For those who don’t know it, I’m a big fan of the television series “Justified”, which is in its fourth season and going strong. It stars Timothy Olymphant, who made his name as the star of “Deadwood”. He plays a federal marshal named Raylan Givens who is probably one of the few badass lawmen left on television. He’s definitely one of the good guys, and bad guys cross him at the risk of their own quick demise.
Anyway, the reason I’m talking about him is that one of the reasons I’ve always liked this show is that the writing is top notch, which is often rare for a television series. Oh, they’ll have decent writing from time to time, but mostly the plots are contrived, and the outcomes expected, but they rarely ever really move things along to get an audience thinking, wow, that show really grabs people by the jugular and doesn’t let go.
It was in a recent episode where I truly saw this happen, and it involves an old writer’s construct called “Chekhov’s Gun”, which is an old adage from the writer who indicated that if you bring a loaded gun on stage, at some point you need to have someone fire it. That’s the simple definition that a lot of amateur writers MIGHT get. However, it is actually discussing something much more insightful, and that’s the concept of foreshadowing.
Foreshadowing is to put something into the narrative that will have significance at a later time. Chekhov argued that you shouldn’t be putting elements into the fiction if they have no use for the story or to drive the story further. A lot of bad writers do this, creating plot holes that don’t get followed up, writing certain characters so they move off stage and then forgetting they’re still waiting in the wings for some kind of resolution.
The opposite of Chekhov’s Gun is a Red Herring, which basically means to introduce variables into a story that aren’t going to be followed up, but make the audience think that they’re important for some reason or another. Quite often, murder mysteries will do this, and some better than others. But in a drama, sometimes it’s hard to do this well. Unfortunately, a lot, and I do mean a LOT, of television does this because the writers are thinking of filling up time rather than producing new arcs for their characters. So you’ll see a lot of mediocre television series that produce all sorts of Chekhov’s Guns that end up being absurd Red Herrings.
But back to Raylan Givens and Chekhov’s Gun. In the most recent episode (and yes, this is a spoiler warning if you’re watching the show and haven’t seen the episode yet), a secondary character started to receive a lot more screen time. The name of the character is Bob (played brilliantly by Patton Oswalt), and he was a portly middle aged guy who was an elected constable in the area where Givens polices. Bob was the typical overweight cop with aspirations to be so much more than he currently was. He complains about how his elected job receives no respect whatsoever, as he has to buy his own car, fix it up with cop gear, and even his own gun and equipment. Most of the other police forces treat him as a joke, and he’s constantly aware of how little respect he has from everyone else. But he’s a good guy, and Givens, who has been burned by bad cops so many times in this series, half-heartedly trusts Bob. But he’s always trying to gain Raylan’s respect. At one point, he shows him this arsenal he keeps in his car for “when the shit gets real”, and he shows Raylan how if a suspect has a gun, he can pull out his knife quickly and seriously mess him up. When he acts out how he would do it on Raylan, who is sitting next to him in the police car, it is so obvious that Raylan is just laughing inside, because Bob’s actions wouldn’t have deterred Raylan (or anyone) from doing whatever they were going to do to Bob in the fictitious situation he was enacting for him.
But then at one point, Bob becomes responsible for information on the location of a fugitive that Raylan is trying to get out of town with while big bad criminals are doing everything possible to keep Raylan from escaping. One of the bad guys (a mafioso from Detroit) captures Bob and tortures him, but no matter how much pain and bad guy tactics the guy uses, he can’t get Bob to reveal that he even knows who Drew Peterson is (Bob keeps responding with different variations on the name Drew: “Drew Mama?” “Drew Bacca?”). As the bad guy looks as if he’s finally going to kill Bob for not cooperating, Bob manages to pull out his knife and in an extremely intense moment of television, manages to kill the bad guy right before Raylan and team arrive to where he was being held. The knife, as foreshadowed, was used almost exactly as Bob said he was going to use it when he showed it to Raylan days before in Bob’s cop car. When it happened, even I was surprised because Bob was thrust into a situation that no normal man could have ever survived, and the drama was made that much better for it.
Which then leads to possibly the greatest line of the entire episode (if not the season), when a bad guy has cornered Raylan (and Bob who is acting as Raylan’s back up), and Raylan tells the bad guy that Bob killed the man the mafioso sent to interrogate him. So the mob guy says: “Him?” Raylan responds with: “People underestimate Bob at their own peril.” Although Raylan isn’t the kind of guy to say “Good job, Bob.” Bob heard him and realized he had the respect he had always been seeking.
This is what I’m talking about when I talk about good writing. They could have gone with a typical Die Hard-like scenario and then a “Yipee ay oh Kiyaay” dialogue, but that’s the difference between popcorn writing and dramatic writing. For the record, I like both kinds of writing, but I’ll be thinking about dramatic writing for days and weeks after I experience it. I can’t say the same for popcorn writing.
