But we were talking about jeopardy, weren't we? And the kind that I'd much rather talk about is the kind that we find on our screens with some degree of frequency. For instance, it wasn't that long ago that we were watching an episode of 77 Sunset Strip in which our hero Kookie (Edd Byrnes) was arrested on a trumped-up murder charge and thrown in a small-town jail. It left us breathless, wondering if our hero would escape the clutches of the crooked police and live to fight another day, or if this was Warner Bros. message on how they take care of stars involved in contract disputes. Well, what do you think? It was so predictable that Kookie would not only escape, he'd find out who it was framing him and why, and uncover the true murderer. We were able to fast-forward to the end for the juicy details.
The following week while we were watching an episode of Mannix, our hero Joe (Mike Connors), who happened to be in a small town investigating a murder, found himself arrested on trumped-up charges and thrown in jail. Will our hero escape and find the real killer before the crooked cops finish him off? What do you think? It was so predictable that Joe—well, you get the point. We were able to fast-forward to the end for the juicy details.
That these two episodes aired, at least in our household, on consecutive weeks, probably exacerbated my already-intense dislike of a hoary television trope that I like to call "false jeopardy." (Actually I only started calling it that a minute ago as I was typing this, but we'll let that go for the present.)
False jeopardy—and I'm not referring to a game show hosted by someone other than Art Fleming or Alex Trebek—is what I call it when one of the lead characters in a TV series is put into an extreme life-or-death situation that is supposed to keep us in suspense. Now, I don't mean the ordinary kind of risk that private detectives or policemen encounter on a weekly basis, like being shot at, run over, beaten up, caught in a room filling up with water, being trapped between two walls of spikes closely closing in on you—well, you get the point. After all, these shows would be pretty dull without some kind of action.
No, what I'm talking about is the kind of jeopardy that serves as the catalyst for the entire episode. For at least two of the four acts, Kookie and Joe were slapped around by bully boys in blue, menaced by fellow prisoners, or threatened by corrupt officials. Their protestations of innocence were ignored; their basic constitutional rights were trampled. It's all very manipulative, designed to work the viewer into a simmering rage against the injustice of it all. And when the bad guys got their comeuppance, as they invariably do, it wasn't nearly satisfying enough to make up for it all.
I don't want to say that this kind of thing happens all the time, but any drama that runs for more than a season or two will have at lesat one episode involving false jeopardy, whether through imprisonment, kidnapping, a hostage situation, a life-threatening disease, or something of the sort. And for the better part of an hour, we're supposed to think that the outcome is in doubt.
What it does do is create impatience on the viewer's part; since we already know how things are going to end (at least insofar as the lead character is concerned), we just want to hurry up and get to the end so we can see the happily-ever-after ending. That's about the time when I reach for the fast-forward button on the remote. (And suggest, once again, that the person who invented the fast forward button should have won the Nobel prize.) I think we're supposed to be curious as to just how things wind up the way they do; who the real killer is, how the police find out where the hostages are, what the doctor comes up with at the last minute. Maybe I'm just not that curious; I'm a cut-to-the-chase kind of guy.
Perhaps we're supposeed to put ourselves in the place of the lead, what it would feel like if we were the ones in a seemingly impossible situation. What we would do, how we might escape. If you ask me, the best series at creating that kind of atmosphere was The Fugitive; after all, the prospect of being executed for a crime you didn't commit has got to be horrible. (Think about it; you didn't even get the satisfaction of murdering someone you hated like the guilty parties in Perry Mason.) But in The Fugitive, this wasn't a gimmick; it was the premise of the whole series. There's a big difference. Sure, there were episodes that put Kimble in the same kind of false jeopardy I'm talking about, and those episodes are subject to the same criticism. But you can't use the premise of The Fugitive as an excuse for the other series that put their leads in false jeopardy.
