The Poochie Problem

Dear TV producers, writers, showrunners, etc.,

Although I don’t watch much of your work lately* (sorry, it’s not you, it’s me), I noticed that you have a problem that seems to span genres, timeslots, and ratings. Eventually, the premise of your long-running series gets stale; you feel like you’ve done all the plots you possibly can with this particular set of characters. You’ve exhausted their potential (or at least, their potential that doesn’t involve breaking them and forcing them off the show). Or maybe an important member of your cast has quit, leaving a void in the fictional world that needs to be filled. So what do you do?

Introduce a new major character, of course.

Now, hmmm, I don’t know quite how to say this. Based on my own experience and a certain amount of tooling around the Internet while I’m supposed to be working, I’ve come to to the following conclusion: new characters suck.

Maybe not completely of their own accord. I’m sure they’re nice people once you get to know them, and perhaps if they’d been around from the beginning, they’d have their own fan clubs. But people signed aboard this show (or book or comic series — any story that comes in open-ended instalments is vulnerable) to hang out with a certain bunch of fictional people, and no matter how great the new guy or gal is, he or she’s always gonna be a gate-crasher, resented as much as a six-year-old sibling running downstairs in his jammies to join you and your twelve-year-old friends at your slumber party.

So how do you solve this problem? Well, there’s no easy answer. Having them played by an already popular and gifted actor or actress seems to help. But since that’s generally unaffordable, unfeasible, or both, here are what appear to be the general rules.

1. DO NOT MAKE THE NEW CHARACTER “LIKEABLE”.

This is the kiss of death: trying to compensate for the fact that you know the new guy will be unwelcome by going out of your way to figure out what the audience wants and trying to give it to them. Thing is, there’s nothing people like less than a calculated assessment of what “they” want fed back to them in a jumble of character traits.

If you find yourself thinking of one of your new characters as “endearing” — i.e.,  not in terms of how her personality drives  her from the inside but instead in terms of how she appears to others on the outside — reconsider. I’m not saying you shouldn’t design this character based on his or her potential interaction with the other characters, but first and foremost, he  has to speak to you as a character on his own. Because, yeah, when he doesn’t? Everyone can tell.

In fact…

2. DELIBERATELY MAKE THE NEW CHARACTER UNLIKEABLE.

Sometimes well meaning storytellers want the audience to like a character so darn badly that they stress his or her virtues in every scene. So they show her becoming BFF with the most beloved character in the series, or they make everything he says and does so mysterious that the audience won’t be able to help wondering about him, or they give her super-special awesome abilities that no one else in the story can match.

Writers, there is a word for this. Well, two actually: Mary Sue. Or rather, Mary Sues share these problems for the same reason that this version of Mr. New Guy does — the author in both cases is desperately trying to get the audience to like his or her character, focussed on the end goal in the real world rather than on writing the best story he or she can.

Mary Sues suck, unless you’re the author who happened to write them. They’re unrealistic, too perfect, too obviously designed to manipulate the audience’s emotions without offering that spark of humanity that actually makes us care for them as a (fictional) person. Worse, the things that are supposed to make us interested in them often ring as artificial: is the only reason we’re supposed to care about this plot because Ms. New Gal is all hush-hush and refuses to talk about her Dark Secret Past? If we wouldn’t care about it if we already knew all the details, why should we care about it now? And why should we care that she’s suddenly best gal pals with the protagonist if their relationship feels fake? If you really want us to care about him or her, then…

3. INTRODUCE THE NEW CHARACTER  BEFORE IT IS A NECESSITY.

Unpleasant truth: audiences can smell desperation. We can tell when you introduce a random recurring love interest to prolong the unresolved sexual tension between your leads, or try to boost your image with the teen demographic by creating a new, younger character. We can tell when the show is devolving into a mess of been-there-done-that and you’re desperately throwing new ideas at the wall in the hope that something will stick. So if you think you’re being clever by tossing in a new character so smoothly the audience will see it as a natural outgrowth of the story… think again.**

So plan ahead. Bring in the new guy long before the lead you’re replacing has quit. It’s surprising how many of the few “new” characters whom audiences loved seem to have come from a minor character who was meant to leave the show after his or her purpose had been served but instead was given new plotlines because the audience liked him or her so much. Also, by giving your character a test run, you put less pressure on her in her first appearance. Audiences aren’t going to be watching with eagle-eyes, determined to figure out if they like this new person or not.

Of course, this doesn’t work if you do unforgiveable things with them, so be sure that you…

4. DO NOT MAKE THEM “LIKE [ANOTHER CHARACTER], ONLY…”

Never, never, never! Because your audience already likes that “another character”. If you try to establish New Gal as version 2.0 of a beloved character, they will see her instead as a cheap knock-off. You know, like the fake Barbies you can buy at the dollar store with hollow limbs and hair that falls out two seconds after you open the package.

This also means don’t introduce your new character to replace another character in the structure of the show, because that can only end in tears. Yes, we are worried when the protagonist’s significant other dumps him or when her best friend suddenly stops talking to her. But we’re not worried in the general sense of “oh dear, what if the protagonist doesn’t have a significant other/best friend”! We’re not his or her mom! If your work is any good, we care about these particular characters as much as you do, and we’re invested in their interactions and relationships. We don’t want a new puppy, we want our old dog back!

If you bring in the new blood in a way that invites comparison to one of the already beloved characters in your story, you’re courting disaster. Because then your new guy can’t get away with just being decent: he or she has to be at least as good as one of the big names, or better.

But if you can’t help putting him or her up for this kind of unfair comparison, then, when all else fails…

5.  INTRODUCE AN EVEN WORSE CHARACTER.

Who could spare the venom to hate I-am-season-one-Scully-only-male, here-to-replace-Mulder-because-David-Duchovny-quit Doggett when flaky, whale-song-loving Reyes came on the scene? Who could be bored by Dr. “Thirteen” Hadley once obnoxious Lucas had appeared to act as House’s temporary broffair? Introduce another new character, and suddenly your audience will be clinging to the familiarity of old-new-guy as though he’d been there since the beginning.

The nice thing about this strategy is, unlike the other four rules mentioned above, to which there are exceptions, this one always works. Also, I’m told there are lots of out-of-work actors and actresses hanging around, so you’d actually be helping the economy here. It’s a win-win situation for everyone!

So there you have it, TV industry. An exact plan of battle from a blogger who knows absolutely nothing about writing for television.

You’re welcome.

* Despite the subject of this blog, I swear I really did stop watching House, M. D. like I said I would…

** The only exception: if the kind of story you’re writing is one in which new major characters appear all the time. For example, on Dexter, each season has one or two new “big bad”s…serial killers/cops on Dexter’s trail/antagonists who usually don’t last past the end of the season. Each season usually also brings in one or two new characters resulting from the fallout of last season’s “big bad” and/or from the appearance of this season’s. But these n00bz always appear in the first episode or so of the season and then stick around until their story-world purpose is over.