If you’ve listened to my podcast, taken one of my courses, read one of my books, or just spend more than twenty minutes around me, then you probably know I’m a big Star Wars fan.
That said, I was less than thrilled with the recent Obi-Wan Kenobi series, and it left me pondering the state of writing and storytelling on streaming television shows.
In this episode of the podcast, I discuss two different approaches to writing that can result in the creation of a masterpiece, and how current television shows like Kenobi are not following either of those paths.
Listen to the full episode or read the transcript below:
The Writing Coach Episode #131 Show Notes
Get Kevin’s FREE book: NOVEL ADVICE: MOTIVATION, INSPIRATION, AND CREATIVE WRITING TIPS FOR ASPIRING AUTHORS.
The Writing Coach Episode #131 Transcript
Hello, beloved listeners and welcome back to The Writing Coach podcast. It is your host as always writing coach Kevin T. Johns.
As a thank you for listening to this podcast, I want to give you a free book. My book, Novel Advice: Motivation, Inspiration, and Creative Writing Tips for Aspiring Authors. It’s available on my website, www.kevintjohns.com. Head over there. There is a link at the top that says free book. There’s also a popup that should come up and put your email address in there. And I’ll get you a free copy of my book, novel advice.
All right, now, today on the podcast, I want to talk about something that has been on my mind lately. Largely probably stemming from the OB one Kenobi television series. So we’re going to talk about movies and we’re going to talk about TV, but it all comes back to writing. And I think a lot of the things we’re going to talk about here are applicable to novel writing who are most of the people I work with as a writing coach, most people are writing a novel or a nonfiction book.
So everything we’re going to talk about here does apply to that. But I’m going to use some examples from television and music and other things because that’s really what got me thinking about this stuff. I think we can all <laugh>. Well, I don’t know if we all agree, but these last few years have been probably the worst of times. <Laugh> culture has been bad even before the pandemic, right? For a while. Things have been great. And I would argue storytelling hasn’t necessarily been that great for a while. And there are all sorts of cultural and technological reasons why that is. And maybe we’ll touch on some of them here, but I am a huge star wars fan. If you’ve ever worked with me as a writing coach, or if I’ve ever taught you a workshop, you’ve probably heard me make some reference to star wars. I grew up on the series, really loved the original films, but kind of fell away from it in my twenties as the prequels were coming out.
But then as an adult, <laugh> a few years ago, I kind of was looking for a hobby or something. And I kind of said, you know what? Star Wars is going to be? My hobby Disney has purchased it from George Lucas. All sorts of products are going to be made and all sorts of behind-the-scenes drama started happening fairly quickly. So anyway, for the last five or six years or something, I’ve been following star wars fairly closely. And when Disney plus launched a few years ago, I was really excited about it as a parent <laugh> I was so stoked to have all these classic Disney movies and things available to my family at a click of a button especially given that I grew up in the vault era. <Laugh> those of you in your late thirties or forties probably, or, and above remember Disney movies when they were releasing
Them on VHS, they would release them from the vault and then they’d go back into the vault. So they weren’t necessarily the easiest things to find. So I was really excited about the concept of Disney plus, and especially the idea of all the star wars, movies and TV shows being together, and this idea of new live-action TV shows. And of course, Mandalorian came out and blew everyone away. And for two seasons that’s really been a high quality, fantastic show and really brought some new ideas to star wars in the form of baby Yoda, kind of one of the first things that has kind of crossed over into mainstream culture and very little of what the sequel trilogy, the Disney sequel trilogy didn’t cross over other than maybe the Kylo Ren undercover boss, the brilliant SNL skit, but largely those movies are, are going to be forgotten before too long because the cultural impact they made was just nothing compared to, well, the original movies or Mandalorian.
