The president is collaborating

Last week, Bill Clinton and James Patterson released their collaborative novel The President is Missing, which has already sold something like a quarter of a million copies. Its publication was heralded by a lavish two-page spread in The New Yorker, with effusive blurbs from just about everyone whom a former president and the world’s bestselling author might be expected to get on the phone. (Lee Child: “The political thriller of the decade.” Ron Chernow: “A fabulously entertaining thriller.”) If you want proof that the magazine’s advertising department is fully insulated from its editorial side, however, you can just point to the fact that the task of reviewing the book itself was given to Anthony Lane, who doesn’t tend to look favorably on much of anything. Lane’s style—he has evidently never met a smug pun or young starlet he didn’t like—can occasionally turn me off from his movie reviews, but I’ve always admired his literary takedowns. I don’t think a month goes by that I don’t remember his writeup of the New York Times bestseller list May 15, 1994, which allowed him to tackle the likes of The Bridges of Madison County, The Celestine Prophecy, and especially The Day After Tomorrow by Allan Folsom, from which he quoted a sentence that permanently changed my view of such novels: “Two hundred European cities have bus links with Frankfurt.” But he seems to have grudgingly liked The President is Missing. If nothing else, he furnishes a backhanded compliment that has already been posted, hilariously out of context, on Amazon: “If you want to make the most of your late-capitalist leisure-time, hit the couch, crack a Bud, punch the book open, focus your squint, and enjoy.”

The words “hit the couch, crack a Bud, punch the book open, [and] focus your squint,” are all callbacks to samples of Patterson’s prose that Lane quotes in the review, but the phrase “late-capitalist leisure-time” might require some additional explanation. It’s a reference to the paper “Structure over Style: Collaborative Authorship and the Revival of Literary Capitalism,” which appeared last year in Digital Humanities Review, and I’m grateful to Lane for bringing it to my attention. The authors, Simon Fuller and James O’Sullivan, focus on the factory model of novelists who employ ghostwriters to boost their productivity, and their star exhibit is Patterson, to whom they devote the same kind of computational scrutiny that has previously uncovered traces of collaboration in Shakespeare. Not surprisingly, it turns out that Patterson doesn’t write most of the books that he ostensibly coauthors. (He may not even have done much of the writing on First to Die, which credits him as the sole writer.) But the paper is less interesting for its quantitative analysis than for its qualitative evaluation of what Patterson tells us about how we consume and enjoy fiction. For instance:

The form of [Patterson’s] novels also appears to be molded by contemporary experience. In particular, his work is perhaps best described as “commuter fiction.” Nicholas Paumgarten describes how the average time for a commute has significantly increased. As a result, reading has increasingly become one of those pursuits that can pass the time of a commute. For example, a truck driver describes how “he had never read any of Patterson’s books but that he had listened to every single one of them on the road.” A number of online reader reviews also describe Patterson’s writing in terms of their commutes…With large print, and chapters of two or three pages, Patterson’s works are constructed to fit between the stops on a metro line.

Of course, you could say much the same of many thrillers, particularly the kind known as the airport novel, which wasn’t just a book that you read on planes—at its peak, it was one in which many scenes took place in airports, which were still associated with glamor and escape. What sets Patterson apart from his peers is his ability to maintain a viable brand while publishing a dozen books every year. His productivity is inseparable from his use of coauthors, but he wasn’t the first. Fuller and O’Sullivan cite the case of Alexandre Dumas, who allegedly boasted of having written four hundred novels and thirty-five plays that had created jobs for over eight thousand people. And they dig up a remarkable quote from The German Ideology by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who “favorably compare French popular fiction to the German, paying particular attention to the latter’s appropriation of the division of labor”:

In proclaiming the uniqueness of work in science and art, [Max] Stirner adopts a position far inferior to that of the bourgeoisie. At the present time it has already been found necessary to organize this “unique” activity. Horace Vernet would not have had time to paint even a tenth of his pictures if he regarded them as works which “only this Unique person is capable of producing.” In Paris, the great demand for vaudevilles and novels brought about the organization of work for their production, organization which at any rate yields something better than its “unique” competitors in Germany.

These days, you could easily imagine Marx and Engels making a similar case about film, by arguing that the products of collaboration in Hollywood have often been more interesting, or at least more entertaining, than movies made by artists working outside the system. And they might be right.

