I’m thinking mainly of Lost and Heroes in this regard but more and more, I’ve found myself getting annoyed by shows in which the characters are forced to undergo a temporary lobotomy or completely change in personality in order to serve the whims of the plot.
There will be awkward scenes in which people will fail to communicate or ridiculously contrived situations caused by over the top motivations and it just takes me out of the story entirely.
Part of the pleasure for me of watching a television show is discovering and empathizing with the internal motivations of a character and that becomes impossible when the character starts behaving in a frustratingly stupid manner.
Is it really that hard to portray realistic characters?
Well, I suspect that with Lost and Heroes, the characterization is secondary to the plot in the writing process. That is, the writers have ideas about where they want to get to by a season finale, or such, and have come up with interesting characters that suit the overall demands of the storyline, but then have to bend the characterizations a little in order to get from A to B to C.
On the other hand, if you start by fleshing out your characters and writing while staying true to them, they have a tendency to take the plot in certain directions ‘on their own motivations.’ This is probably less apparent to the reader or viewer as a problem if it’s done well, though. (As long as the writer can guide the plot to a reasonably satisfying climax and conclusion.)
Isn’t one of the members here a scriptwriter for some fairly well-known shows? I can’t remember who it is, but no doubt they’ll be along in due course to help answer the question.
Personally, I always thought it was because there was either a “staff” of writers or a number of different writers over the course of a show’s run and they might all have slightly different ideas of how Character X is supposed to react/behave/respond to a situation that subconsciously come through in the scriptwriting process.
Having said that, I’m not a scriptwriter so I can’t offer anything more definitive as a response, unfortunately.
Realistic characters are boring. Realistic characters wouldn’t walk off alone when they hear a sound in the woods at night, or would just shoot the antagonist when they got the chance, or would explain the situation which would really only take as long as saying “there’s no time, I promise to tell you everything when the time is right.” Realistic characters are the Rose’s and Bernard’s of the world, who the hell wants to watch that?
I think sometimes writers have great ideas for a plot, and find the only way they can drive the plot forward is to bend character traits and characterization.
I don’t think the question is writing “realistic” characters, but rather writing stories that the characters can fit into and develop within without it seeming artificial and forced. Heroes has a problem in that it has taken the comic book theme to it’s logical conclusion and the characters have become (for all purposes) comic book characters (and not even particularly well written comic book characters) and their dialog reflects this. It’s creative exhaustion and sheer laziness. The original writer shot his bolt on the original storyline and apparently there wasn’t much left after that.
It could be a good show but it needs to be pared back re the ongoing story lines and have a brain transplant to add some IQ points. Even a magical/mutant universe has to make “sense” on some level and Heroes doesn’t. The characters are written to behave like literal retards to move the story along. It’s a lot easier to invest in a magical universe if the actors within the universe are written so that the decisions and actions in that universe are comprehensible as involving some degree of intelligent consideration.
I think some writers get too attached to a particular plot idea, and either forget or just don’t care enough to check if it fits the characters. At least, that’s the impression I get from your average bad fanfiction author.
I agree somewhat. It’s not so much that realistic characters are always boring I think; it’s just that coming up with situations that are exciting that don’t result in the realistic character either getting killed or resolving it immediately is harder than writing the character stupidly.
Also, we are extra-sensitive to such things; we are wired by evolution to detect fakery in others.
While these are all good answers, I think there’s an additional thing at work here: when people say a character is not realistic, sometimes (most times?) they mean that the character doesn’t do what they (the speaker) thinks they would do in that situation.
To which I’d say A. you never know how you’ll react 'till it’s you (and doubly so for the extreme situations most TV shows and movies highlight) and B. not everyone’s like you. Most people aren’t like you, in fact. See GD or The Pit or even IMHO for a whole cast of “realistic characters” who won’t make the same decisions or take the same actions you would. Real people are bloody well unpredictable and do mind bogglingly stupid and/or “out-of-character” things all the time; wouldn’t a “realistic” character be just as capricious as reality?
Probably, and they’d be unbelievable. I’m sure you’ve heard the old line “Truth is stranger than fiction”; one reason for that’s because real people do things so stupid or bizarre that no one would buy it in a fictional character.
It ain’t me but I do screenwrite seriously with the goal of getting produced (I haven’t yet). But when I write, I always create the characters first and let the plot be a byproduct of the characters’ goals and personalities instead of the basis for writing the script that I just plug various characters into later. I think to myself: what would Soandso do in this situation? What would be an appropriate obstacle to Soandso’s goal that would force them to test themselves and grow as a character?
