12 Unasked-For Suggestions For A Proposed Prime-Time Soap Opera

1.
Include at least two heroes who work at cross-purposes. Not that they are opposed, or antagonistic, but simply that they have mutually exclusive goals. A nice sort of affective suspension results.

2.
A five member action-grouping, as follows:

• The bland leader (for projection purposes)


• The melancholy second-in-command (the acceptable face of a rejected "other")


• The woman (a sublimated sex object, resolutely bubbly)


• The big man (the doltish foil, implicitly the despised flesh-body)


• The pixie (a memory of the infant self, indeterminate gender and all)

Younger audiences respond well to this configuration. Their elders will enjoy the quote.

3.
Exclude family ties as a working motivation. As an armature, a set of initial relationship positions, fine...but no intelligent viewer can be expected to sympathize with ancestries, or with rigid links that interfere with individual initiatives.

4.
Mine the great literary devil-visits...Karamazov, naturally, and Mann's Doctor Faustus. Any interesting person will be visited by interesting devils now and again.

5.
A conscious play of spatial concerns. Take it from a specialist, landscape is paramount! Any expression can be safely removed from the mouths of the characters and placed into production design. If you're planning on projecting into the near future, make a future out of untoward conjunctions rather than Swiss design. Likewise, even the movement of actors through space can serve as a tracery of allegorical propositions.

6.
Satyr-plays. Obsessively re-enact the main concerns of the narrative on a humorized micro-scale. No, I don't mean Johnny playing with a cap-gun as his mother ponders a loaded revolver. You can do better than that.

7.
Carefully scale all plot interventions. Consciously under-size or ill-fit the ostensible concerns--deaths, financial troubles, mutilation--in order to retain the essential physics of the narrative.

8.
If dealing with corporations, here's a thought--a corporation uncomfortable with its own heroics. A corporation that does good out of strict necessity, not caring to publish the fact.

9.
Characters who are physical travesties. They could at some far point be shocked into beauty; they may have already been altered irrevocably from their former beauty. For the moment, they are travesties and there is nothing to be done about it.

10.
Avoid a moral or realist take on drug use, instead striving to duplicate the moral-realist matrix of contradictory reactions and opinions typically present in the minds of drug users.

11.
Those currently seeking to bring the telenovela to the Anglophones plan to abandon the most vital attributes of the genre. Please remedy this and give these Anglophones what they really want: strongly emotive acting and reams of extraneous plot material.

12.
Plot for indelible acts and images, each wholly singular, rather than elaborated verbal confrontations. As characters meet, they silently fight and mate in ways heretofore unimagined.