Difficult characters
(Spoilers for The Privilege of the Sword, Season Two Battlestar Galactica, "House vs. God," "Finding Judas")
Difficult characters, in the sense I mean, are those who don't easily sit within audience expectation. There's always a "but" that goes along with them. Hannibal Lecter, for instance, is a brilliant and civilized man but he's a serial killer. Or, to put it another way, he's a serial killer but he can converse on Renaissance art, history, and psychology. What is the audience supposed to think? Are they supposed to love, hate, or fear? If he ends up apprehended or killed, will they cheer or be disappointed?
Obviously, to a great extent, this is in the hands of the artist. You can create a character who's bright and entertaining, and give him witticisms in great heaping bunches (because as the writer, you've got plenty of time to go home and think of them); and if you tell the audience he was once a vampire or an immortal or a fallen angel responsible for the violent deaths of thousands, they'll be happy to overlook such details. It all happened off-stage, you see, and therefore it's purely intellectual knowledge. On-stage, what they see is a man of wit and bravery, and for those two things, the audience will follow anywhere.
Full disclosure: even knowing it's a bit of a cheat, I use this technique myself from time to time. But back when I was first considering these questions, I'd watch or read about such characters, and I'd feel a niggling dissatisfaction. I couldn't help thinking that if the story were told differently -- if you went back and, say, opened with some likeable teenage girl and then watched her and her family be slaughtered, a goodly portion of the audience would not follow the killer into his new life.
Just for the hell of it, I once began a novel by having my protagonist murder an innocent, and I was overjoyed when people told me, "I didn't think it would happen, but by the end of chapter two I was completely on his side." That, I thought, was earned; I wasn't slipping anything past anyone, or using a light tone to mask deeper matters. (Which didn't stop me from leaving the book unfinished; my editor asks about it once a year. I'll get to it, Betsy, if you're reading this. Year after next, I may have some free time...) Understand, I'm not criticizing when I use words like "cheat"; as it happens, I'm a big fan of characters like Spike or Methos or your local dark lord with the angsty look and the shady past. But if you're like me, you've got to push the archetype.
What we're talking about here with the word "difficult," is really likeability. You could get an essay out of whether all characters have to be likeable, and indeed, what "likeable" means; this is not that essay. Most of the time, most writers want their characters to be, at the very least, appreciated, and I'm addressing the practical side here: the how, and not the why or when. I personally have to have affection for my characters, even the serial killers, or I can't do them justice in the writing. The good news is, in the world of books, affection from an author will very readily translate into affection from the reader, because the reader sees a character through the author's eyes. (Of necessity, I'm generalizing here; but it's a source of great joy to me -- like watching the building-blocks of the universe fall naturally into place -- when I see how easy it is to transmit the authorial state of mind to the reader. You don't have to work at it, you don't have to try. It just happens! Could life be better?)
In film and television, that close contact between two minds (writer and reader) is gone, and so is the automatic get-out-of-jail-free card. A world of ambiguity opens up. You have to consider how your affection may be transmitted to the viewer, and likeability is just not a rational thing. After all, why should it make a difference which part of a story you tell first? Why should it matter whether you see a character behave nobly before he behaves upsettingly? And what happens when you deliberately introduce shades of gray? Without the guidance of a narrative voice, what will the audience make of it?
I should pause here and say that, first of all, any time we let gray into the mix, some part of the audience is not going to come along. Gray creates a cognitive dissonance that permeates your story and drives some people off the way those ultrasonic pest sirens drive off mice and groundhogs. There's a high-pitched squeal, and suddenly people are thinking, "I had ironing to do, didn't I?" My first piece of advice: let those people go. They're not the ones you're looking for anyway. The bigger question is, once you get past the slice of audience that can't tolerate ethical questions, who's left, and what the hell are they thinking as they watch?
Fortunately for us all, there's still a big portion of the audience that likes ethical questions. (If not, David Kelley would never have had a show.) The challenge for the writer comes when the questions are embodied in a character, because characters, like our families and friends and lovers, call forth our monkey-troop instincts. We love and support, no matter who they mangle! Or else we hates them, my precious! This is who we are; characters we become attached to become part of our "unit," part of what defines us, and thus are fandoms born and divided.