That always just felt like the natural way to do it for me. But I’m the type who doesn’t give a shit about a complex, fancy plot if I don’t identify with or care about the characters at all.
Because people are complex. Their thoughts are not always consistent. TV and movie writers are always making characters who are all evil or all good. Real people are neither all bad, nor all good.
Realistic characters are tough to create. Dialog is especially tough. People don’t talk in grammatically correct complete sentences and so it is tough to write dialog and make people sound realistic.
As Reverend Jim Ignatowski of “Taxi” once said, he didn’t like a particular Star Trek episode because they had the Klingons saying things that Klingons just wouldn’t say.
Realistic characters in common situations are boring. Realistic characters in interesting situations are entertaining.
That said, realistic characters aren’t always necessary for a good TV show. The characters just have to seem plausible. Realistic enough so that the audience doesn’t get drawn out by their falseness. The last two presidents on 24 were so ridged in the way they dealt with people that I was annoyed every time they said a sentence. Politicians are never that ridged and inanimate.
As to the OP’s question, they are hard to write because you can’t make realistic characters do anything you want. It takes more time and effort to come up with something that a real character would do that is also entertaining to watch. It is apparently almost impossible to do on network TV because of the deadlines for scripts. I think in most cases on network TV, the characters look more realistic because of the acting rather than the writing. Jack Bauer would look really corny if someone other than Keifer Sutherland were playing him. The few good characters on Heroes (Noah and Sylar) are more due to good acting than good writing. If you listen to what they actually have to say it all sounds just as cheesy as everything else.
When writers are given more time they can really flesh out the characters. Then you get shows like The Sopranos and Six Feet Under.
Another problem is that real characters are more complicated and don’t communicate very well. They rarely tell other people exactly what’s on their mind and often misinterpret what others are saying to them. This happens on Sopranos all the time. Tony and Carmella probably never figure out each others issues. On another TV show you would have psychoanalysis of a characters actions by the end of the episode. Usually by some very wise and misanthropic doctor or a very perceptive supporting character. Often, when an audience doesn’t get an explanation for what a character has done, they get upset. So characters are given super communicative or psychoanalytical powers and seem more fake because of it.
I don’t think of that as “realistic” characters; that’s just plotting. Any kind of high concept writing where the idea behind the story is more important than the characters is going to be susceptible to this.
On the other hand writing dialog the way people speak is usually pretty awful dramatically. If you’re trying to tell a story instead of a character study or just something that meanders around a bit before ending then you want dialog to convey information. Plot, character, setting, or something but filling pages with small talk is going to make a viewer’s or reader’s eyes glaze over.
I’d raise that up one. It’s easy to get realistic characters to do just about anything and justify it in a reasonable way, so long as it’s not taken to excess, what’s difficult is to get SEVERAL realistic characters to all do what you want when they’re all being influenced by all the other people’s views and actions.
It’s tough to get around it too, you could have one writer assigned to each character, but then you get favoritism issues with all the writers liking “their” character too much, and you end up with a lot of “focus on this character” stories. The best way I’ve found (I’ve been doing exercises with my friends so we know how to approach the storywriting of the game we’re making) is to actually write down an entire backstory and psychological profile of every character, and even possibly “rate” how much certain experiences will affect them. However, as you said, this is almost impossible on network TV due to deadlines, as well as changing viewership tastes. What happens if it turns out one of your main characters is a scrappy? Half your viewership LOATHES them, yet their personality is integral to the group dynamics of the characters. Do you have a bunch of incidences that change him? That requires several episodes focusing on the hated character. Do you drop/kill them? Then you have to replace them and redo the whole profile thing again.
It also doesn’t help that everyone on Earth has exactly one data point about how humans think, the rest are approximations and observations. So the writers have to really extrapolate those observations, and the success heavily depends on the team.
Usually this is true and I give you that but I’d like to offer a counterexample of interesting small talk: the famous Big Mac scene in Pulp Fiction. It’s nothing but a couple guys in a car shooting the shit. But people loved it and ate it up because it lended these characters, who otherwise seemed like hardened gangsters of the type you never see in real life but only in movieland, an aura of authenticity. Suddenly they weren’t just movie gangsters, but real people who talk about stuff like what they call quarter-pounders with cheese in France.
So my point is done skillfully everyday small talk can be a great asset to character development.
Character development is information. The spiraling repetitions, the extended pauses, the stuttering non-words of normal human conversations, on the other hand, typically are not.
