Great shows are built around great characters in great conflicts and great relationships. Comedy, drama, it doesn't matter. Are your characters interesting and distinctive? Are they in pursuit of something challenging, or forced to contend with something hard? And are their interrelationships surprising and compelling? If the answers are yes, you've got the makings of a great show.
FRINGE has all of that. Just to take one character: Walter Bishop is a crazy scientific genius obsessed with food, music, drugs and his cow Jean; he's ruined a universe to save his son and confronted now with the consequences is desperate to save his son again.
Each detail about him and element of his backstory is clear and specific, his goal/problem is huge in its scope and difficulty, and his relationships with his son and colleague Olivia are enormously fraught as a result. And you end up loving the show in part for the ways those relationships keep turning upon one another and eventually bring him to self-sacrifice and forgiveness.
But if you ask someone about FRINGE, one of the first things you're going to hear about is that in every single episode there is a dude in an old timey black suit and fedora who appears for just a second in the background watching the events. It serves a narrative function -- Observers be observin' -- but really it's there as something to engage and delight viewers.
FRINGE has many little touches like this. Episodes set in different time periods or alternate worlds get different opening credits. Check out the 1980s one, for it is fantastic:
Different universes and timelines also have different colors popping up repeatedly but unobtrusively--blue in the main universe; red in the other side; amber in the new timeline of season four.
Superfans will also tell you about how the glyphs and dots presented before each commercial break constitute a code that comment on what's happening or gives hints as to future episode, or how the 19th episode of every episode swings for the fences with insanely fantastic storylines that to read on the page would seem to break the rules of the series -- an animated quest through Olivia's mind! a very very high Walter imagining the world around him as a 1930s noir musical! -- and yet absolutely hit their marks.
Again, some of these details have narrative significance. And some of them are just easter eggs the creative team took the time to add for the audience. As Grandnana Rose says when she puts that third plate of lasagna before you, "I made special just for you."
There's plenty of more interesting and significant writing techniques on FRINGE. But I think it's worth highlighting the show's little narrative decorations, too, because they can have such a nice impact. They are the TV-equivalent of how everything you see when waiting in line at the Haunted Mansion -- every molding, every fleck of dust, every font -- has been purposely chosen to help create a fully immersive environment.
And this isn't just about planting Easter eggs. It could be polishing the dialogue of your characters so many times that they become truly distinctive one from another or just uniquely entertaining, like LOST's Sawyer referring to everyone by nicknames; or giving a character a unique habit or preoccupation, like Walter's complete and total obsession with milkshakes.
The "little things" is not the the first thing we should be worried about when writing a script, for sure, but it is a good question to ask in later rewrites. Where can I make my story more special for the audience? Where can I add just a little more delight, a little more WTF, a little more zazzle?
[Note: Sorry this wasn't posted Friday. I thought it was, only to discover last night it was still waiting in draft.]