Some questions are easy. Take Max killing Ben, her broken, beloved, long-lost "sibling" at the end of Dark Angel's "El Pollo Loco." "Will the audience like her if she does this?" (You have no idea how often this question gets asked in television. Along with the note, "Could you clarify this?" Recently a writer said to me, "Wouldn't it be great to get a note that said, 'Could you make this more subtle?' And we both started laughing like lunatics.) I said, "They'll like her more." (How could they not? When has an audience not come on the ride when a hero suffers through a heartbreaking act?) Or on The Agency, when Stiles learns, too late, that the man he killed was innocent. "The audience will hate him if he does this!" Me, grinding teeth: "They will like him more."
James Kirk lets Edith Keeler walk in front of a truck. Buffy sends Angel to Hell. We. Like. Them. More.
Years ago, a writer I know created a science fiction pilot, in which a group of star academy cadets are trapped on a ship, far off at the edge of nowhere, when war breaks out. There is no real authority in the ship. They learn that one of their number is a traitor, who will continue to aid the enemy the first chance he gets. And they can't guard him every minute. They find him guilty, but there's no official of the state to pass sentence. The highest ranking cadet agrees the traitor must be executed, for the safety of everyone, and says he'll take the responsibility and burden on himself. Then he goes to the traitor's cabin and finds he's conveniently committed suicide. At this point, everyone watching became disgusted -- what an easy escape from a difficult situation; it threw you out of the story and announced in bold type, "A writer did this." Why did it happen? Because the network refused to let the pilot air unless the story was changed so the cadet didn't have to execute anybody. "They won't like him if he does that." Of course, the fact he didn't do that was the last straw for the audience and the reviewers; the pilot was not a success.
In the examples above, there was really no danger the characters would become "difficult" -- i.e., ambiguous, potentially dislikeable -- because of their actions. As I said, some questions are easy.
Others are far more gelatinous and messy. Especially (and this may seem counter-intuitive) when it's not all about life and death. I said that I once opened a novel by having my protagonist kill someone; well, ellen_kushner did me one better in her world of Riverside (Swordspoint, The Fall of the Kings, The Privilege of the Sword). One of the main characters in Swordspoint is Alec, a scholar with a mysterious past and a lover who's one of the best swordsmen alive. So in a world where annoying someone can lead to duels and death, what does Alec do? He annoys people. Deliberately. All the time. "I just don't get what Richard sees in him," I muttered to myself. "That boy needs a good spanking." And yet, it's not entirely true that I couldn't see his attraction: in the sequel, The Privilege of the Sword, Alec is now a wealthy duke and his scale of trouble-making has grown proportionately. A young girl he hardly knows is raped by her fiancé, and her family tells her not to be a fool about it -- it's a great match, and the rapist was just anticipating the wedding with a little "cuddle." No big deal. You picture to yourself the future she has with this man. And you think, "I bet when Alec hears about it, he'll understand why it's a big deal."
Because you know what? There is room in Alec for all those things.
What Kushner does with Alec is far more dangerous than the dark deeds I've had my characters do; Alec is hardly a blameless innocent forced into a difficult situation. This is who he is; a guy you might not even want to hang around in real life. He could very easily turn on you and verbally snap your head off because he's feeling moody that day. I couldn't live with him. But I have to respect him, and I understand why he could hold Richard's affection; I understand that there is someone at home there, and that he's made up of a mixture of frailties. And taken altogether, they make him a hero. He's a stubborn pain-in-the-ass; so? That quality can be put in the service of heroism as well as any other. He's a hero because he will occasionally recognize when something should be done, and he has the will to do it.
Or to put in my own terms, "stubborn pain-in-the-ass" is Alec's superpower.
Now, this sort of thing is much more risky in terms of audience response. They feel far freer to take such characters or leave them the way you take or leave people in real life; here we enter an arena that's a lot less predictable.
Here as well we might return to that joke I was told: "Could you make this more subtle?" It would be harder to sell Alec on television than on the page, unless he were played by an actor with looks and charisma (as he certainly ought to be, by the way). I mean "sell" here not to the network, but to the audience. Decades of simplification, of refining everything down to dualities -- right/left, black/white, friend/foe -- have trained us not to perceive the spectrum, at least not in this medium.
On Battlestar Galactica, President Laura Roslin learns that scripture speaks of a leader who will die before their people reach the promised land. Roslin herself is dying of cancer, and fits the bill eerily well. Her priest is convinced she's the leader foretold; as for Roslin's point of view, we're not immediately given it. We see her taking in the information. We know she's a bright, rational, soft-spoken woman who knows how to look at things politically and logically, but -- religiously?
