Things I learnt from Realiti

Whew. Realiti has been a bit of a roller-coaster ride. For my own good, I should do some sort of 'lessons learnt' post. Because it's always good to relook over what you've done and cringe at your mistakes. And if I do it as a post, I can get some of you to shout at me if I've missed anything out, or got anything wrong. Anyway, this is what I know, now that I've done the show:

• Writing an ensemble show is hard. Wah, we watch shows like Lost and Firefly and then get delusions of grandeur that it's really easy to plot multiple storylines over a course of a season and have them come together to make sense. It's not. It's hard for several reasons.
  
  • First, instead of having one interesting story, you need to come up with five. So, you end up with some good stories (Burn/Melody), some okay stories (Nickson), and some 'hmm...' stories (Baby, Amir). And you have to come up five interesting characters, with five different voices, and five different styles... Argh.
  
  
  • Second, it's almost impossible to stretch a story arc over ten episodes without it either being very slow, or very soap operatic. What worked was the Burn/Melody story, where it started with 'Melody is on drugs' and then transformed into 'Burn's love-redeems-all'. Roughly three episodes for each, and almost seamless. What didn't work so well was Amir's story (The ran-from-kampung didn't really segue that well into throw-the-competition-for-your-family line), and Baby's (I think the poison-pen letter storyline was too short; the resolution of the blackmail storyline was too stretched out).
  
  
  • Third, crossing-over storylines need work to make it feel natural. There needs to be a really good cause-and-effect at work. I tried to cross-over Burn's storyline to Baby's; however, in the process, I lost sight of the competition, so that had to be ditched. On the other hand, I did like how Baby's story created tension between Amir and Dayang.


• Having a clear theme would be a good thing. Sometimes, I felt like we lost direction about what the show was about. Yes, it's about a singing competition, but it isn't just that. It's more about what you would do to win the competition. The tag-line I end my notes post with has the phrase, "What would you do to become a star?". This isn't the official line, this is just something I realised very late into the writing process (despite having Ping point out that it's "all about the competition" a lot of the time). If I had this stuck on my monitor as I was writing, I think everything would have hung together much nicer.


• Planning helps. Having a good idea where you want to get to really makes a difference. That whole run between episodes 7 to 10 I think works because we had a strong theme (eliminations), and because we knew who would reach the final, so we knew which stories had to be wrapped up when, so we knew how to pace (most) of them... Compared to, say, Impian Illyana, when the episodes were more standalone, so they didn't really fit in that well.


• Malaysian audiences don't always have patience. Rather, until they've bought into the show, they don't really want absorbing storylines that have subtle turns. Well, I'm not sure that I know what I'm talking about in this one, but let me try. People thought episodes 1 and 2 were slow. But I've been through them (again), and I think there's at least as much fat in episodes 6, 8 and 10. I think audiences need to identify with a character first, before you can put them in a grind. Compare this with the first season opener for Battlestar Galactica (very tense, slowly builds up), or a lot of mid-season episodes of lost (it's all about the character and lots of 'hmm' moments). And I'm a huge fan of Inspector Morse, but I notice very few people in Malaysia took to that show. So, the lesson is, hit with a bang, then another bang, then another bang, and then slow down.


• Extreme characters become popular. I should already know this, but people like characters that make larger-than-life decisions. I think Baby (when she's bad) and Nickson (when he's gay) stick in many peoples' heads, whereas Amir and Melody are a little more low-key.


• Songs and music can tell stories. Duh. But what I mean is that I regret not pushing for songs that fit into the storyline better. The song then tells the story or reinforces the theme. For example, Melody singing 'All By Myself' to Burn on the rooftop. But it's hard to find songs that fit the style of the singer and the copyright/licensing restrictions that you have.


• Banter resets tension. Okay, this really isn't a lesson learnt, but it's quite funny to see how I've handled banter throughout my writing career (I do use this term loosely). At the beginning, I used to have a lot of banter, but Ping kept cutting it out. And then I learnt that "shorter is better", so I started to cut down on it myself. But then I realise that it's not that you want to cut unnecessary banter, but you need it to let stories breathe in between scenes sometimes. So now I wish I had pushed for a little more in some scenes (e.g. in Burn's dyslexia story).

There's probably a few more things I can write about, but I'm geting hungry, and I need to eat. Man cannot live on words alone, you understand.

Labels: realiti, tv