Bonesin käsikirjoittajan oppeja amerikkalaisen hittisarjan tekemiseen

Bones-tv-sarjan luoja ja pääkäsikirjoittaja Hart Hanson puhui alkuvuodesta Future of Story -konferenssissa. Hän lähestyi tv-kirjoittamista hyvin pragmaattiselta kannalta, jossa tärkeintä on suuren yleisön tavoittaminen ja miellyttäminen. Kiinnostavaa kamaa, josta läjä sitaatteja alla.

Taide vs massatuote:

To varying degrees, I believe the secret – there is no secret, first; I believe there is no secret – the secret, then, the secret to getting a mass audience… I didn’t make this up, I wish I knew who did, I’d give them credit. But if you cleave to, if you support – as an entertainer – the basic values of your culture and society, you have a much better chance of reaching a mass audience than if you challenge the mores and morals of a society. I hope a huge number of you are going, ”Well, that’s what artists do. Artists challenge what we think.” And I would say, that’s right. So I’m not an artist.

And I know I sound glib and flip about it, but when my job was to design a series that would go for more than three years, so that the people who hire me and pay me a lot of money would make their money off the investment… that three years of a television show is roughly 240 million dollars that they would spend. I should make them… it’s my job, I’m the showrunner and creator, to make them that money back.

Perusarvoista:

First of all, it’s a murder show, and that’s bad, so we should catch the murderer. And the murderer should be punished. That’s a very, very… that’s a safe value to… you know, you wouldn’t want to write a show like The Wire, that’s really, really good, where murderers get away with it. It seemed like a pretty good engine for mass entertainment.

The States, that culture is a very, very religious culture these days. It’s… a significant amount of it is very fundamentalist. My lead character is an atheist. The female character is a scientist and an atheist. The value that we were talking about there is faith. Not to get too personal, but I tend more toward her than him. […] So I put a lot of what I think into Brennan’s mouth. But in the end, because Bones is mass entertainment, the spiritual, religious man gets the last word.

Yleisöä ei sovi väheksyä:

You have to make it as best you can, you can’t write down, because they will know and they will hate you for it. I’ve had many TV writers come onto my staffs, mostly from the feature world but sometimes the novel worlds and they write down. They look down on entertaining the masses, and they get fired. It just doesn’t work. It always shows. The actors can tell. Everyone can tell.

Suuret yleisöt vs vielä suuremmat yleisöt:

Like, I don’t know a single television writer who doesn’t want to be on cable, where these rules can be relaxed because you don’t have to go after over 6 million people to stay on the air. You can easily survive at 6 million people. And that’s a smaller audience to go after. If you have to go for 10, 12, 16 million people, you have to make friends with the mores of your culture. You have to know the mores of your culture and make friends with them.

Tätä sopii sitten verrata David Simonin metodiin.