When her power is threatened and she's thrown in the brig, a group of high-ranking, apparently fundamentalist members of government visits her. She tells them that she believes she's fulfilling scriptural prophecy, and is the leader who'll take them to Earth. It's a turning point in getting the support she needs.
After the episode aired, some people were disappointed that Roslin was so manipulative as to fake a religious conversion. Others were disappointed that Roslin, the rationalist, believed what the priest told her so easily.
It was a dual choice: either Roslin believed, one hundred percent, and is weak-minded; or she was wholly faking it as political manipulation, and is a bad person.
If I were in Roslin's place, I'd think: How strangely well I fit the description given in scripture. How much of my childhood religious training do I still believe? It may be true, it may not -- I have to think about this some more. Meanwhile, the survival of the human race is at stake; we can't afford to let the Fleet break up over my incarceration. I have to rally people to my side, or all is lost.
People can wonder about things without believing them fully. Political manipulation can take place without the motivation being selfish. A lot can go on in the human brain; it's more than an on/off switch. Why can't all these things be true?
In a novel, it would be easy to lay out her thoughts. In a visual medium, the viewer has to do the work themselves, and here's the problem: we're used to there only being one answer.
Take Wilson, a complex character on House. He's introduced as (1) a married womanizer (and therefore, by definition, a betrayer) and (2) someone who can't stop caring about people. I loved that two traits we don't normally find in the same character were there in him; it gave him a reality I miss on television. In "House vs. God," we learn that he drove a terminal patient home when her ride didn't show up, stayed to get her groceries when he saw she was too sick to go out, and then, just stayed. A glaring ethical violation for a doctor.
In my mind, Grace was glad he was there. I imagined what it would be like to go through cancer treatment, knowing you were terminal, without any support. What do people do who don't have families, or money to hire help? It might even have crossed her mind that she was using him. (Though she was very fond of him, and knew he was of her. I would use the word "love" here, because it applies, but there's too much tendency in our society to read that as "one, true romantic love.")
House, upon learning of this, calls Wilson an "emotional vampire," who feeds off others' need. That's why, House says, that Wilson is one of the few oncologists who thrives instead of burning out under the burdens of his practice. And perhaps that's true, on one level; but we also know that House likes to present motivations in the darkest possible light. Is it so horrible to need to be needed? That's the kind of drive that calls people to volunteer in the Peace Corps, to become firefighters, to risk their lives for others -- to become an oncologist, and make the lives of many people better than they were before they met him.
Does any of this mean that Wilson didn't violate an ethical standard? And an ethical standard that's there for a very good reason, to boot. He betrayed himself, medicine, and an ideal of behavior.
And I believe Grace was very glad he did it.
Can't all these things be true? Must it be only one answer?
Can't being a manipulative liar who needs to be needed be Wilson's superpower, if he puts it in the service of heroism the best he knows how?
At the end of "Finding Judas," Wilson goes to Tritter to give evidence against House. Why did he do it? Because House, under prolonged psychological pressure (remember the Lenny Bruce story), coupled with drug deprivation, was coming apart? Because something had to be done to put an end to this, one way or another, and House clearly wasn't going to do it? Because he nearly cut a girl in half? Or because he punched Chase? Or because Chase looked angry enough to go to Tritter himself, and if Wilson beat him to the punch, he could negotiate a more reasonable deal that might get them all off the hook?
Can't all these things be true? Must there be only one "real" answer? Because I have to say, in the actual life that I live, I have multiple reasons for doing things all the time. The trouble with choosing only one answer is that it boxes the character in, and from that day forward, Laura Roslin must ever be the jaded manipulator who fakes her religion; and that makes her less than she is. Or less than she could be.
Frankly, I think television is to blame here; we're all about finding one true answer. We simplify and distill and chip away at stories till everything's as straightforward as we can make it. But we still insist (because we have to) that the audience do the work of filling in the blanks. (Contrary to popular wisdom, I believe television is a far more active medium than books; at least, most of the time. A book can tell you the answers, when it pleases. A face may leave you guessing.) Every story we structure goes from A to B to C; so of course, given a blank, the audience will fill in "D." Life, on the other hand, as we very well know, is about being hit from all sides. Like birth, it's a messy process. I'd like to see television become a bit more messy, but it means taking Alec-from-Riverside chances. Will the audience like it? Where's the dividing line, where does a character cross over into "difficult," and where into "difficult without any reward for me in watching"? (Two very different things, as anyone who remembers the old Profit series will know.)