The analogy to movies and television seems especially appropriate in the case of Patterson, who has often drawn such comparisons himself, as he once did to The Guardian: “There is a lot to be said for collaboration, and it should be seen as just another way to do things, as it is in other forms of writing, such as for television, where it is standard practice.” Fuller and O’Sullivan compare Patterson’s brand to that of Alfred Hitchcock, whose name was attached to everything from Dell anthologies to The Three Investigators to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. It’s a good parallel, but an even better one might be hiding in plain sight. In her recent profile of the television producer Ryan Murphy, Emily Nussbaum evokes an ability to repackage the ideas of others that puts even Patterson to shame:

Murphy is also a collector, with an eye for the timeliest idea, the best story to option. Many of his shows originate as a spec script or as some other source material. (Murphy owned the rights to the memoir Orange Is the New Black before Jenji Kohan did, if you want to imagine an alternative history of television.) Glee grew out of a script by Ian Brennan; Feud began as a screenplay by Jaffe Cohen and Michael Zam. These scripts then get their DNA radically altered and replicated in Murphy’s lab, retooled with his themes and his knack for idiosyncratic casting.

Murphy’s approach of retooling existing material in his own image might be even smarter than Patterson’s method of writing outlines for others to expand, and he’s going to need it. Two months ago, he signed an unprecedented $300 million contract with Netflix to produce content of all kinds: television shows, movies, documentaries. And another former president was watching. While Bill Clinton was working with Patterson, Barack Obama was finalizing a Netflix deal of his own—and if he needs a collaborator, he doesn’t have far to look.

American horror stories

As a devoted viewer of the current golden age of television, I sometimes wake up at night haunted by the question: What if the most influential series of the decade turns out to be American Horror Story? I’ve never seen even a single episode of this show, and I’m not exactly a fan of Ryan Murphy. Yet there’s no denying that it provided the catalyst for our growing fascination with the anthology format, in which television shows are treated less as ongoing narratives with no defined conclusion than as self-contained stories, told over the course of a single season, with a clear beginning, middle, and end. And American Horror Story deserves enormous credit for initially keeping this fact under wraps. Until its first season finale aired, it looked for all the world like a conventional series, and Murphy never tipped his hand. As a result, when the season ended by killing off nearly every lead character, critics and audiences reacted with bewilderment, with many wondering how the show could possibly continue. (It’s especially amusing to read Todd VanDerWerff’s writeup on The A.V. Club, which opens by confessing his early hope that this might be an anthology series—”On one level, I knew this sort of blend between the miniseries and the anthology drama would never happen”—and ends with him resignedly trying to figure out what might happen to the Harmon family next year.)

It was only then that Murphy indicated that he would be tackling a different story each season. Even then, it took critics a while to catch on: I even remember some grumbling about the show’s decision to compete in the Best Miniseries category at the Emmys, as if it were some kind of weird strategic choice, when in fact it’s the logical place for a series like this. And at a time when networks seem inclined to spoil everything and anything for the sake of grabbing more viewers, the fact that this was actually kept a secret is a genuine achievement. It allowed the series to take the one big leap—killing off just about everybody—that nobody could have seen coming, but which was utterly consistent with the rules of its game. (It wouldn’t be the first or last time that horror, which has always been a sandbox for quick and dirty experimentation, pointed the way for more reputable genres, but that’s a topic for another post.) The result cleared a path for critical favorites from True Detective to Fargo to operate in a format that offers major advantages: it can draw big names for a limited run, it allows stories to be told over the course of ten tightly structured episodes rather than stretched over twenty or more, it lends itself well to being watched in one huge binge, and it offers viewers the chance for a definitive conclusion.

Yet the element of surprise that made the first season of American Horror Story so striking no longer exists. When we’re watching a standard television series, we go into it with a few baseline assumptions: the show may kill off important characters, but it isn’t likely to wipe out most of its cast at once, and it certainly won’t blow up its entire premise. American Horror Story worked because it walked all over those conventions, and it fooled its viewers because it shrewdly kept its big structural conceit a secret. But it reminds me a little of what Daffy Duck said after performing an incredible novelty act that involved blowing himself up with nitroglycerin: “I can only do it once.” With all the anthology series that follow, we know that everything is on the table: there’s no reason for the show to preserve anything at all. And it affects the way we watch these shows, not always to their benefit. During the first season of True Detective, fan speculation spiraled off in increasingly wild directions because we knew that there was no long game to keep the show from being exactly as crazy as it liked. There wasn’t any reason why Cohle or Hart couldn’t be the killer, or that they couldn’t both die, and I spent half the season convinced that Hart’s wife was maybe the Yellow King, if only because she otherwise seemed like just another thankless female character—and that couldn’t be what the show had in mind, could it?

