Out of Order

Generally, I prefer things to be neat, organized, and orderly, which should come as no surprise to any of my long-term readers. Real life is often disorderly, but one great thing it has going for it is that it proceeds chronologically. Imagine if you woke up one morning and it was 1975 or 1999. Oh, we need to go back and explain some stuff from this part of your life, and then we will jump to 2010 before we return to the present. Or perhaps you’re driving home from work, but the street signs are all different because you’ve been transported to 2034 for an hour. WTF? That would be really annoying for me to experience.

In entertainment, however, we must put up with a lot of this nonchronological disorderliness. Now, I don’t mind a prologue, especially to a murder mystery ~ it could be something intriguing from the past to give us a clue about the murderer's identity, or it could be the murder scene itself, and we begin the story to wend our way to the aha moment, at which point the fuzzy prologue becomes clear. These are standard openings, and they don’t turn me off from reading a book. 

Then there’s the type of fiction that jumps around in time and gives us whiplash: now, far past, now, recent past, now, etc. I usually find this horribly tedious to read, especially when the sections aren’t clearly marked and when the story is told in multiple points of view. There are exceptions, but I can’t think of any right now. The First Lie Wins by Ashley Elston was an enjoyable read for my book club, even though it flipped around a lot, but the flips were clearly marked and the narrative consisted of only one POV. 

I recently skimmed through the second half of a romance novel (A Love Letter to Whiskey by Kandi Steiner) that retold the whole story from the man’s POV, as if it wasn’t enough of a slog to get through the first half from the woman's POV. There wasn’t that much chronological whiplash, but was this book ever boring with the entire plot being: are these two annoying people ever going to get together permanently (and who cares)? The idea that I would want to jump back 15 years and start the whole saga again was bonkers. ALLTW was also full of “amazing coincidences,” and you know how I feel about those. One per story. One.

And now we come to TV. What the hell is going on here? So many programs are filmed in this choppy, nonchronological, whiplash-inducing method. The Bachelor Nation shows give us a “teaser” of an episode, then bits and pieces of a date/interaction as it’s happening, but the date is interspersed with snippets of an interview afterward when one of the parties chats to a third person, and then we get a teaser or two for next week’s episode. Overall, each season is chronological, but why must we subjected to these snippets and teasers for the future? Could it be the case that the actual storyline of a particular main character finding their soul mate from a group of possibilities chosen by the BN producers is simply… not that interesting? Hmm.

Two other shows I began to watch recently were The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives (Hulu) and The Perfect Couple (Netflix). TSLOMW was as stupid and cringe as one would expect, and it was made infinitely worse by the whiplash method of storytelling. Unlike, say, the film It Ends with Us, where you know you’re in the past because the lead characters are played by different, younger actors, I had no clue what was going on with the Mormon wives, whether a TikTok was current or from years ago, whether the characters were talking about a present BFF crisis or a past one, and who was having an affair with whose husband. After 5 minutes, I decided I dgaffed, but I slogged through the entire first episode so I could complain about it here. You're welcome! Btw, in case you missed my first post on this reanimated blog, I didn’t much care for It Ends with Us, but at least I knew where the characters were in time. 

I expected much more from The Perfect Couple, since it had solid lead actors and was a real movie, not docu-drama dumbassery, but alas no. TPC was filmed in a horribly choppy way, and it was super hard to tell what was going on and when. There was wedding prep at a luxurious estate, snippets of convos among various characters, a murder, interrogations, more snippets, etc., and it was hard to place the snippets in the correct chronological order with the action. Too much work, feh. I watch TV to relax while doing crafts, and I don't want to have to give a show my undivided attention. Like right now while writing this, I am also watching Still Alice on Netflix, and it's possible to tune in and out without losing the gist of what's going on. That's what I like. Good movie, but it's hard to believe Alec Baldwin as a sensitive, loving husband. Shouldn't he be a yelly general in every film?

You know, when we see a real documentary, such as the ones hosted by David Attenborough, there is no need for out of order nonsense. We watch an animal born, go through its life cycles, and die. The reason these programs are interesting is because of the cinematography and David’s fantastic narration; there’s no need for gimmicky shit and teasers. Perhaps the human reality shows are simply too boring to exist without gimmicks. Lightbulb! The Kaos show I highly recommended doesn’t do this nonchronological crap either. Most good shows do not, I venture to say. Breaking Bad did a teaser before each episode, and the teasers were interesting, a puzzle in pieces. We knew the writers were hinting at something to come, and the teaser never became confused with the current action because the BB creators knew how to do it right. Often, in the "reality" shows, the teaser ends up meaningless because it's an arrow pointing to nothing. Near the end of Bachelor Season 28 (Joey), there was a teaser of Kelsey saying, "We need to talk." It seemed soooo dramatic, but all she wanted to say was that she missed Joey between their dates. Nothingburger.