Some answers are easy, remember? Not this one.
Difficult characters, in the sense I mean, are those who don't easily sit within audience expectation. There's always a "but" that goes along with them. Hannibal Lecter, for instance, is a brilliant and civilized man but he's a serial killer. Or, to put it another way, he's a serial killer but he can converse on Renaissance art, history, and psychology. What is the audience supposed to think? Are they supposed to love, hate, or fear? If he ends up apprehended or killed, will they cheer or be disappointed?
Obviously, to a great extent, this is in the hands of the artist. You can create a character who's bright and entertaining, and give him witticisms in great heaping bunches (because as the writer, you've got plenty of time to go home and think of them); and if you tell the audience he was once a vampire or an immortal or a fallen angel responsible for the violent deaths of thousands, they'll be happy to overlook such details. It all happened off-stage, you see, and therefore it's purely intellectual knowledge. On-stage, what they see is a man of wit and bravery, and for those two things, the audience will follow anywhere.
Full disclosure: even knowing it's a bit of a cheat, I use this technique myself from time to time. But back when I was first considering these questions, I'd watch or read about such characters, and I'd feel a niggling dissatisfaction. I couldn't help thinking that if the story were told differently -- if you went back and, say, opened with some likeable teenage girl and then watched her and her family be slaughtered, a goodly portion of the audience would not follow the killer into his new life.
Just for the hell of it, I once began a novel by having my protagonist murder an innocent, and I was overjoyed when people told me, "I didn't think it would happen, but by the end of chapter two I was completely on his side." That, I thought, was earned; I wasn't slipping anything past anyone, or using a light tone to mask deeper matters. (Which didn't stop me from leaving the book unfinished; my editor asks about it once a year. I'll get to it, Betsy, if you're reading this. Year after next, I may have some free time...) Understand, I'm not criticizing when I use words like "cheat"; as it happens, I'm a big fan of characters like Spike or Methos or your local dark lord with the angsty look and the shady past. But if you're like me, you've got to push the archetype.
What we're talking about here with the word "difficult," is really likeability. You could get an essay out of whether all characters have to be likeable, and indeed, what "likeable" means; this is not that essay. Most of the time, most writers want their characters to be, at the very least, appreciated, and I'm addressing the practical side here: the how, and not the why or when. I personally have to have affection for my characters, even the serial killers, or I can't do them justice in the writing. The good news is, in the world of books, affection from an author will very readily translate into affection from the reader, because the reader sees a character through the author's eyes. (Of necessity, I'm generalizing here; but it's a source of great joy to me -- like watching the building-blocks of the universe fall naturally into place -- when I see how easy it is to transmit the authorial state of mind to the reader. You don't have to work at it, you don't have to try. It just happens! Could life be better?)
In film and television, that close contact between two minds (writer and reader) is gone, and so is the automatic get-out-of-jail-free card. A world of ambiguity opens up. You have to consider how your affection may be transmitted to the viewer, and likeability is just not a rational thing. After all, why should it make a difference which part of a story you tell first? Why should it matter whether you see a character behave nobly before he behaves upsettingly? And what happens when you deliberately introduce shades of gray? Without the guidance of a narrative voice, what will the audience make of it?
I should pause here and say that, first of all, any time we let gray into the mix, some part of the audience is not going to come along. Gray creates a cognitive dissonance that permeates your story and drives some people off the way those ultrasonic pest sirens drive off mice and groundhogs. There's a high-pitched squeal, and suddenly people are thinking, "I had ironing to do, didn't I?" My first piece of advice: let those people go. They're not the ones you're looking for anyway. The bigger question is, once you get past the slice of audience that can't tolerate ethical questions, who's left, and what the hell are they thinking as they watch?
Fortunately for us all, there's still a big portion of the audience that likes ethical questions. (If not, David Kelley would never have had a show.) The challenge for the writer comes when the questions are embodied in a character, because characters, like our families and friends and lovers, call forth our monkey-troop instincts. We love and support, no matter who they mangle! Or else we hates them, my precious! This is who we are; characters we become attached to become part of our "unit," part of what defines us, and thus are fandoms born and divided.
