Alan Sepinwall on Obsession With Nonlinear Storytelling on TV

The remote control seems to be suspended in the air for a moment, its infrared sensor mixing with the light that comes in through the window to create a pixelated rainbow before the device hits the screen of my television. I lean back, satisfied that my anger has found a therapeutic outlet, so I turn around and look for other things to break.

You are probably wondering how I got here. So, let’s go back a few weeks before to explain. Or it would be better if I told my TV critic’s misfortune story in the proper order, instead of starting with a semi-emotional incident before going back to how things are going. truth began? Because a plague has descended on the land of Peak TV, a plague in which fragmented timelines are sucking the life out of many stories.

The idea of ​​telling non-chronological stories in itself is far from new for television. Seinfeld made an episode in which the story went backwards, called “The Betrayal”, three years before Christopher Nolan Souvenir hit theaters. Juggernaut of the drama of the nineties ER ended up falling in love with the idea of ​​starting episodes in the middle of a story (also known as in medias res) and then going back several hours to illustrate how one of the heroic doctors got into this tricky situation.

Recently, however, the “24 hours before” chyron has gone from an occasional device to what appears to be the narrative pattern. In the coming week alone, three scripted series will be released using some variation of the device: HBO Max’s Made for love (April 1), Netflix’s The serpent (April 2), and AMC’s Gangs of London (April 4). In fact, it would be difficult to identify any newly released series that doesn’t move a little bit over time, instead of naming those that do. Even shows made for preschoolers like Netflix Ghost Town, I can’t resist!

So why, you may ask, is this a problem? Did I just become an old man who screams at the clouds? Or are the children wrong?

When used intelligently, scrambled narratives, flashbacks, flash forwards, parallel timelines, etc., can have an incredible impact. Three of the best drama pilots ever made – Pseudonym, Lost, and Breaking Bad – use one or more of these devices and they are much more interesting for him. Pseudonym it starts with cinnamon-haired Sydney Bristow about to be tortured by Chinese government officials, and then jumps between the situation and the story of how she ended up handcuffed to a chair, at risk of tooth extraction. Lost (also by JJ Abrams, although co-creator Damon Lindelof has played with a lot of time in his later projects) begins moments after the crash of the Oceanic 815, only later offering glimpses of passengers in mid-flight. AND Breaking Bad the famous begins with Walter White in his underwear, recording a video message of farewell to his family, while he expects to die in a gunfight with the police; then the story plunges into his pre-meth life. These programs also continued to move forward and backward in time as needed throughout their executions, with Lost dedicate an entire season to time travel and Breaking Bad triggering its end of the series at the beginning of the previous season.

Therefore, non-linear narratives in themselves are not the problem. It’s just that a lot of people – both creators and executives – saw the programs that worked and said, “Oh, this is easy! We can do that too. ”So what used to be an occasional, artisanal treat is now junk food so sloppy and mass-produced that you can’t even get the initial sugar.

Several showrunners have told me that it is now a frequent note that they receive from heads of broadcasters and studios, especially in pilot episodes. (One even claimed that agreeing to the grade was the price to get the green light for his program.) With so many programs to choose from, everyone is afraid of losing viewers’ attention for even a second. So, they decided that the simplest and safest way to avoid this is to skip the boring exposure, introduce someone by jumping through a glass window or robbing a bank dressed as Angela Merkel, and only then adequately present everyone . But very few creators are as talented as Vince Gilligan (who also uses a non-linear framing device for each season of the Breaking Bad spin offYou better call Saul

) So, between the fall in basic art and the absolute ubiquity of the device, what is done to excite (“Ooh, I can’t wait to find out what it is about!”) Instead it gets worse (“Ah, that again? ”). What’s particularly exasperating is when flash-forward teasers aren’t even as exciting to begin with. NatGeo’s The right thing

the series begins with two of its astronauts running competitively, shaving and having breakfast

before the story goes back two years in the past to begin the narrative of how they came to dislike each other. Opening on medium res generally betrays a lack of confidence in the material, but when you’re starting out with guys eating grumpy steak and eggs, it’s best to give up. The ostentation and overuse of starting in the middle can also have the unwanted consequence of taking the viewer out of the story. We know we are enjoying fiction, but storytellers must be very careful about how and how often they remind us of it, just as Superman writers are usually better at not trying to explain why a pair of glasses is enough to hide Clark Kent’s identity. When you are following the timelines and looking for clues about how the past and the present will connect, you will not be so focused on what the characters are feeling and experiencing the moment you are watching. This is an even bigger problem for programs that rip their timeline apart from their opening scenes. The first season of Real detective he did it beautifully, with glimpses of the ruined middle-aged Rust Cohle and Marty Hart, providing an emotional anchor and some narrative clarity for the flashback scenes about the case they worked on together. More often, however, mapping out what timeline you are in and how it relates to others becomes work that disconnects the viewer from the story you are watching. Even when there is a thematic point to become non-linear, like the first seasons of

