Today, I explain why you really shouldn’t show performance art in your TV show or movie that is supposed to be good unless it is actually good.
This is the Cronin Theory of Pop Culture, a collection of stuff I’ve noticed over the years that I think hold pretty true.
Famously, one of the most difficult things to write in fiction is brilliantly clever people, because, well, to write a brilliantly clever person, you have to be close enough yourself for it to translate. Sometimes, writers ARE good enough that they can pull it off. Matthew Wiener is a good enough writer that he could make Don Draper seem really clever and smart in his ad pitches on Mad Men. But it’s hard to do.
Similarly, as I’ve discussed in a past article, writing songs for your movie or TV show that are supposed to be hit songs is REALLY REALLY hard to do, because, well, you know, writing a hit song is REALLY REALLY hard to do!
The same goes for brilliant comedy. Seinfeld was able to do standup bits because the show starred one of the most successful stand-up comedians of the past forty years, Jerry Seinfeld. However, in instances like Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Aaron Sorkin ISN’T a brilliant comedian, and thus, his attempts to show supposedly amazing comedy on Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip failed miserably.
In the first season of Sex and the City: And Just Like That…, the show had a major problem with one of its new characters, Sara Ramirez’s Che Diaz, who was a major “Poochie,” in that everyone talked about how great and amazingly funny they were, but when we saw them do comedy, they weren’t particularly interesting. So it really grated to see everyone go on and on about how awesome they were.
So far, in Season 2, I think the show has done a better job by simply not showing them actually DOING comedy. We’ve only seen them tell one joke, and it was awful and really poorly written (not the joke itself, which was bad enough, but the way that the scene was written so as to suggest that this awful joke was somehow their CLOSING JOKE), but at least that was it. We just hear people talk about how great they are, which is FINE. It is FINE to have a character who is a great comedian, so long as you either A. actually make them a great comedian (hard) or B. don’t show them doing comedy (much easier).
If you can somehow come up with amazing music for your acclaimed musician characters to perform, or amazing comedy for your acclaimed comedian characters to perform, go for it, but if not, just try not to bother.
I see the same problem in print fiction. Character’s supposedly silver tongued or witty or charismatic and there’s no sign of it (charisma is way hard to pull off). Or in comics, treating minor-league characters as if they were omega-level adversaries. I blogged about it here: https://atomicjunkshop.com/reaction-shots/
I felt this way about the Tom Hanks/Sally Fields movie “Punchline”. Tom Hanks can be funny in his movies and get off some good one-liners. But he was playing a comedian in this movie who was supposed to be a fantastic up and comer that the other comedians saw as the funniest guy in the house. But he just wasn’t funny. Tom Hanks, even as a cheesy 80’s comedian, was a lousy stand up. So it was hard to believe the movie when his audiences were constantly laughing hysterically at everything joke he threw at them.
I’m reminded of how they solved this when making the movie ONCE, which was originally supposed to star Cillian Murphy. But director John Carney decided that instead of getting actors who can sing a little, he’d hire musicians who could act a little.
one of the more annoying things is fake TV shows on TV shows, which are so bad you wonder how anybody would commission them, in OMITB Steve Martin is in a show where he’s in a wheelchair with dementia then recovers or Vampire Cop in Rookie Feds, or Mac and Cheese In friends, then look at 3×3 in inside No 9 which convinced millions it was real until the end
Yeah, Carney is a wonderful example. Here’s a guy who knows his movies have to have great music for the plots to make sense and so far, he has had…you know…great music!
I don’t think the sketches in Studio 60 needed to be funny. Or in fact, could be.
* Sketch comedy are almost always made up of good and bad sketches. They work because of the rapid fire of different sketches. A few good sketches put you in the mood to laugh at the bad ones. The show only showed the sketches independantly or on montage. Neither is how sketch comedy works. [Yes, great sketches are often shown individually on Youtube, etc, but they’re outliers]
* Sketch comedies also rely on repeated character gags. A skit may be slightly funny the first time, but after they’ve appeared on 12 episodes they’re classic. The show had a few of these referenced, but obviously only showed them once.
* Nothing kills a joke like explaining it. And the show was based on explaining the joke in advance. The cold open (Modern Major General rewording) in The Cold Open would have been a talked about classic the next day in the world of Studio 60. However, we were shown the creation of it and it isn’t the real world so it doesn’t work. [Showing the whole thing in the episode like you were meant to like was a poor move, though]. As an Australian who doesn’t see SNL, the Trump stuff that everyone raved about didn’t hit as hard when you’re seeing it first in articles saying how great it was and giving away all the jokes.
I don’t think it need the sketches to be funnier for the show to work. It needed to be less about Matt Albie’s drug battle and probably less about how a sketch comedy show was going to save the world.
Of course, not showing things will also be attacked. I recall that in connection to Identity Crisis Wonder Woman gave a speech at a funeral that would go one to be considered one of the greatest of all time and people complained that we didn’t get the speech.