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Date Posted: Thursday, June 29, 11:00:51am
Author: JayBee
Subject: Not all shows work the same way (r)
In reply to: Swatkat 's message, "Backstories" on Thursday, June 29, 09:22:05am

And so these comparisons aren't necessarily very apt. Some shows, just by their nature, are ensemble pieces (think "Lost"); others orbit around a single main character; others are based on a duo; and so on.

Building backstories for supporting players in shows that are *not* ensemble-oriented doesn't always make sense. It often happens, however, in later seasons when the writers have run out of new things to do. People in fandom, who are often very attached to supporting characters and crave every tidbit of new canonical information about them, tend to *love* these types of episodes, but I think the general (i.e., non-fannish) viewing public finds them boring. Most non-fen fans (if that term makes any sense) tune into House because of House, and the supporting characters interest them because of the way House bounces off them. They are *not* going to be terribly thrilled with a Very Special Episode about Wilson's childhood trauma. Fen, in contrast, would eat that episode up.

As for LFN, I think the original intent was that it was definitely a single-character-centric kind of show and not an ensemble one. Because of that, TPTB just didn't take any particular care with supporting character backstories. The problem was that they seemed to run out of ideas for their main character very quickly, and began to depend on the ensemble more and more, even as they still insisted on thinking of the show as single character-centric. It led to a weird kind of sloppiness.

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