The element of no surprise

by David Benjamin

“Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland. You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly, commercials—many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom.” —FCC chairman Newton N. Minow, 1961

MADISON, Wis.—All too often, I tend to know what’s coming.

For example, Hotlips and I have been recently streaming a police drama called “The Killing.” By Episode #25, we finally had hopes of finding out who murdered Rosie. At a climactic moment, Jamie, the Machiavellian political operative, is waving a gun. Suddenly, he turns and aims at the depressingly depressive—but astute—woman detective, Sarah. He’s poised to blow her brains out.

Here, I slump with disappointment. I know what’s coming.

A moment later, after the anticlimax, I pause the program. I turn to Hotlips and say, “He wasn’t gonna shoot her.”

I knew what was coming because Jamie’s gun was a 9mm automatic.

I’ve been watching cop shows all my life. I’ve read Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct police procedurals, which are textbooks for writers of crime fiction. Nowadays, I write crime fiction. In this endeavor, another of my basic sources is the Standard Catalog of Firearms, 27th edition, which comes to 1,472 pages.

I knew before Jamie could squeeze the trigger that he wouldn’t—couldn’t—shoot, because he hadn’t snapped a bullet into the firing chamber of his automatic.

Am I being hypercritical, nitpicking a tiny technical detail that most viewers wouldn’t notice? But why wouldn’t they? The essence of a murder mystery is its clever and ambiguous parceling of tiny details, known in the gumshoe genre as “clues.” Connoisseurs of cop fiction spot clues. We remember and fit them together, hypothesize an outcome and react with pleasurable surprise when an overlooked detail, or a twist-on-a-twist leads to an unexpected denouement.

This is why the anticipated ending—the absence of surprise—disappoints people like me. I’d rather not always know what’s coming.

Don’t get me wrong. “The Killing” is a good cop show. By stringing out a single crime over 26 hours, it evokes the time-frame of a real investigation and plumbs the psychology of its characters, the police, the victims and the Agatha Christian menagerie of Rosie’s murderers.

“The Killing” also epitomizes video fiction’s transition from the classic television form—which wraps up its whole yarn in an hour (minus commercials). Today, a streaming series has few constraints on time or length. This is how we’ve gotten hugely popular serials like “Upstairs, Downstairs,” “Downton Abbey,” “Game of Thrones,” etc. Streaming makes feasible unabridged, multi-episode versions of epic novels like Les Miserables and Middlemarch. War and Peace, anyone?

I date this upheaval to 1995, when Steven Bochco launched “Murder One.” Its 23 episodes tracked a single criminal case, the death of Jessica Costello, from killing to resolution. This show flouted all of TV’s traditional limitations and succeeded, partly because the writing was exceptional and partly thanks to the electric tension generated by two brilliant actors, Daniel Benzali and Stanley Tucci.

“Murder One” foreshadowed serial streaming’s potential to interweave parallel plotlines and to penetrate characters more deeply than ever before possible. Writers can insinuate visual and narrative details that would have once been purged from the script. They can set the stage for more and better surprises.

But there are drawbacks. Aa a streaming series stretches toward infinity, it can gradually divert the viewer from wondering “Who on earth killed Rosie?” to asking—as Episode 23 fades out with no mystery solved, Sarah still miserable and more episodes in store—“Is this ever gonna end?”

However, a mystery that takes two dozen episodes to solve isn’t the big pitfall of the streaming revolution. As was always true of broadcast and cable TV, there’s so much time to fill and so little material with which to fill it.

This issue is not yet evident because the thrill of novelty is abroad in the land and the choices seem infinite. Drop in on any get-together among middle-class Americans, especially if they’re retired, with time on their hands. By and by, you’ll hear the conversation circle around to what these folks are watching on Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV, Amazon Prime. etc. Their resulting plaudits are speckled with words like “must,” “need,” “have to” and “gotta.” Hotlips and I haven’t watched or even heard of these current hits because we don’t subscribe to the right streaming services. But, we’re told, we gotta see these shows.

Gotta? Really?

This abundance of boutique video dwarfs the force-fed mass culture of yore, when everyone watched “I Love Lucy,” “Playhouse 90,” “The Ed Sullivan Show,” “CBS Reports,” etc. The prevailing implication is that streaming video is a leap forward in the quality of popular entertainment, promising viewers a range of narrative originality unprecedented on the home screen.

Trouble is, I think I know what’s coming.

America’s mass media have never yet—in all these years—made originality a priority. It is, after all, the very DNA of the bread-and-circus industry to rely on formula. The bread’s always white. The circus always has clowns and elephants. Big entertainment’s corporate leaders have always trusted the public to seek comfort in familiarity and to cherish protagonists who never change.

Did anyone ever expect Gilligan to get off the goddamn island?

My personal exhibit for this timid norm is the publishing industry, whose most lucrative genre is “romance.” The Book Industry Study Group lists 66 codes to classify its sub-genres of romantic fiction. The bestselling novels in this cash cow are so rigidly specified that their “content providers” must follow a recipe from which, lest they lose the gig, they dare not trickle the taboo spice of creativity.

Romance readers know what’s coming and they keep coming back—at twenty bucks a book—for more. Surprises can be disturbing. Jamie might actually have a round in the chamber and Sarah might actually be lying dead on the floor in the next-to-last episode. What the hell?

My all-time favorite TV flop was a Western called “Nichols,” starring James Garner as a smalltown sheriff at the turn of the 20th century. The series proved too smart, quirky and ironic to draw good ratings and satisfy sponsors. When NBC canceled the show before filming was finished, the network inadvertently inspired the fired script writers with a brainstorm. At the very beginning of the last episode, in an in-your-face metaphor for the entire series, James Garner was shot—dead. For the next hour (minus commercials), the title character was a corpse. I watched in literal disbelief. My surprise was absolute, my admiration boundless.

I’m confident that “Nichols,” cursed by an offbeat premise, a tongue-in-cheek hero and contempt for the predictable, will never spring back to life on any sensible video subscription service. Investors and sponsors are loath to risk their money on originality, moral ambiguity and perishable protagonists. They know that the last thing their audiences want is the element of surprise.

I understand.

More than that, I sympathize. After all, ‘round midnight, at the end of a long day of trying to write inventively, ironically and surprisingly, I rock myself to sleep with re-runs of “Perry Mason.”