Some questions are easy. Take Max killing Ben, her broken, beloved, long-lost "sibling" at the end of Dark Angel's "El Pollo Loco." "Will the audience like her if she does this?" (You have no idea how often this question gets asked in television. Along with the note, "Could you clarify this?" Recently a writer said to me, "Wouldn't it be great to get a note that said, 'Could you make this more subtle?' And we both started laughing like lunatics.) I said, "They'll like her more." (How could they not? When has an audience not come on the ride when a hero suffers through a heartbreaking act?) Or on The Agency, when Stiles learns, too late, that the man he killed was innocent. "The audience will hate him if he does this!" Me, grinding teeth: "They will like him more."
James Kirk lets Edith Keeler walk in front of a truck. Buffy sends Angel to Hell. We. Like. Them. More.
Years ago, a writer I know created a science fiction pilot, in which a group of star academy cadets are trapped on a ship, far off at the edge of nowhere, when war breaks out. There is no real authority in the ship. They learn that one of their number is a traitor, who will continue to aid the enemy the first chance he gets. And they can't guard him every minute. They find him guilty, but there's no official of the state to pass sentence. The highest ranking cadet agrees the traitor must be executed, for the safety of everyone, and says he'll take the responsibility and burden on himself. Then he goes to the traitor's cabin and finds he's conveniently committed suicide. At this point, everyone watching became disgusted -- what an easy escape from a difficult situation; it threw you out of the story and announced in bold type, "A writer did this." Why did it happen? Because the network refused to let the pilot air unless the story was changed so the cadet didn't have to execute anybody. "They won't like him if he does that." Of course, the fact he didn't do that was the last straw for the audience and the reviewers; the pilot was not a success.
In the examples above, there was really no danger the characters would become "difficult" -- i.e., ambiguous, potentially dislikeable -- because of their actions. As I said, some questions are easy.
Others are far more gelatinous and messy. Especially (and this may seem counter-intuitive) when it's not all about life and death. I said that I once opened a novel by having my protagonist kill someone; well, ellen_kushner did me one better in her world of Riverside (Swordspoint, The Fall of the Kings, The Privilege of the Sword). One of the main characters in Swordspoint is Alec, a scholar with a mysterious past and a lover who's one of the best swordsmen alive. So in a world where annoying someone can lead to duels and death, what does Alec do? He annoys people. Deliberately. All the time. "I just don't get what Richard sees in him," I muttered to myself. "That boy needs a good spanking." And yet, it's not entirely true that I couldn't see his attraction: in the sequel, The Privilege of the Sword, Alec is now a wealthy duke and his scale of trouble-making has grown proportionately. A young girl he hardly knows is raped by her fiancé, and her family tells her not to be a fool about it -- it's a great match, and the rapist was just anticipating the wedding with a little "cuddle." No big deal. You picture to yourself the future she has with this man. And you think, "I bet when Alec hears about it, he'll understand why it's a big deal."
Because you know what? There is room in Alec for all those things.
What Kushner does with Alec is far more dangerous than the dark deeds I've had my characters do; Alec is hardly a blameless innocent forced into a difficult situation. This is who he is; a guy you might not even want to hang around in real life. He could very easily turn on you and verbally snap your head off because he's feeling moody that day. I couldn't live with him. But I have to respect him, and I understand why he could hold Richard's affection; I understand that there is someone at home there, and that he's made up of a mixture of frailties. And taken altogether, they make him a hero. He's a stubborn pain-in-the-ass; so? That quality can be put in the service of heroism as well as any other. He's a hero because he will occasionally recognize when something should be done, and he has the will to do it.
Or to put in my own terms, "stubborn pain-in-the-ass" is Alec's superpower.
Now, this sort of thing is much more risky in terms of audience response. They feel far freer to take such characters or leave them the way you take or leave people in real life; here we enter an arena that's a lot less predictable.
Here as well we might return to that joke I was told: "Could you make this more subtle?" It would be harder to sell Alec on television than on the page, unless he were played by an actor with looks and charisma (as he certainly ought to be, by the way). I mean "sell" here not to the network, but to the audience. Decades of simplification, of refining everything down to dualities -- right/left, black/white, friend/foe -- have trained us not to perceive the spectrum, at least not in this medium.
On Battlestar Galactica, President Laura Roslin learns that scripture speaks of a leader who will die before their people reach the promised land. Roslin herself is dying of cancer, and fits the bill eerily well. Her priest is convinced she's the leader foretold; as for Roslin's point of view, we're not immediately given it. We see her taking in the information. We know she's a bright, rational, soft-spoken woman who knows how to look at things politically and logically, but -- religiously?
