Distinction based on the smallest variations

Just the other day I read a review of The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories by Christopher Booker which identifies the, surprise, seven basic plots to which all stories can be mapped (sounds good by the way and is on my "to be purchased" list.)

This morning I see Cracking the Sitcom Code by Noah Charney.

As happens to so many of us, I was asked to write a sitcom for Croatian television. I’m an American ex-pat living in Slovenia, and I know next to nothing about Croatia, besides the fact that it’s Slovenia’s southern neighbor, a fellow ex-Yugoslav republic, and that the language resembles Slovene except with a lot more “js” in it. I am a writer of books and articles, and I used to write a lot of plays, but I’ve never written for television. So I immediately said, “Sure, of course I can do that,” before rushing off to Google “How to write a sitcom.”

In addition to much Googling, I spent a good deal of time watching sitcoms. I was after tips on how they are constructed, and watched actively, looking to crack open their laugh-tracked shiny exterior to get at the goopy mechanism within, to see how they functioned. What I found out surprised me, and changed the way that I watch television.

From The Simpsons to Seinfeld, from Everybody Loves Raymond to Everybody Hates Chris, from Taxi to Arrested Development to Parks & Recreation, there is a highly-specific, minute-by-minute recipe used to write the vast majority of sitcoms out there. And once you know the formula, it makes it much easier to write them, and much harder to watch them without seeing that formula—the “sitcom code”—everywhere you look.

Booker covers the basic plots into which every story falls and Charney maps the story to the time constraint, i.e. if you have 22 minutes to tell the story, how is that time allocated?

Which all sounds terribly formulaic, as it is. And it is easy for a class element or elitism to slip in with criticisms of being formulaic and mass entertainment etc.

All of which is true.

But what I find interesting is how exquisitely attuned we are to the smallest differences. It is like the human face: two eyes, two ears, a mouth, a nose, cheeks, forehead, chin. That's about it. But what infinite variety with such limited variables.

I used to occasionally play a game with the kids to make the point of how finely attuned humans are to the human face, despite the limited variables. Driving on the highway, I would ask them to identify the sex of the driver up ahead of us. Lighting might be poor, the angle of view might be constrained, the time for viewing fleeting. Yet you almost always get it right. We are highly sensitive to identifying the opposite sex even with the most limited data.

A variant of this game was to ask them to tell a story based on a person who they might have seen for less than half a minute. Someone in the car opposite on the highway or somebody in a cafe or passing you on the street. Of course part of the fun was simply the exercise in imagination but part of the exercise was to get them to recognize just how many cues you pick up from a person - posture, gait, clothing, facial expression, etc. By telling the story and then explaining why they made it up the way they did, they would go back to small observed details.

Similarly with stories. We quickly discern good (engaging) stories from bad. But all follow the same formula and all work within the same constraints. Yet such exquisite variety from the smallest variations.