Returning to this intermittent thread concerning story-telling, my Arts Editor and I have been sucked into the new TV show You, Me, and the Apocalypse, and the show illustrates some of what I look for in new drama. Some of this is novelty: the scenario of a bit of space debris heading for the Earth, with fatal consequences, while not unknown in fiction (for example, the Willis movie Armageddon), is unusual; just as importantly, the approach appears to be unexpected, as we get to watch a person with OCD pursuing his missing wife, a mildly irreverent priest and his new found assistant, and others, some with links, known or not, to others, pursuing their lives in the face of imminent extinction.
And they are not entirely predictable, yet they’re organic. The priest is tasked with investigating various people claiming to be the Second Coming, so maybe we’ll get to see how such investigations proceed. The guy with the missing wife gets a hint when the police try to charge him with being a computer hacker and goes into full-blown chase mode – despite being a socially awkward wimp. You can understand their personal motivations, even with overriding disaster coming.
And it’s not just that they’re weird, or different, but how are they going to react? What will be their choices? What will the consequences?
It seems absurd, doesn’t it? After all, in an earlier post I postulated that much of the reading public doesn’t read just because it’s entertaining, but because it’s a survival strategy. We read to see if someone’s choices in a situation we may, or may not, face someday, were successful. Testing faux characters’ faux choices against a faux reality may seem to taste of madness, and yet stories are a central part of every society of which I’m aware.
The absurdity? Oh, yes. So how likely are we to face an incoming comet, and what use would it be to know the whys and consequences of these decisions?
It’s this: we don’t accumulate exact information and do nothing it. We abstract from it, we build generalized rules, we derive principles. And this is the raw information with which we build that abstract information.
