s exhausting.
Seriously: No one has ever thought “I really must watch Grace and Frankie before I risk missing out on this pop culture juggernaut.”
In my wild youth I played the text adventure The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe by Douglas Adams, which has the greatest conceptual puzzle ever known to man. When you check your inventory at the beginning of the game, it only notes that you have “No tea.” This was odd, because in those games you generally only saw items you actually had in your inventory, but I chalked it up to Adams’ silly humor. Slowly, it dawns on you that this is diabolical: In order to win the game you had to figure out how to simultaneously have “No tea” and “Tea” in your inventory. The whole “interest/no interest” thing reminded me of this and I just wrote 125 words about it. I’ll show myself out.
It’s somehow horrifying to realize that we live in a world where every single working actor alive has a role on some show, on some barely-there streaming service. If you have any sort of name recognition at all, you’re appearing in 4 scenes on something like FreeVee.
For example, I used to have what scientists call Boyish Charm. Here’s my proof:
Er ... except me ... oh, I’ve wasted my life.
And yet, not nearly upset enough. Sitcoms always operate on this weird level where they gesture at outrage and anger, but the feel-good vibes of the format require everyone to hug it out aggressively. So this show feints at people’s intense rage at being deceived and cheated on for decades and then does the busy work of having all these people continue to be in fun, affectionate relationships with each other as they mutter darkly about how the heart wants what it fucking wants or something equally ludicrous.
The classic Jeff Somers Move: Write 500 words before getting to the goddamn point. You’re welcome.
He says as he writes the SIXTY-EIGHTH GODDAMN WEEKLY ISSUE OF THIS NEWSLETTER.
Where’s the alternate history where Bruce Wayne’s parents aren’t murdered and he grows up to be Elon Musk?
I knew that high school physics course would pay off someday. My whole life has been building to this.
Is “EVERYONE HAS REGRETS” the title of my memoir? Maybe.
I suddenly wish writing a novel was more like cooking dinner and you could literally have EXPOSITION SAUCE on your desk in a tube, because that would also mean you could have a tube of AWESOME SAUCE as well. Of course, that also means I’d have a tube of EDGY OPINIONS I’d always be tempted to break out.
And the increasingly ludicrous nature of its story, yes, yes, there was that as well.
I see you cut your own bangs the morning of your school picture, to the horror of your mother, unlike no one I personally know or am.
I had a high school ID where I wore plastic vampire fangs. 🦇