I’ve been reading shooting scripts of some of my favorite TV shows and it’s increasingly being clear to me what I’d really like to do. For a living, hopefully, but more so for myself. No big surprise here, I would like to write. I’d like to be someone working behind the scenes of a good TV show or a movie or a musical. I don’t know where I’m going to start with that but just thinking about it makes me happy already.  

Reading episode shooting scripts, I was amazed how much input the writers have on the nuances of a particular scene. It’s not just about writing dialogues but even expressions and actions, which is not to say that actors don’t really have any creative input. The coming together of it all, the merging of talents and ideas, culminating in a single work of art for all the world to see, is something I’d like to be a part of.

Take my recent fascination with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for example. [I know, it's an old show, that's why it's prominently featured at datedthings.com.] Here’s what Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.com said about the show:

It’s pointless to spend much time wrestling with the question of whether TV can be art (of course it can be and often isn’t). But there have been many days when, after a particularly potent “Buffy” episode, I’ve found myself feeling vaguely off my game, my mind clouded with a gauzy, muted sense of dread. When a show jostles your equilibrium to the point of haunting your days or robbing you of sleep, when it finds a place in your imagination that also rubs, hard, at the core of who you think you really are, it starts to look like something more than what we simply call TV.

 

To be as effective a writer as those who are rained down by such compliments must be something so fulfilling. Another writer for Salon, Joyce Millman, described the show as

Buffy is an ode to misfits, a healing vision of the weird, the different and the marginalized finding their place in the world and, ultimately, saving it. … the show’s central themes [are] female empowerment, destiny vs. free will, the search for identity and the many varieties of families.

I agree to everything that has been said, but what I most appreciated about Buffy are the hidden and not-so-hidden emotional riches. You can look at it and go, “Wow! Tiny girls saving the world, cool!” and see nothing but that, and that would have been one objective – to have people enjoy watching the action unfold. But for those who look deeper into the many layers of meaning, the allegories, and the metaphors, the series has provided an entire universe of thought, so much so that scholars wrote tons of papers about it.  That’s what I love about the use of subtext; you can have one character go rummaging for an acne treatment, for example, but what’s really happening there in the scene is something bigger (like the demonstration of self-loathing perhaps?). Of course, there are times when subtext needs to be translated to text so as not to alienate the audience, and there’s a certain amount of satisfaction a viewer gets from being proven right when such things come into order.

There’s something about the play with words that fascinates me. Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy, was described as someone who “writes people who are self-deprecating, pop-culture savvy, madly in love with wordplay, quick-witted, terrified of sounding pompous and with wells of emotion lurking beneath a shiny, protective layer of self-aware sarcasm” (Kristi Turnquist, The Oregonian). Which is why despite being so late in the game, I enjoyed his show immensely. I’m twisted like that. But at least it gave me my lightbulb moment, so I couldn’t ask for a better reward for spending hours and hours in front of the TV than that.