When her power is threatened and she's thrown in the brig, a group of high-ranking, apparently fundamentalist members of government visits her. She tells them that she believes she's fulfilling scriptural prophecy, and is the leader who'll take them to Earth. It's a turning point in getting the support she needs.
After the episode aired, some people were disappointed that Roslin was so manipulative as to fake a religious conversion. Others were disappointed that Roslin, the rationalist, believed what the priest told her so easily.
It was a dual choice: either Roslin believed, one hundred percent, and is weak-minded; or she was wholly faking it as political manipulation, and is a bad person.
If I were in Roslin's place, I'd think: How strangely well I fit the description given in scripture. How much of my childhood religious training do I still believe? It may be true, it may not -- I have to think about this some more. Meanwhile, the survival of the human race is at stake; we can't afford to let the Fleet break up over my incarceration. I have to rally people to my side, or all is lost.
People can wonder about things without believing them fully. Political manipulation can take place without the motivation being selfish. A lot can go on in the human brain; it's more than an on/off switch. Why can't all these things be true?
In a novel, it would be easy to lay out her thoughts. In a visual medium, the viewer has to do the work themselves, and here's the problem: we're used to there only being one answer.
Take Wilson, a complex character on House. He's introduced as (1) a married womanizer (and therefore, by definition, a betrayer) and (2) someone who can't stop caring about people. I loved that two traits we don't normally find in the same character were there in him; it gave him a reality I miss on television. In "House vs. God," we learn that he drove a terminal patient home when her ride didn't show up, stayed to get her groceries when he saw she was too sick to go out, and then, just stayed. A glaring ethical violation for a doctor.
In my mind, Grace was glad he was there. I imagined what it would be like to go through cancer treatment, knowing you were terminal, without any support. What do people do who don't have families, or money to hire help? It might even have crossed her mind that she was using him. (Though she was very fond of him, and knew he was of her. I would use the word "love" here, because it applies, but there's too much tendency in our society to read that as "one, true romantic love.")
House, upon learning of this, calls Wilson an "emotional vampire," who feeds off others' need. That's why, House says, that Wilson is one of the few oncologists who thrives instead of burning out under the burdens of his practice. And perhaps that's true, on one level; but we also know that House likes to present motivations in the darkest possible light. Is it so horrible to need to be needed? That's the kind of drive that calls people to volunteer in the Peace Corps, to become firefighters, to risk their lives for others -- to become an oncologist, and make the lives of many people better than they were before they met him.
Does any of this mean that Wilson didn't violate an ethical standard? And an ethical standard that's there for a very good reason, to boot. He betrayed himself, medicine, and an ideal of behavior.
And I believe Grace was very glad he did it.
Can't all these things be true? Must it be only one answer?
Can't being a manipulative liar who needs to be needed be Wilson's superpower, if he puts it in the service of heroism the best he knows how?
At the end of "Finding Judas," Wilson goes to Tritter to give evidence against House. Why did he do it? Because House, under prolonged psychological pressure (remember the Lenny Bruce story), coupled with drug deprivation, was coming apart? Because something had to be done to put an end to this, one way or another, and House clearly wasn't going to do it? Because he nearly cut a girl in half? Or because he punched Chase? Or because Chase looked angry enough to go to Tritter himself, and if Wilson beat him to the punch, he could negotiate a more reasonable deal that might get them all off the hook?
Can't all these things be true? Must there be only one "real" answer? Because I have to say, in the actual life that I live, I have multiple reasons for doing things all the time. The trouble with choosing only one answer is that it boxes the character in, and from that day forward, Laura Roslin must ever be the jaded manipulator who fakes her religion; and that makes her less than she is. Or less than she could be.
Frankly, I think television is to blame here; we're all about finding one true answer. We simplify and distill and chip away at stories till everything's as straightforward as we can make it. But we still insist (because we have to) that the audience do the work of filling in the blanks. (Contrary to popular wisdom, I believe television is a far more active medium than books; at least, most of the time. A book can tell you the answers, when it pleases. A face may leave you guessing.) Every story we structure goes from A to B to C; so of course, given a blank, the audience will fill in "D." Life, on the other hand, as we very well know, is about being hit from all sides. Like birth, it's a messy process. I'd like to see television become a bit more messy, but it means taking Alec-from-Riverside chances. Will the audience like it? Where's the dividing line, where does a character cross over into "difficult," and where into "difficult without any reward for me in watching"? (Two very different things, as anyone who remembers the old Profit series will know.)
Some answers are easy, remember? Not this one.