And so I, I was really enjoying Mandalorian in enjoying this idea of streaming television and then the Bobba fat TV show came out and it had some good parts, but it was very strange. There were parts of it that were just terrible, like the worst chasing in the history of star wars some weird aesthetic choices on some characters and things I attribute most of that to Robert Rodriguez, but the writing of the series was so bizarre for those of you who watch it, or didn’t. I mean, there was four episodes of this show basically, and then it became the Mandalorian <laugh>. So I don’t, I mean, I’m, I’m here now, maybe the last three episodes or something of the series were so bad, they just flew in fro and they kind of turned it into the Mandalorian show because they realized how bad Bobba Fett was.
I don’t know how true that is or not, but I would argue the writing of the series was not top-notch. And the execution was definitely top, not, not top-notch. It just looked cheap at times and kind of strange aesthetically. And anyway, I, I would probably still say I was a fan of it to some extent I certainly enjoyed aspects of it. So when the OB one Kenobi mini-series was launched or was upcoming, you know, I was, I was hopeful. I mean, Mandalorian is great. Bobba Fett, maybe missed the mark, but that was largely because Mandalorian is Bobba fat that kind of already tilled that story. And so then they had to try to turn Bobba fat into something else, but this OB one Kenobi series came out, and I always make my family watch all this star war stuff, my poor wife, but strangely my children and my wife were really enjoying this OB one Kenobi show and mean not so much. And, and there was a moment, I think it’s the fourth episode, OB one Kenobi is rescuing Princess Leia from an Imperial base. And he just pulls a trench coat out of nowhere, wraps himself in it and then puts princess Leia under the trench coat. And, and this, this is their big escape. And at that moment I was kind, I, I, I checked out on the series. It, it was absolutely dumber than anything, George, our banks or anything else in star wars has ever done. I, I was sitting there looking at the worst moment star of anything star wars ever put on the screen and I’ll, I’ll include the Christmas special with that. I watch the Christmas special every year and it’s painful, but it’s a, a joyful kind of pain. Whereas this, this Boba, oh, this Pokemon Kenobi putting princess Lea under his trench coat was God awful.
And as the series went on, a lot of the writing choices were revealed to be terrible. Largely this storyline with this character Reva made no sense. And then there was just logic fallacies throughout. Like there’s a moment where the good guys are being chased by the bad guys through a tunnel. They get to the end of the tunnel and the bad guys already there with no explanation of why they’re there, how they got there. The series was rushed, it looked cheap. And while there was moments there was highlights, it wasn’t very good. And the writing was not good. And what all this got me thinking about is the state of streaming television. I think over the last half-decade, we all thought streaming television was going to be this incredible thing. And as Kenobi and as Bobba fat have proven, it’s not very good.
And it, it’s not just star wars. You might say, oh, well, star wars just doesn’t work on TV, even though we’ve seen it work with Mandalorian. But I would say the Marvel TV shows have largely been amiss as well. Falcon in the winter soldier, again, strange writing issues and just not that compelling low key was just a low rent rip off of the umbrella academy. A bunch, a much better series over on Netflix. Miss Marvel was okay, but it was so damn short. It was over in six episodes. And again, I thought the writing was kind of confusing on it. <Laugh> and so we’re seeing a pattern here. There’s a certain level of mediocrity to the streaming Disney plus material. And I, I have a thought as to why, and it’s largely related to writing. So let’s talk about different approaches to art, and this
Is going to get us to why I think the state of entertainment is in a bit of a Rocky place right now. I’ve always thought there’s two types of successful artists who are able to produce brilliance or masterpieces. And I would say one type is the Stanley Kubrick type. So Stanley Krick was a filmmaker who made about a movie, a decade and every decade it would be a different genre. And every movie it would become the defining film of that genre. So he did 2001 and it was considered the greatest sci-fi movie ever at the time he did the shining. It became the classic horror movie. He did full metal jacket, the classic war movie this idea of spending a lot of time and a lot of thought, and he was notorious for doing 40-50 takes of a scene, putting in the time and effort to make a masterpiece.
