|
||||
CB: Heh. I watched that on DVR, so I blew right by it.
RT: As I said, I about hit the roof, and I think they gave away our huge twist for next week's episode ["Ruskie Business"]. I am so angry with them today. It's been a constant battle, like, tease the red herring -- don't tease the actual ending. And it's embarrassing I'm going to admit this, but the way I learned about that promo was not originally from watching the episode, but from checking in on the Television Without Pity boards after the East Coast airing to see what people were saying. They were like, "Why did they give away the ending in the middle of the show?"
CB: Man, promo departments. Okay, moving on, you also do a great job, it seems to me, of being subtle, whether it's in clues, dialogue, or characterization. We often use the word "anvilicious" to describe the clunkiness and ham-fistedness of many of the shows we recap. I haven't really had to use it with Veronica Mars, but it certainly was thrown around enough in the Dawson's days.
RT: [laughs] Honestly, and this will probably come back to haunt me, but I think everything on the WB network is like that. That network takes a lot of control of their shows, and they have a formula and they like it and they think it works, and I swear to God, no one on that network has a thought that they don't express. It's what I call "emotional exposition," and I hate it. I hate it. I'm a pretty wordy writer, and we love writing our dialogue -- it's not like we shy away from dialogue. But generally speaking, I like people to be backed into corners before they share their feelings, or you kill that part of the story. It's the whole "show, don't tell" -- let the emotions be the subtext, and let the dialogue be in the way of what the characters are trying to hide.
CB: Not to ruin my TWoP cred with too much praise, but the continuity editing is strikingly good as well. You must really not want us to nitpick you.
RT: Well, we take it so seriously, and at the same time, I know we screw up from time to time. I know it's hard for me to keep track of, and I'm so immersed in it. And we know that the two weeks of Duncan breaking up with Veronica, Lilly dropping Logan, Lilly murdered -- we know that we've jam-packed -- we've got, like, eighty-six events happening in that little stretch of time. But any flashbacks before then would take the kids ["except Lilly" -- CB] back to their freshman year, and we've got our twenty-three- and twenty-four-year-old actors. At the beginning of the year, I gave every writer a chart, and I put every event that I knew had happened in the past on that chart, but I knew -- twenty episodes later, it's a cluttered, complicated situation. I'm hoping there aren't too many errors, and if there are, that they're small.