I was watching a pretty good episode of L&O: SVU tonight and it ended with: "The jury finds the defendant..." With Dick Wolfe's credit coming on. Apparently, we VOTE on the outcome??? WTF kind of lazy television is that?
Yeah that was crap. And I hate how they advertised the show "a courtroom ending which will have people talking for a long time." Really? Hmmm.... But all that aside, do you think he did it or not?
Yea, this sucked. Mostly because it's letting "America" decide who is the victim in a "he said/she said" rape case which basically painted the guy as the victim for a whole hour. By the way, the SVU Dist. Atty. is terrible. Her closing statements are always ridiculous and unconvincing, and last night was no different.
That bothered me too. It basically came down to who had the better sob story. So do the people who vote for the "winner" get writer's credit on this episode. I demand residuals when the episode is shown in syndication! BTW, the opening scene was shot on my street - they were filming it a couple of months ago and they made me walk around the block to get to my apartment, which was just one block down. The bastards.
--- I didn't see the show, but why is this lazy? If you need to be told what to think, does that make you lazy? I don't want to personalize this and attack you, but it seems to me to be a very legitimate approach to a court drama, to let the audience decide what the "evidence" "proved". I don't think you are wrong to be disappointed that they didn't resolve the conflict, but that that part is not a hard thing to do. They could have slanted the evidence to make the victim look like she was making the whole thing up and paradoxically found the man guilty. It's TV. They can spin this anyway they want.
It's quite simple. The challenge, and in most cases the duty, of a writer is to create a payoff that is both compelling and plausible. A writer has to create a story arc that leads to a payoff without tipping off the audience too much, and story elements have to be relevant to the payoff. By handing off the ending to the audience, the writers have copped out on the most challenging part of the writing process.
--- i really hope you are kidding about the "challenge" because 87% of the stuff on TV and the movies is completely formulaic. in courtroom drama there are three possible outcomes, so the end is predictable. the verdict can be a surprise or appear outrageous or be what is expected. it doesn't take surpassing writing skill to make the story come out in a way where the audience will be satisfied. the key is the story itself and whether it hits at the heart of what makes for good drama. there is skill involved, but please don't tell me that it was the writers that copped out when you don't know the whole story. maybe the producer decided to leave things hanging. maybe this was an experiment. a bad experiment? that's for the audience to decide, but announcing the verdict and having a discussion between the DA and the DA's assistant, or the detective, or the victim's husband, afterward is hardly rocket science.