And that’s one type of artist. And then there’s the other type of artist, which is the Woody Allen type. I call it. So unlike Krick, who did a movie, a decade, Woody Allen did a movie every year for 40 years. It was unbelievable. And so for every one movie Stanley Krick would make Woody Allen would make 10, but I would argue in those 10 would be a masterpiece. So you see what I’m getting at here? There’s the Stanley cubic approach. One in a decade, you make a masterpiece or there’s the Woody Allen approach, which just churn ’em out, churn them out and you stumble upon a masterpiece once a decade while churning things out. I lean on this side of the things I lean on. The more is better side of things. I think again, you know, me, I’m always talking about my punk rock life, but growing up, listening to punk rock, I think of the album, let’s go by the band.
Ranted probably came out in like 1994 or 93 or 95 in that area. That album has 23 songs on it. And they’re not the greatest songs ever written, but every one of those 23 songs is really solid. And there are a couple of punk rock masterpieces on there. I think seven years down is one of my favourite songs of all time. You’ve got salvation, which pushed them to the mainstream to a certain extent, but that’s kind of the world I come from. And I really think if you produce, produce, produce, you stumble upon magical things. I just lean in that direction. Cuz I think about the Stanley cubic approach and I think about guns and roses album, Chinese democracy. So Axel rose spent a decade or a decade and a half or whatever it ended up being, working on the follow-up to the two user illusions albums and I guess the spaghetti incident and which was a cover album though. And when ChineseDemocracy finally came out, it wasn’t very good. It just wasn’t that great an album. It was overproduced, but also the delay had built up such anticipation that even if it had been a great album, it probably would’ve felt like a letdown to some fans because there was just so much buildup. But at the end of the day, it’s just a work of art. It’s just an album. It’s really tough to match the expectations of something built up like that.
And you know, going back to Star Wars, I would say that that’s part of the, the response to episode one, the Phantom Menas, there was just, it was the most anticipated and most marketed movie of all time. And it was going to be really tough to win over audiences with that film. So I, what I’m getting at is I, I like more content.
I would rather 20 average songs than one really, really great song from a band that I like. And I think this also goes to comic books. In addition to punk rock, I grew up on comic books and I’ve always said, I don’t need the defining Spider-Man story. I don’t need the ultimate Batman story where things are never the same. I just want the comfort of another Spider-Man story. Another Batman story make it slightly different than the last one. And I’m okay. I like the serial nature of knowing that back in the day, I could go into my comic shops on a Wednesday and once a month, whatever my favourite book was would come out on a regular basis. It was this idea of content, content, content, and every once in a while you stumble across something really great. Now, this carried over into television for the longest time film was filmed.
Cinema was cinema and television was something else. It was its own art form. And I would say movies were more like the Stanley cubic approach where movies were these one and done has to be great thing. Whereas television was so much more like a punk rock album or a comic book where shows put out about 24 episodes a season, and this wasn’t just sitcoms. These were hour-long shows. My favourite show probably of all time is the XFiles. And for years, year after year, they were doing 20 to 24 episodes, a season of hour-long, super high-quality episodes. And there was a couple of masterpieces in there. And so by alluding to a 24-episode exfil season, you might see what I’m getting at and it’s that these, this new streaming format does not give us the pleasure of serial storytelling. Miss Marvel was six episodes, long Kenobi with six episodes.
That’s barely serial storytelling. It’s basically a long movie broken up into chunks. And so we get none of the pleasures of serial storytelling for the most part, especially things like seeing characters grow and develop and change over time, as well as discovering how actors are at their best in wi in what situations does this character or that character really work. I think of something like how I met your mother and that show really became the Barney show eventually, but it took tour month, three or one or two seasons anyway, to kind of figure out that character and, and figure out what were the things that actor did that worked. And so when you’re making 24 episodes, a season, there’s time to learn what works, what doesn’t, which actors have chemistry, what sorts of storylines can be good. And in these six, nine, even a 10-episode season on streaming television, it’s really tough to see that sort of development of quality, especially when Netflix consistently cancels everything.