And if viewers seem to have turned slightly against True Detective in retrospect, it’s in part because nothing could have lived up to the more outlandish speculations. It was simply an excellent genre show, without a closing mindblower of a twist, and I liked it just fine. And it’s possible that the second season will benefit from those adjusted expectations, although it has plenty of other obstacles to overcome. Maintaining any kind of continuity for an anthology show is challenging enough, and True Detective has made it as hard on itself as possible: its cast, its period, its setting, its structure, even its overall tone have changed, leaving only the whisper of a conceit embedded in the title. Instead of Southern Gothic, its new season feels like an homage to those Los Angeles noirs in which messy human drama plays out against a backdrop of urban development, which encompasses everything from Chinatown to L.A. Confidential to Who Framed Roger Rabbit. I’m a little mixed on last night’s premiere: these stories gain much of their power from contrasts between characters, and all the leads here share a common dourness. The episode ends with three haunted cops meeting each other for the first time, but they haven’t been made distinctive enough for that collision to seem particularly exciting. Still, despite some rote storytelling—Colin Farrell’s character is a divorced dad first seen dropping off his son at school, because of course he is—I really, really want it to work. There are countless stories, horror and otherwise, that the anthology format can tell. And this may turn out to be its greatest test yet.

What I’ve learned from Glee

The other night, my wife asked, with genuine curiosity: “Why do you like Glee?” Which, honestly, is a really good question. I don’t watch a lot of television; I’m not, as far as I can tell, anything close to Glee‘s target demographic; I know that Glee is fundamentally flawed, and often disappointing; and yet I find it fun to watch and, more surprisingly, interesting to think about. But why?

My only answer, aside from the fact that I like musicals, that that I enjoy Glee because of its flaws, because it can be frustrating and horrifically uneven, because it regularly neglects its own characters, and because an average episode can get nearly every moment wrong—and yet still remain a compelling show. For a writer who cares about pop culture, it’s the most interesting case study around. (As opposed to, say, Mad Men, which is the best TV drama I’ve ever seen, but much less instructive in its sheer perfection.)

Here, then, are some of the lessons, positive and negative, that I’ve tried to draw from Glee:

Positive:

1. Do follow through on big moments. Howard Hawks defined a good movie as having three good scenes and no bad scenes. The average episode of Glee has maybe three good scenes and eight bad scenes, but the good stuff is usually executed with enough conviction and skill to carry the audience past the rest. The lesson? Every story has a few big moments. No matter what else you do as a writer, make sure those moments work.

2. Do invest the audience in your characters as early as possible. Glee‘s pilot, which now seems so long ago, did an impressive job of generating interest in a massive cast of characters. Since then, nearly everything the pilot established has been thrown out the window, but the viewer’s initial engagement with Will, Rachel, and the rest still gives the show a lot of goodwill, which it hasn’t entirely squandered. (Please note, though, that a cast of appealing actors goes a long way toward maintaining the audience’s sympathy. In a novel, once your characters have lost the reader’s interest, it’s very hard to win it back.)

3. Do push against yourself and your story. A.V. Club critic Todd VanDerWerff has done a heroic job of arguing the “three authors” theory of Glee: that the show’s creators—Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk, and Ian Brennan—each have distinct, and conflicting, visions of what the show should be, and that this inherent tension is what makes the show so fascinating. Similarly, much of the interest of an ambitious novel comes from the writer’s struggle against the restrictions and contradictions of his or her own story. (Of course, if you don’t give yourself at least some constraints, such as those of genre, you aren’t likely to benefit from this.)

Negative:

1. Don’t neglect structure. Remember the importance of constraints? The trouble with Glee is that it doesn’t seem to have any. Early on, the show established a tone and style in which almost anything could happen, which is fine—but even the most anarchic comedy benefits from following a consistent set of rules. In Glee‘s case, a little more narrative coherence, and a lot more character consistency, would go a long way towards making it a great show, rather than a fascinating train wreck.

2. Don’t take your eye off the long game. Glee rather notoriously went through four years’ worth of plotlines in its first season, and as a result, the second season has seemed increasingly aimless. Obviously, it’s hard for most TV shows, which hover precariously between cancellation and renewal, to plan much further ahead than the next order of episodes, but a novelist has no such excuse. A writer has to maintain the reader’s interest over hundreds of pages, so as tempting as it is to put all your best ideas up front, it’s important to keep a few things in reserve, especially for the ending.

3. Don’t give the audience what it wants. Joss Whedon, as usual, put it best:

In terms of not giving people what they want, I think it’s a mandate: Don’t give people what they want, give them what they need. What they want is for Sam and Diane to get together. [Whispers.] Don’t give it to them. Trust me. [Normal voice.] You know?

Glee, because it was so successful so early on, and with such a devoted fan base, has repeatedly succumbed to the temptation to give viewers exactly what they want, whether it’s more jukebox episodes, bigger musical numbers, or a romance between two of its leads. (And fans don’t like it if the show takes one of these things away.) This approach might work in the short term, but in the long run, it leaves the show—as is becoming increasingly clear—with nowhere else to go. Remember: once your characters, or your readers, get what they want, the story is essentially over.

Of course, none of these issues have hurt Glee‘s success, and judging from the last few episodes, the show is making an effort to dial back the worst of its excesses. And I do hope it continues to improve. As much as I enjoy it now, a show can’t work as a case study forever. Because a show like Glee is always interesting…until, alas, it isn’t.