I remember an episode of Hawaii Five-O in which McGarrett (Jack Lord) was temporarily blinded. Maybe I should say apparently temporary, because the doctors weren't sure he'd regain his sight. Now, we all know that he's going to see again, because the name of the series is Hawaii Five-O, not Longstreet. But I'd argue that the threat of permanent blindness was nothing more than a McGuffin. The suspense wasn't in whether or not McGarrett would recover; it was how he'd cope with being blind while the bad guy was out there looking to finish the job. Of course, that outcome wasn't in doubt either. The point is that this was a battle of wits, with the false jeopardy just a backdrop against which the real drama was played out.
Defenders of these plotlines would, I suppose, say that this is the point with all of these false jeopardy stories, that we're supposed to be taken in by the chess match between good and evil. But this isn't The Seventh Seal we're talking about, and it's only a superior storyline that can make the suspension of disbelief work long enough to get to the end of the episode. And the word I keep coming back to is manipulative.
We're supposed to hate the dirty cops that keep Kookie im jail, the corruption and the injustice in the system. That's not suspense; that's advocacy. We're supposed to hate the killers that hold Cannon and his client hostage, and thirst for the retribution that awaits when they get what's coming to them. And that's great, until you realize the writers have stacked the deck, that they're counting on you to react that way. Once you figure that out, the anger lessens. So does the suspense, though. It can't make us worry about the lead, because we already know he or she is going to be all right. (Unless we've read in the trades that their contract is up for renewal.) And the premise is too sustained, over the course of an hour, to keep the level of suspense high enough to take us along on the ride.
That leads to another kind of false jeopardy, one that's become much in vogue over the last decade or two: the season-ending cliffhanger. One of the first, and most famous, cliffhangers (I can't remember right now if it was a season-ender or not) was the "Who Shot J.R." episode of Dallas. It was a great gimmick, because it kept people all over the nation talking for months. It was also a shrewd one, one that kept the concept from slipping into the clutches of false jeopardy.
What was shrewd about it was that the purpose of the cliffhanger was not to keep us guessing as to whether or not J.R. was going to pull through; without Larry Hagman, there's no Dallas. No, what the braintrust did was to make us guess who shot him, and this created some real suspense. Nobody could be ruled out; a trial could have sent ratings shooting even higher (no pun intended). A clever team of writers could have figured out how to keep the storyline going without endangering the tenures of any of the regulars. If need be, they could even have played it all off as a dream, right?
I know that all entertainment is manipulative, to some extent. Whether it's music, literature, movies or television—they all play on our emotions, condition us to respond. That's OK; we like being manipulated, just as we like being scared. We don't want it to be too obvious, though; we don't like knowing that it's happening. And that's how I feel when I see the lead in false jeopardy.
It doesn't have to be that way, of course. A series like The Fugitive baked the jeopardy into the equation from the very beginning, and because of the skill of the writers and the talent of David Janssen, we managed to be gripped by what happened even though we knew what would happen, because there was usually more than one story to worry about. Would Vera Miles escape her abusive husband, would the autistic child get the treatment he needed, would Doctor Kimble manage to treat the sick or injured without giving away his status as a fugitive pediatrician? That was really the question, not the one about whether or not Kimble would avoid arrest. Of course he would; the entire premise of the series depended on it. And it worked. In lesser hands, it might not have.
I imagine that just about every writing room in the history of series television has at least one, if not more than one, script handy for just such a purpose, one that probably comes complete with blanks to fill in for the lead character's name, the location, and the other details that prevent you from being able to claim that the episodes are exactly the same. And that's OK, once in a while, Not, however, once a season, for each series on the air.
When I get in a mood like this, I have to remind myself that I've never worked on a television series, never written a script, and so those who have are automatically miles ahead of me when it comes to playing the game, and so what gives me the right to complain. And they're right, in a way. I think we're also right, though, that we're entitled to a game that offers us more than true-or-false jeopardy. And if you don't agree with me, that's perfectly all right. Just prepare to find yourself in jeopardy next week, when I start reminding you of Darkness in Primetime again. TV
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Thanks for writing! Drive safely!