Westworld they were about humans and machines being caught in their own behavioral loops, the mental effort required almost always outweighs the spiritual reward. British action drama full of action Gangs of Londonplays with time less aggressively than other notable premieres from next week, largely advancing chronologically after a colorful murder scene in medias res to set the mood. Made for love, a sci-fi comedy starring Cristin Milioti as a woman whose husband, a technology mogul, implanted a chip in his head to track his actions and thoughts, zigzagged through the whole ugly wedding story, and even before.

The serpent , about real-life serial killer Charles Sobhraj (Tahar Rahim) attacking Western tourists traveling the Asian “hippie trail” in the 1970s, dramatizes Sobhraj’s many crimes wildly out of order and in parallel with a chronological timeline in that Dutch diplomat Herman Knippenberg (Billy Howle) and his wife Angela (Ellie Bamber) become amateur detectives when local authorities do not sufficiently investigate the murder of two Dutch tourists. Made for loveat least it gains a little humor by presenting events almost at random, and this fits the idea of ​​Milioti’s character constantly revisiting his past to avoid thinking about his depressing present. The serpent however, it weakens at every turn because it does not move in one direction. There are frequent chyrons to remind the viewer exactly where they are in Sobhraj’s story, but a whiteboard may be needed to remember when certain events happen in relation to others. The scenes are often presented several times from different perspectives in different episodes, in theory to provide a new context to what we saw earlier. Together with Sobhraj’s ritualized methods – he poisoned his victims, making them sick enough to depend on him for everything – it makes the story seem more monotonous than intended. (No one needs to see so many scenes of people writhing from intestinal discomfort.) And although the non-linear approach sometimes raises the level of suspense, it usually gets in the way. Jenna Coleman has a strong performance as Sobhraj’s girlfriend, Marie-Andrée Leclerc, but as Leclerc evolves from unsuspecting love interest to semi-voluntary accomplice she gets lost in all the confusion. Eventually, the two timelines merge, with Herman and Angela making enough progress to

The serpent assumes an urgency befitting the atrocities committed by Sobhraj. These later chapters are so tense, exciting and sometimes moving that periodic setbacks don’t get in the way. The question is how many viewers will be around for that reward. The structure will look familiar from a series of recent documentaries, such as The vote or

The last dance. In many cases, it looks like an attempt to hide the completion of a story that could easily have been told in half the time (if not less). This is a variation of the problem that so many series these days are ideas for a feature film that were simply expanded when they couldn’t be sold to a movie studio. But a “10-hour film” presented in this complicated way, in the final analysis, is no more satisfying than the one that follows in order.I asked a writer who worked on chronological programs and programs that are not about the proliferation of non-linear narratives. They said, “You have to answer, ‘Why are you doing this?'” The device is generally more effective in revealing the character than in hiding the plot, this writer argued, and is best when the audience ends up in the same space head that the character – like poor Leonard with his short-term memory problems inSouvenir . Many recent programs simply go out of sequence for an initial adrenaline shock or to turn basic points of the story into mysteries, leaving the whole thing looking, at best, an empty exercise, at worst, like an irritating repetition of troops that half the time. television currently uses. “When you think about it,” added the writer, “

everything stories start in medias res ”, because even a story that begins with the birth of a character is still arriving after his parents met, etc. Once upon a time, however, the stories generally continued wherever they chose to start, and this is happening much less often than it should. As I have seen many openings of in medias res in recent years, I often vent that if you cannot tell your story in chronological order, you must find a different story to tell. This is obviously a reducing thought; I would not like to see fully linear versions of Souvenir or Breaking Bador pulp Fiction . Still, many shows are unfolding in time right now, and doing so poorly. The device went from a rare and exciting surprise to a familiar and frustrating crutch – one that shows how

The serpent