Don’t dumb your work down so you end up “second-screen viewing”. Let’s talk about how to get audiences to actually watch what you write by posing narrative questions that force them to lean in rather than tune out.
🎙️ Listen to this 5AM StoryTalk Podcast bonus episode.
📖 READ this episode as an essay below.
You’ve no doubt heard complaints from many filmmakers about “second-screen storytelling”. This is the demand from streamers that films and TV must now work as ambient background noise as audiences do other things — and it’s why plot points are now repeated over and over so people can keep up regardless of how distracted they are.
Consequently, what we watch outside of movie theaters is getting…well, dumber. I’d argue we’re getting dumber too as a result, but that’s a subject for another episode.
This “second-screen storytelling” phenomenon is echoed in the sudden success of social media clips, which, if you’ve never cut one, cannot bore people for one second. You have to tell them something, bluntly and quickly, or they’ll swipe away. People are increasingly uncomfortable with no knowing what’s happening, rather like children. Lose them for a second, and they’re gone to play with some other toy.
In other words, mystery is vanishing from our storytelling lives.
To be fair, this problem isn’t entirely new.
Network TV dramas employed a similar technique for years, which eventually was disregarded for more sophisticated ways to tell stories.
If you’ve ever developed TV with an inexperienced producer or TV executive, you’ll no doubt also understand how frustrating it is to lay out an interesting, deliberate story over a full season — maybe even multiple seasons — only to be told that the most interesting bits come much later in the story — so…you know…move all that up into the pilot.
Of course, the reason why they’re the most interesting bits is because the audience had to experience all the other stuff first. They had to be engaged by a series of mysteries, that got them excited, so that the ultimate answers got them really fucking excited.
But whatever. All these execs are concerned with most of the time is grabbing them up front, it seems — not keeping them.
Again, everything I’m describing seems like basic storytelling to me. Common sense. But it is lost on a lot of people – and it’s especially lost on a lot of people who now work for an algorithm.
So, let’s look at why the algorithm is wrong, at least in terms of creating a meaningful audience experience that translates to huge commercial success.
The first film we’re going to look at is Project Hail Mary, which I also discussed in last week’s feature episode if you didn’t catch it. Here it is again:
Don’t worry, I’m not going to offer any serious spoilers here if you haven’t seen it yet.
The film opens with Ryland Grace waking from something like cryosleep, light years from Earth. He’s aboard a spaceship and completely confused how he got there.
He shouldn’t be here, we quickly understand. He wants to know how he got there. And we want to know how he got there.
That’s one hell of a question to start a film with, I think. How many stories have you experienced where an Earthling wakes up on the other side of the galaxy, unsure how he got there?
I’m sold right away. I’m engaged, I mean. I want to know the answer.
But I want to know the answer even more when a few scenes later, I discover he was just a junior high teacher on Earth.
That’s storytelling gold on the part of author Andy Weir, who wrote the Project Hail Mary novel.
Later, when Ryland meets the alien Rocky, the film’s opening question is reiterated. Why is a school teacher all the way out here?
It’s not until the third act that we finally learn the answer and, when it arrives, it is a spectacular gut punch— both intellectually and emotionally devastating.
Apparently, screenwriter Drew Goddard had to fight to hold on to the ultimate twist— which again, I won’t give away. But that makes sense based on everything I’ve discussed about how story development in all mediums is now moving toward a kind of blunt-force obviousness in some idiotic attempt to make sure nobody ever gets bored – or has to think.
