Not only do I apparently dine at the Peach Pit, but I used to hang out at the park where the characters in Privileged get their coffee (because it’s on the Paramount lot, where I used to work), the Buy More on Chuck is supposedly located near me in Burbank, which is also where John Connor was driving through on Monday night’s Sarah Connor Chronicles.

I love living in L.A. (I also love my two VCRs that allow me to stay up-to-date on all this shows.)

Aside from seeing my favorite places on TV, one of the things I like most about series television is that the writers get to tell so many different stories … so long as their show is successful and lasts more than two episodes. They get to explore different relationships, which brings new opportunities to the storytelling. What they did on Gossip Girl the other night is a prime example of why series television is so much fun. (Caution: If you haven’t caught Monday’s episode yet, you might want to skip the rest of this until you do.)

The writers took two characters that normally hate each other (Dan and Chuck) and stuck them together for an episode to try out an entirely new dynamic. The reasoning may have been a little forced for my tastes, but I can easily overlook that when it provides so much to explore for the characters and the actors. In much the same way, that’s how I approached (DRAMA! spoiler coming if you haven’t read the last book) the casting of Hope’s play in Entrances and Exits. It wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun if I had given Tasha a role in the play instead of Belle. For those aspiring writers out there, this is not just good advice for writing a book series or TV series. It’s something you can try in a standalone project too. If you have a scene that isn’t working, bring in a character who has absolutely no reason to be there. Someone who would change the entire plot of your story simply by walking in the room. It could be a horrible mistake that kills your story, but it could also be something that brings a fresh take on the idea and leads you off in a multitude of directions.

On the flipside, I think breaking up a pairing and making Blair and Serena enemies on Gossip Girl is going to make for much more exciting television. It’s already making for a much more exciting Serena. I just hope they tread carefully, move slowly, and don’t overdo it. Blair and Chuck are two of my favorite characters on TV right now. It’s such a challenge to create characters that you can love and hate all in the same sentence. And Serena had a wonderful moment of that in her speech to Blair that had Blair say something like “Can you even hear what you’re saying?” Obviously, I want Blair and Serena to be friends again in the end, but there are loads of different opportunities to examine before we get there.

In other news, to find out what I did on my end-of-summer vacation, check out the Ro Com blog.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 1st, 2008 at 7:45 pm and is filed under TV Talk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.