Writing

Just more culture rot

It was novelist and screenwriter Sidney Sheldon who said, “A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God.” Indeed. Then there’s the aphorism attributed to film and Broadway writer and producer Fred Finklehoffe: “If it ain’t on the page, it ain’t on the stage.”

For film, novels, plays, and TV, writing encompasses the very nature of the story, along with the crafting of dialogue. Thus, it is of the greatest importance. Sometimes, the story is so compelling that we can overlook bad dialogue, and less often the dialogue is so interesting that it can make you at least temporarily ignore the bad story. But, far more often, bad writing is just bad writing.

Consider the Netflix hit series The Watcher. In the first episode, Dean Brannock (Bobby Cannavale) and wife Nora (Naomi Watts) are getting it on in the middle of the day while both of their kids are at home. Naturally, their 16-year-old daughter Ellie (Isabel Gravitt) calls out to her mother at the most inopportune time, to which Dean replies, “She’s coming.”

So, an otherwise pointless scene is crafted for the sole reason of creating a salacious pun. Except, given Dean’s overbearingly strict handling of his daughter otherwise, including admonitions against lipstick, and her wearing a top that might expose a bra strap, the pun addressed to Ellie is remarkably out of character.

Clearly, this and other out-of-context sexual references are used to drive interest in a very weak narrative that ends up being little more than a shaggy-dog story.

**SPOILER ALERT**: The identity of the watcher is never determined.

In the widely-panned Amazon Prime series Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, the writing is uniformly abysmal—shockingly so, given the huge budget. SPOILERS FOLLOW:

The “reveal” of Halbrand (Charlie Vickers) as Sauron in the final episode is pathetic, since many fans figured this out nearly from the beginning. The convenient survival of key characters exposed to a massive volcanic eruption via plot armor is laughable, and every word uttered by heroine Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) is awful. But, cut the writers some slack on this since Clark’s emotional range is…limited. And, some heroine Galadriel turns out to be, since virtually everything bad that occurs is her fault.

It would have been possible to write a good story describing Middle-earth’s Second Age, and the forging of the rings—even within the crippling confines of having to make all sorts of woke points—only this was not it.

Finally, ponder this. In the two series cited, especially Rings, many people had to observe what was going on, and with every retake, dialogue and situations were exposed that were ridiculous by any standard. Yet, what was broadcast ended up being the best version of what they could produce.

But then, the media chronicles—with no criticism whatsoever—the daily machinations of an incompetent, destructive, and corrupt government. And this is the very worst writing of all.