I really, really enjoyed the first season of the show. Jupiter’s legacy, a superhero show based on a Mark Miller comic book or series of comic books. I thought it was a really intriguing first season. I hadn’t read the comics. I went and read the comics afterwards because I enjoyed that show so much the week after it was released, it was cancelled. So before I’m even able to get into it, it’s already cancelled. And there were only six, or eight episodes, whatever Santa Clarita dya is another show that I’ve really enjoyed and got cancelled by Netflix after two seasons. And so this streaming television does not give us the pleasures of serial storytelling, which is what it’s supposed to do. But at the same time, it doesn’t have the production value of a movie. Some people on the internet pointed out, there’s a scene in this OB one Kenobi TV show where a character stands up on a spaceship from a seat.
And you kind of see these seats are like plastic chairs painted gray and like leaning up against a wall. Like this is not a high budget, quality production. It’s not old fashioned budget, television budget, but it’s also not feature film budget. And so also we know these shows are rushed. We know the Disney sequel star war series was rushed and the writing was a disaster because it was rushed, but also because they didn’t plan ahead. But the writing was the worst part about the Disney sequels. And we know these TV shows are rushed. People are talking about it. They’re not getting a chance to get the scripts where they need to be. They’re not high quality scripts and they’re not high quality productions, they’re mid-level productions, but that doesn’t give us the pleasure of the masterpiece, the pleasure of the big budget thing, where every little aspect of it, I is thought out.
And so where we’ve ended up in culture in storytelling, in film, which barely exists anymore. And basically, streaming television is the worst possible scenario where we don’t get the OOS and OS the big budget, wow-factor that cinema used to bring us. But we also don’t get the long-form serialized storytelling that we used to get from television. And I, I really think we’re, we’re at a, a story state in time in terms of storytelling in popular culture. So I, I hope the people listening to this who are writers, who are novelists. I, I hope you are, are thinking about this. Are you thinking about producing a lot of material and hopefully stumbling along the way or stumbling upon something truly great along the way? Or are you doing a book a decade and really making sure it’s a masterpiece? I don’t know if a lot of writers are doing either of those.
I think most novelists that I know are kind of doing this mid-range thing where they, they’re not doing spending a decade on a book they’re exhausted of it after two years. Right. But they’re not also saying I’m a serial storyteller. I’m going to put out six books in this series in the next two years. And working at that rate, a lot of the writers I know are kind of working at this mid pace rate, but hopefully what I’ve I’ve convinced you of in this argument is that sometimes that mid-range thing doesn’t satisfy anyone. It’s not a masterpiece. It’s not the high budget, well thought out thing, but it’s also not the Puy serial storytelling that we used to get from something like television or comic books. So if you are in, in the boat, I am and, and finding yourself distressed or annoyed, or kind of disappointed in, in the state of television or whatever we call these streaming shows now stop and think about how are you approaching your novel? How are you approaching your writing and just make sure you’re moving at the appropriate rate. If you really do want to write the defining book in your genre, it may take you a couple years to get it there. Or if you want to put out six books into series, cuz you have the whole series thought out, you might wanna increase the pace at which
You’re getting work done because it takes a long time to publish six books. So there you go. There’s me kind of griping about the state of television, the state of my poor beloved star wars which has swiftly slid down the hill into the land of poor writing and cheap productions. But I, I, you know, it’s not about me complaining about streaming TV. It’s about you thinking about where you’re at with your book, with your art and what approach you wanna take to create something memorable and to create something that readers are going to enjoy and be entertained by. As I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, you can head on over to www.kevintjohns.com and click on the link that says free book to get a copy of my book, novel advice, motivation, inspiration, and creative writing tips for aspiring authors. And once you’re on that mailing list, any email I send you feel free to hit reply and, and let me know, you want to know about my one-on-one coaching services or you want to know about my incredible group programs that are up and running right now. We’d love to have you join us. Okay. That is it for this episode. Remember to subscribe so that I can see you on the next episode of The Writing Coach
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