{ Mitt Romney } wrote:
Christopher wrote:
I dunno, I'm getting tired of shows where the case of the week just happens to resonate perfectly with whatever's going on in the main characters' lives at that moment. As soon as they begin a secret workplace romance, they get a case involving a secret workplace romance? It's too contrived.
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You're talking about a show whose premise is that some writer is following around actual cops for 4 years now. When I've suspended my disbelief enough to buy that I have no problem buying the cases mirroring their private lives. |
It's just that this is something
most shows these days tend to do, sometimes quite blatantly (there was even an episode of
Fringe last season where Olivia actually
mentioned that they kept getting cases that coincidentally resonated with what was going on with them personally and wondered if there was some deeper pattern behind it), so I'm growing weary of it in general.
You could've stopped here.
TV/Writer Logic =/= Real Life
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And that's too easy a copout. I'm a writer myself; I understand suspension of disbelief. But it can too easily be an excuse for laziness or sloppiness, and it shouldn't be. The goal is to try to minimize the amount of belief the audience is required to suspend. It's called
willing suspension of disbelief, after all, not
mandatory suspension. To sell your story to an audience, you have to make it something they're willing to suspend their disbelief about. And the more they have to work to swallow the premise of a story, the more they become aware of having to do that work, and the more reluctant they are to play along. The writer should do most of the work for them, take care to craft a fiction that feels real enough that suspension of disbelief is easy.
As the saying goes, "The key is sincerity; if you can fake that, you've got it made." But if you
can't fake it effectively, then you're in trouble. So don't go telling me that fiction is an excuse to throw logic and credibility out the window, or to fall back on lazy cliches for year after year. They could do better. Just because it's fiction doesn't mean quality is irrelevant.