I am currently watching Spartacus for the first time. My plan was to watch one episode per week and blog about it. I started watching it two weeks ago and have just finished 'Vengeance'. We are going to start watching the final series 'War of the Damned' tonight. It is because of this programme that I haven't blogged the last two weeks because EVERY SPARE MOMENT IS SPENT WITH THIS SHOW!! If I'm not watching it, I can't get it out of my bloody head!!!
Anyhoo. As I've been watching it, the sheer excellence of the writing made me think of something done by lesser shows that really annoys me. And that is treating characters as plot devices instead of living breathing things (I know they're not but stay with me a minute!).
The desire of any show is to draw in the viewer. To have them buy into that show. And the main way in which this is done is through the characters. We need to believe in them - their motives, their actions, their desires, etc.
One of the quickest ways to stop your viewers buying into the characters is to have them behave in such a way that goes completely against the very essences that you have spent X amount of episodes building.
For example - Heroes.
Series one of Heroes is one of the best seasons of anything. Ever. So why then, did it turn to shit after that? Here is my theory.
I remember reading that the creator planned to have each season be a completely new story with completely new cast. Maybe the odd character from previous seasons would pop up, but other than that it would be a new cast. Fantastic! I then remember reading that as the show built in popularity the studio "requested" that this didn't happen as the cast had become quite famous/popular and they felt audiences wouldn't like the change. So they didn't.
So, during season one the writers had spent a lot of time breathing life in to Hiro, Peter, Nathan, etc. Then from season two onwards they then seemed to trample all over these characters - having them behave in ways that the 'people' we had grown to love/hate in series one would NEVER have behaved in! Personally, this was the main reason I stopped watching at the start of series three. I didn't believe in them anymore.
PS - Spartacus DOES NOT do this!
