The Comfort and Danger of the Status Quo
I’ve been thinking a lot about sitcoms and their relationship to story-telling lately, no great surprise given that we’ve culturally just finished watching Wandavision together. But long before that stroll down TV-History Lane, I’ve always been intrigued by sitcoms. Granted, part of that is because I grew up watching so many of them, but it’s also because I enjoy digging into the different strengths and weaknesses various story-telling methods offer.
As one of my favorite blog entries highlights, one aspect of the sitcom style that has long held my interest is the return to status quo. It is a feature that I both love and hate in perfectly matched amounts, capable of strangling the life from stories while also letting them last forever. On one hand, living in a world where nothing substantial ever changes represents the perfect avenue for story-telling. Characters don’t age or pass on, there’s no end to the adventures, an infinite road of exploration available.
That inability to change also creates a limitation, though. Without the capacity to learn from their experiences, all growth by the characters is immediately discarded after an episode’s end. For all the service that does to longevity of the overall story, it means there are a finite number of believable challenges to overcome before the character has to start retreading old ground or move into increasingly unlikely scenarios. The grumpy boss character can only see the error of his ways so many times before viewers start to wonder if there are memory issues at play.
Okay, we’re only a few paragraphs in and this is getting a tad complicated, let’s talk with examples. The Simpsons is a perfect show to look toward for general preservation of the status quo. There have been a few shake-ups, but those were related to the logistics of running a show for 30+ years, not the intended tale. Few substantial changes occur between episodes, especially anymore, largely locking the characters into themselves. This is also why a show that started out about a working class family escalated to Homer going to space, working for a Bond villain, and so on. There were a limited amount of grounded stories to tell before they needed new material.
Another method for handling the status quo was an inspired move best exemplified by Seinfeld. In their case, the characters never changing was part of the show’s core humor and premise. There were no morals or lessons in the episodes, these were specifically people who willfully refused to learn from their mistakes. It allowed for the show to still feel like it was moving forward, even as everyone stayed largely the same.
The last one will involve some spoilers for The Good Place, so skip this paragraph if you haven’t seen at least seasons 1-2. The Good Place tackled this issue by incorporating it into the nature of the story. Through the seasons, the characters would grow and change, however the “reboot” mechanic meant they could also be consistently taken back to their starting points. In a way that show was a meta-commentary on, and explanation for, all sitcoms, but I’m never shutting up if we start down that road. Suffice to say, The Good Place used a method by which the status quo was being preserved by an element of the story, making it something to struggle against rather than an accepted constant. Essentially, by giving that power to a force within the story, they created the hope that the hold might be broken.
By the nature of TV, there’s never a truly unchanging story unless the show is canceled super-fast. Contract disputes happen, people pass away unexpectedly, humans age. Funnily enough, books are actually far better designed for this sort of story-telling model, proven by the long-running serialized tales like The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. No actors to have contracts with or watch age, no set budgets or ratings to worry about, and only person one author to worry about quitting or passing away. Sometimes not even the lone author is a concern, in cases where the name is a pseudonym shared among many writers. That said, these sorts of series do suffer from the same issue as their TV-peers. They are bound to the status quo, never able to change things too substantially, keeping their characters locked as they are.
There isn’t a right or wrong way to handle dealing with the status quo, different audiences come to fiction for different reasons. Some people take their satisfaction from seeing growth and change, others prefer the experience of sitting down with familiar faces for a fresh adventure. It’s just important to know what kind of story your telling, and how it’s relationship to continuity will best serve that tale.
For me, as much I loved those older shows, when I found programs that had running continuity, I was gobsmacked and instantly taken. When working on a book, one of the first items I consider is how the various characters can, and should, change through the pages. Seeing characters grow, overcome hurdles that toppled them before, is one of my favorite parts of fiction, from both a creation and consumption side.
Still, I’ve always loved the slow, fun pace of sitcoms, getting enough time to explore a world and all it’s quirks. I’ve never been able to find a way to truly synthesize the constant return to status quo with continual character development, the best approach I’ve found so far is my Fred method, named for the vampire accountant who helped me figure it out.
The Fred method is simply setting up an over-arcing story that can move forward very slowly while the smaller adventures take place. It allows for lots of world-exploration and character focus, with the ability to tie everything up at the end to a natural conclusion. You can see this at work on the small-scale in some of the Fred books themselves, between the various novellas, but it also applies to the series as a whole. For works trying to capture a sitcom’s general vibe, this is the best compromise I’ve found, though continuing to search is half the fun.
Ultimately, how much you restore the status quo between entries should relate to the kind of story you’re trying to tell. If you’re focusing on the adventures themselves, preferring the characters act as constants for the reader, the stable ground to build everything else around, then minimal growth will serve the series well. If you want to look more toward the characters themselves and how they interact with the world, then some manner of change here and there is probably going to be expected by the audience.