Over the past years, I’ve found myself just tuning out when watching a tv show. At first, I considered I might suffer from the Instant Gratification Disease that plagues most of the world, but that wasn’t true.
I had no trouble sitting still for 2+ hours to watch a good movie. I’m one of the rare few who never checks his phone while doing something else and never “multitasks”. (Which is just a different way to say you’re doing multiple things badly.)
What was the issue? The story just felt slow.
Once I realized this, I started to look for it. The long, slow shots to fill another 10 minutes of runtime. The repeated dialogue, stating things we already know and weren’t that interesting to start with, filling another 10 minutes of runtime. The intense close-ups on somebody’s face, with a long pause afterwards, whenever they’re supposed to show an emotional reaction. Hey, that’s another 5 minutes of runtime filled with nothing!
It’s not just that the pacing is off and things didn’t happen quickly enough. It’s that, most of the time, nothing of importance happens.
The ideal story should move from cool scene to cool scene, using the transition as the breather.
Most of the “content” produced nowadays, however, moves from boring scene to … nowhere.
Why? Don’t they realize attention spans are shortening? Wouldn’t it make more sense that they’d lean the other way, crafting stories that are way too fast and never build up anything?
My conclusion
I’ve thought about it, analyzed the stories I encountered, and drew a simple conclusion.
Stories are slow because they’re not actually telling a story, but rather try to fill the runtime and produce the content requested.
It used to be the other way around. You woke up one day with a great idea for a story. You want to tell it. Your fingers are itching to get that story out. Through months of hard work, that story eventually turns into a really good book.
Because you’re passionate about the story. Because you want to tell it. Because there is a reason why you think the story’s interesting, which means there will be others who find it interesting.
It started with “what’s the story about and why am I telling it”, and ended with a good story.
Now it’s the other way around.
It starts with “we need ten 45-minute episodes stat!” and ends with slow stories using all the nasty tricks to fill that runtime. Long silences, slow pacing, meandering plot that’s back where you started after four episodes. There’s no purpose to any of it, no forward momentum, which means even interesting ideas will feel slow and boring.
Start with why
It’s related to an issue I’ve noticed for some time now. Fewer and fewer projects are created because there’s a good reason to create it, because people are passionate or they have strong arguments for why it will work. Instead, most projects are made because there’s a gap in the release schedule and it needs to be filled. Because some people want more “content”, because some people want more money and quick.
In my view, you should always start with why.
Stories are meant to entertain and intrigue. If you’re going to tell a story, ask yourself why you’re doing it and why others would care. What’s the purpose? What does this story do that no other does? What burning desire, theme, idea, plot twist, whatever do I need to get out of my system? Why do I think this particular idea will be entertaining?
These days, however, many studios just assume people will watch anything they make. Because that’s what people do, right? Watch a lot of shows every day? They’re starving for content, right?
The result is a story that isn’t meant to entertain, just to fill time. And anything that’s meant to be a time waster, will, of course, feel like a waste of time. And when you feel like time is being wasted, that’s when you call something “slow” or become impatient.
How can we change this?
Of course, analyzing or critiquing is easy, so I always try to provide solutions or alternatives.
Do less of it
First of all, the idea of “content content content” just doesn’t work. It never has.
I know nobody who subscribes to a streaming service because they produce the most content, or the fastest, or have the most offerings. Instead, the subscribe to the one that has the few shows that they really like. The ones that actually entertain them, the ones they specifically picked out.
So why do streaming services see this as their mantra? I truly don’t know. It’s costing them millions of dollars, and nobody actually cares.
In fact, it’s just overwhelming. Many around me have stopped using a service or watching certain shows, precisely because there is too much content. Too many shows to choose from. Episodes are too long and seasons are dropped all at once.
Nowadays, it’s even hip to create cinematic universes, forcing you to watch 5+ shows just to understand the story they tell together.
Overwhelming is the deadly sin of all creative endeavors.
What do people do when they’re overwhelmed? They give up. They retreat. They stop doing something, stop enjoying something, and try to go back to a more comfortable state.
It’s the biggest trap to watch out far when developing games. As soon as you’ve overwhelmed players, even once, you’ve basically ruined everything that comes after it. I spend most of my time crafting the tutorial/rules for a game to the point I’ve sidestepped any possible cause for being overwhelmed.
But overwhelm is not the same as challenge.
Viewing tv shows as mere “content to fill time” obviously creates terrible stories. But it also overwhelms through sheer volume. It’s the most common way to overwhelm people. Even if the thing you throw at them is easy—such as a simple story that really doesn’t challenge you—throwing hours of it is overwhelming. Similarly, picking a show you’d like to watch should be easy, but not if you throw thousands of options at somebody.
So, what’s the simplest step to take? Produce less content.
- Produce shorter episodes or seasons. Make them the duration you need. Nothing more, nothing less.
- Produce fewer shows. Currently, all those expensive shows are mainly paid for with “good hopes and promises”. The producers think that, once they have enough content, they’ll make that money back, but they won’t earn even close that amount from the show itself. This is a bubble that has to burst sometime.
- Consequently, stop starting a million shows and then cancel them at random.
Or maybe I can put that in a one-liner.
When you go for something, really go for it.
I’d like to see streaming services do just a few shows. Do the necessary preparation, have a clear plan and vision for how and why to tell this story, then stick with it from start to finish.
