Posted in: TV | Tagged: Blindspot, entertainment, flash, HRL, punisher, smallville, television

The Importance Of A Driving Mechanism In Television

Have you ever wondered why there are so many cop shows and medical dramas on television? It's not because the general populace really loves to watching the police and doctors work. It's the fact that both of those jobs lend themselves multiple stories. Just because a television series is good, it doesn't mean that there is a mechanism to drive it for multiple seasons. Family dramas tend to fade quickly because there is only so much an audience might believe will happen to a family before crossing the believable line. Even in the '80s shows like the A-Team had a mechanism for new adventures: they were out there helping people. But for The Dukes of Hazard, way too much happened to that set of cousins who were just trying to avoid getting in trouble.

This brings us to comic book related shows and their driving mechanisms. Smallville was the first one to realize that if there wasn't a built-in reason why all of the super-powered beings were popping up, it would become a soap opera quickly. So they added the meteor shower and the Wall of Weird. Now each new villain was a result of the same mechanism and didn't have to have a whole separate cause. Arrow started that way with the list his father game him, but Oliver Queen moved past that and uses the straight forward vigilante/city protector motif. And most of his villains match that. The Flash, on the other hand, was going to need metahumans to fight on a regular basis, so they created their version of the meteor shower: the particle accelerator explosion. That event caused the villains for season one and a good number for the rest of the run. Dimensional travel drove the villains for season two and time travel the cause of season three.

With season four, they tried a new event. A group of metahumans created by Barry Allen when he came out of the Speed Force and caused a Dark Matter event. We are getting 12 new metas this season because of it. Nice mechanism… except last night we discovered that it's a shoot off of the original mechanism. The Thinker was a result of the particle accelerator explosion and he caused the Dark Matter event. The original mechanism created for the series has now been refreshed in season four, and it's showing that maybe we haven't seen all of the metas created at that time.

The driving mechanism is key to a lot of series. Supergirl has the DEO, Legends of Tomorrow has the anachronisms. Another Greg Berlanti series, Blindspot, has the tattoos. The Blacklist has Red's list of bad guys. Even the new Punisher series acknowledges the driving mechanism in the first episode… we find Frank after he's killed everyone, but before he finds out there is more to the death of his family. What's he doing in that time? Nothing. He knocking down walls and trying to control his anger.

In comics, it's perfectly acceptable that once a hero puts on a pair of tights, villains just start showing up. It's the nature of the medium. And that works fine on film in that they're telling one big story and it's easy for audiences to accept something crazy could happen to someone once. But to do 13 to 22 episodes a season, there needs to be a reason why this stuff keeps happening. This is why so many comics are changed in development. It's why The Gifted are on the run instead of just being a series about mutants. And don't be surprised if Black Lightning ends up with the 100 Gang wanting to kill him or something to drive that series.

A good mechanism is key to the success of a action/thriller series, and like any good machine, it needs to be properly cared for — or it breaks down and you find very popular shows suddenly coming to an end.

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