This Alan Sepinwall piece in Rolling Stone about the recent ubiquity of non-chronological storytelling on TV prompted this thread but I’ve previously expressed concern about what I view as an overuse of multi-POV technique in fantasy and other genres.
The basic idea is this: non-traditional techniques can be absolutely great when they fit the material and when the creators are up to the challenge; but these techniques can also descend into cheap and shoddy gimmickry if either of those conditions is not met.
And I feel like in recent years, we’ve seen a great increase in the use of many of these techniques, to the point where I’d say the vast majority are not successful and I start to cringe when I crack open a fat fantasy to see 17 POVs or when I start a TV show and weird shit is happening out of sequence. I still like these techniques when they are well done but I feel like they are being used so much the ratio of success is now poor.
Why the spike? Some of it is simple copying of people like George RR Martin or Christopher Nolan or JJ Abrams, and some of it is probably a desire to stand out from the massively crowded media landscape. Problem is, not everyone has the talent to pull this off and not every piece of material is suitable.
Edit: Here is Sepinwall’s expression of the issue:
nonlinear narratives themselves aren’t the issue. It’s that too many people — both creators and executives — have looked at the shows that did it right and said, “Oh, that’s easy! We can do it, too.” So what was once an occasional, artisanal treat is now junk food so shoddy and mass-produced, you don’t even get the initial sugar rush out of it.
It’s a well-written article, but the premise is a bit silly. “Some things are badly written” is hardly news, and neither is “some things over-rely on tropes.” I don’t know why this particular trope is his pet peeve; you could just as easily say “too many shows use training montages” or “musical episodes” or whatever. Also, I can’t really remember a time when episodes didn’t often start with an action sequence, and then after the first commercial, a title card saying “two days earlier”. Admittedly my memory isn’t great, but I think it’s always been common. The TVTropes page for In Media Res has several examples from '90s TV, and one from Twilight Zone in the 50s!
I like the idea of testing a non-linear story by making sure it’s good when presented chronologically. That sounds like some kind of quality rule Pixar would institute, like how they supposedly made sure Inside Out made sense with only the outside parts.
I think the issue is the increased usage of the technique - it really has become very common in recent years to the point of being overused and misapplied. I feel a similar phenomenon occurred in fantasy books in regard to multi POVs after the success of A Song of Ice and Fire.
I think that, regardless of the artform, a very high percentage will be poorly done.
Poorly done comes in various flavors: following the traditional recipe, imitating some recent trail blazer, or trying to be original but to poor effect
People disagree as to rank order of which “poorly done” is most and least bearable.
I swear I’ve watched at least 3 movies this year where the kid is imaginary. One was that George Clooney one where he’s the last man on earth. The most recent one was Paper Lives on Netflix. When it was about 20 minutes in and the kid showed up, I told my gf “If this kid is imaginary I’m going to be so pissed.”
I think the point that Sepinwall was making (which is also my point) is that these techniques are not inherently “crap” but rather that the overuse of them, applying them ubiquitously to all or most shows, is crap. And I’m saying I’ve seen similar trends of overuse in other genres, like the excess of poorly-applied multiple POVs in fantasy after the success of George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series.
Perhaps this just an iteration of Sturgeon’s Law “90% of everything is crap, but the crap comes in waves.”
The flood of mystery box shows has to fit into here somewhere too. Then you get instances of a combination of multiple points of view and a false mystery (all these characters in the show actually know what’s going on, we as the viewer just don’t, like in HBOs Watchmen)
Not to mention Quentin Tarantino, the guy who made it ubiquitous in pop culture, both in well-executed forms (Pulp Fiction) and kinda lazy forms (Kill Bill.)
As someone who remembers the 70s and 80s, it’s waaaaaaaaaay more common now than it was then. Especially in mass pop culture. Back in the 70s and 80s nonlinear storytelling more complicated than the simple traditional case of “there is one flashback somewhere in the movie” (which covers things like your Twilight Zone episode or Mildred Pierce or Sunset Boulevard) was comparatively rare outside of literary fiction or art house movies.
The fact that bad writing (or direction, or game design, or whatever) is, has been, and will always be with us is no reason not to point it out and complain when it happens. If nobody ever spoke up, art would never change or evolve, if only to move on to a different set of tropes that will become over-and-mis-used after a few decades. (Also, if no one ever spoke up, this message board would not exist. ;)
It is “news” with regards to this particular trope because for the last couple of decades nonlinear storytelling has been treated as a mark of quality by creators, critics, and the public alike, something used by the best and the brightest. At the start, only talented creators were using the technique. That’s because only the most talented could get away with it: execs would veto using “confusing” art house techniques on most of their mass market releases.
But now that nonlinear storytelling has become so ubiquitous, it’s no longer a mark of quality. Instead of getting Mementos and Pulp Fictions, we’re getting jigsaw puzzles where, when you put the pieces together, you realize that that the reason it was turned into a puzzle was to distract you from the fact the overall picture is crap.
So the time has come to look at the technique and ask: does nonlinear storytelling actually make a given story better? And it it does, is the technique adding enough to make up for the fact it puts a burden on the viewer?
Yep, Westworld season one is a prime example. “Look at this amazing ‘mystery’ I’ve ‘created’ just by ignoring standard editing techniques. Am I not clever?” Which misses the most important part of using a nonstandard storytelling technique. It’s trivially easy for any creator to mislead the audience: the hard part is sticking the landing - leaving the audience pleased that they were misled and feeling like the story could not be told any other way.
Westworld neatly captures the point I’m trying to make about how nonlinear storytelling is way less vetted than it used to be. When he was trying to get Memento made, Johnathan Nolan no doubt had to fiercely defend and explain why the story had to be told backward in countless pitches, and the no doubt also revised the screenplay countless times to deal with people’s concerns. By the time of Westworld, though, Johnathan Nolan was a mover and shaker in Hollywood and storytelling gimmicks had become ubiquitous on TV. So no one ever asked him “why do it this way?” and “does this really make the story better?”