Maybe a new streaming service needs to pop up with that slogan: “We never cancel.”
It’s insane how big movies can have multiple years of preproduction (for a 2 hour film), while TV shows that are ten times as long seem to be written and shot in a weekend. And it shows. If you’ve barely prepared sets or scenes, then no wonder your story will only visit five locations and spend a looooong time just sitting still right there.
This also relates to the actual content of the story. Streaming services constantly try to make shows “for everyone”. They create something near horror, but dumb it down and tone it down for all the kids subscribed to Netflix. They create a funny adventure story, but think it also needs some heavy emotional weight in the middle. Especially Disney, especially in recent years, is a good example of how to change stories so that everyone is equally angry about them.
This doesn’t work. Nothing is “for everyone”. The more you really go for one thing, the more that part shines, and the more your target audience will absolutely fall in love with that.
Learn from Music Streaming
There’s an interesting distinction between video and music streaming.
Disney+, Netflix, all of them create their own content. Especially since the boom of streaming services, nobody “lends” shows from other producers anymore. They all have total control over their content and keep creating more of it.
Services like Spotify, however, do not create their own content! They merely provide an interface to find the music from artists. This also means there’s no exclusivity or owned content: you can find almost every artist and song on all streaming services.
And it’s wonderful!
People can choose the one service they like the most. And they do, for that small monthly fee is easy to stomach in exchange for listening to any music at any time. (It’s also relatively easy, speaking from experience, for artists to get their music out there on all of them.)
Maybe our imaginary ideal streaming service should add that to their slogan: “All our shows can also be watched on any other streaming service, as it should be.”
Sure, higher-ups don’t like that. They’d rather force people to subscribe to their service just because they hoard exclusive content. They’d rather pull the questionable move of removing their content from other services.
The end result, however, is more cost and inconvenience for all users.
And even worse: slow, terrible stories.
Start with the specifics
Finally, a more story-specific tip.
Many of these shows are made based on perceived popularity or hip trends alone. For example, people really like character X, so they decide to do a spin-off about it. Or maybe there’s a large fanbase for this certain IP, so they just have to plan a project about it within a year.
See what I see? This means you start a project purely based on a name or (very) general concept.
This might seem fine. I certainly thought so when I was young and did my first creative projects. You always start with a concept, right? You always start with “hey it would be cool if there was a game about monkeys in space, because people like monkeys and space”, right?
I’ve learned, however, that this isn’t true. Yes, a good story starts with a good premise. It really helps, in terms of marketing, to have name recognition or some really cool world that attracts new viewers.
But … then comes the other 99.9% of the story.
Whatcha gonna do with that?
Many shows are plagued by this issue. They have an intriguing concept or a character that people do want to see more of … and then they just start. They fill those hour-long episodes with … stuff they came up with at the moment, because there wasn’t an actual plan for the specifics.
In my view, a good (story) idea actually starts with the specifics. You can’t pull the trigger unless you have some meat to the story that is equally enticing as the marketing slogan.
I often mention this in my (book/film) reviews. I talk about why I chose that story in the first place—a cool premise, an interesting idea—and then lament how they never actually used it. It’s just a trick for the first few chapters, to draw people in, and then writers are lost on how to continue. The story becomes slow and meandering, lacking purpose, because … well … after that first chapter it had no purpose anymore.
An example is the Pixar movie Onward. It starts with a really interesting concept: “Magic exists, but technology just became more useful so it fell out of practice/favor”. I was hooked, I wanted to see this play out. What does the movie do with it? Nothing.
After a strong introduction, it basically reverts to “our modern everyday world”, so it can do a default “fetch quest” to fill the plot.
A “fetch quest” is a very common trick in which the author just invents some requirements a person must meet, such as objects to find or places to visit, and fills the whole story with it. This works “well”, because you have a clear goal and a list of things to check off. But it’s also slow and overdone.
I’m actually an improviser, not an outliner. I know many writers who create these detailed, structured plans before writing a single line of their story. I’m clearly on the other side: if I know how it ends, I don’t want to write the book anymore ;)
Even so, I’ve learned that I can’t start without some specifics. I need to be able to write down specific events, themes, story beats, ideas that the story will explore. These don’t need to be fixed, these don’t need to be detailed (“on page 67, our protagonist should kill character X with an overhead swing of his weapon, and …”).
But I need to know if there’s enough meat to fill the entirety of the story. To make sure the plot always keeps a purpose, a good pace, a reason for existing.
I’d advise anyone to do the same. Don’t jump into a story until you know some specific, interesting ways to fill the other 99.9%.
Because a story that really only has two or three moments of significance (usually the premise and climax), yet has to fill hundreds of pages or minutes of screen time, will obviously feel slow.
Conclusion
These are my thoughts on why there is more money and time spend on stories than ever, and yet they’re all worse and slow as a result.
Many shows that cost millions of dollars—which sport great talent and are supposed to be a huge release—are simply unwatchable for me. So, so slow. Meandering plot. No true purpose or reason why the story would be interesting in the first place.
And that’s just a shame. I’d rather they tone back the lumps of money, tone back the volume of shows (or length of episodes), and focus on the actual purpose here.
Tell the best story you can, because you have an inner desire to tell that story. Not because you’re told you need to fill hundreds of minutes of screen time. Not because somebody said “character X is really popular, we must do a spin-off about them!”
Any story born from that objective won’t be a story at all, just a time waster.