i've spent the last year and a half writing a procedural thriller. most of the feedback i've received focuses on the fact that we never get invested enough in the characters.
the message came in different forms. some said i hadn't developed my characters enough, some said they weren't sympathetic enough, etc. but as i examined the problem of telling a procedural mystery story, i discovered something: there's a fundamental difference between procedural structure (especially as seen in most television procedurals), and the basic hollywood structure for a modern film.
we've all heard the mckee/campbell journey myth model for our three act stories. introduce a protagonist, protagonist gets into trouble, protagonist triumphs and ends up better than where they started. if graphed it would look like this:
(courtesy of austin kleon's excerpt of kurt vonnegut's 'palm sunday')where “G” stands for good fortune, “I” stands for ill fortune, “B” stands for the beginning of a story and “E” stands for its end.
a key point of this model is jeopardy and sympathy (it's usually hard to have one without the other). the "arc" works because we identify with and care about the character undergoing these changes.
and that's where the procedural model breaks down.
procedurals aren't about the characters really. law & order is an excellent example of this. the show was specifically created by dick wolf to not be a drama about the personal lives of law enforcement folk. from
a 1991 entertainment weekly article about the second season of the show:
Also unique are the scripts, which Wolf insists must never cut away from the policemen or the prosecutors. ''On other shows, you can always cut away to another story when you have an awkward moment,'' he says. ''On this one you can't, and you can't cut to a car chase or action scene-we hope to get through five years without our guys ever firing their guns.'' Notably absent from the scripts are the subplots that other shows use to humanize their characters. Law & Order's cops and lawyers have no romances, no coffee breaks, no days off, no personal crises: When they're on-screen, they're on duty, necessitating tough adjustments for the cast. ''Oh, it drove me crazy,'' says Moriarty (Holocaust, Pale Rider). ''It makes Stone into a workaholic. It's taken 22 episodes to reveal that I have a daughter and an ex- wife, and I had to fight for it. But,'' he adds, smiling, ''they have already trained me not to want too much of a personal life.''
mind you, we're talking about the most successful procedural ever and the longest running show currently on television.
so obviously not learning too much about your procedural characters can work. on television. but i believe it's fundamentally different for films for one specific reason:
we expect our main characters in film to get into trouble.
this rarely happens in procedurals. in fact, i think that's why they work so well on television. television is primarily about comfort and safety. it's about tuning in weekly to get your dose of the familiar. the characters you love (even if you don't know that much about them), the places you've come to know; the bar in cheers, the offices of countless characters, the standing set. of course we want something fresh and different every week - but only a little. everything else should feel comfortably familiar.
procedurals do this incredibly well. you get your familiar cast and setting, but each week a new wrinkle: a new case with new victims and new clues to puzzle. but there's no jeopardy involved for the main characters. their greatest issue is that they might not solve the case, that another interchangeable victim-of-the-week might not survive or that the jury might find against them. so we're safe along with them. no worries that we'll be chewing our fingernails wondering if these people we love will perish.
unless of course it's sweeps. then someone gets into trouble. or if it's law & order, may actually get killed off.
but this type of safety doesn't work for film. we need our main characters, the ones we're identifying with, to experience jeopardy, to be in harm's way and survive, even if that harm and survival is metaphorical. it's a fundamentally different paradigm.
to use the above graph as reference, in film that graph represents our lead character, our hero, the person we're identifying with; in television
it represents the victims. our prosecutors, our police detectives, our ghost whisperer, our medical staff? they're going to be fine.
obviously procedural elements or a procedural setting can work for a story told on the big screen, but invariably they need to include a personal element to the crime. there have been great procedural films (se7en, in the heat of the night, la confidential, etc.), but they all have personal stories entwined in the cases being investigated (indeed in a film like '
in the heat of the night', the procedural plot exists solely to examine the personal stories of the characters).
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