How to Tell If You’re in a TV Show

As someone who writes for TV but lives in the real world, I’ve compiled a handy guide:

Convenient Interruptions
In television, a conversation is always getting conveniently interrupted right after all the pertinent information has been conveyed. Two characters will have a pivotal moment, and then someone else will bust in, or the telephone will ring. In life, no one ever comes and interrupts my conversations when they get boring. Nope, I’m still just standing there, with my heavy plate of potato salad, making small talk, eking it out of whole stone.

Sex
In TV, people are always sneaking out in the morning after having sex, sometimes even leaving a note on the sex partner’s pillow. In life, there’s no way you wouldn’t hear that person leaving. First of all, you’d already be awake, because you stayed up all night wondering what the hell just happened. Second, even if you were asleep, you’re not going to hear when someone’s rustling around in your room looking for a pen among your giant pile of DVDs? And your shelves full of DVDs? And also your wooden bowl full of loose DVDs??

Talking About Something When It’s Really About Something Else
In TV shows, people often talk about something that’s really about something else. Like, a soccer mom will get up and give a speech about soccer, but it’s really about her divorce, and the disparity is used to comic effect. Has this ever happened in life, even one time? Actually, I take it back. My ninth-grade French teacher showed up in class one day and said that, when it came to learning vocabulary, life was “full of new adventures” and we should be “very open to them,” but I’m pretty sure she was talking about the affair she was having with the principal, so I was clinging to the original meaning for dear life.

Tone
In TV, there is supposed to be a consistent tone. Either you’re in “Sex and the City,” gliding through a shoal of puns and relatable problems, or you’re shitting yourself with anxiety in the sickly morning light of a show like “The Wire” (haven’t seen it). In life, the tone of your day can change on a dime. Even in just the span of a phone call with your mom. One moment you’re in a witty ensemble family comedy, and then your mom asks how your writing is going and you’re in the desolate mists of “The Handmaid’s Tale” (haven’t seen it), and then you stub your toe and you’re in a split-level-ranch-house comedy (not a real genre), and then you go downstairs and forgive someone under a burning roof and you’re in “Grace Under Fire.”

Rousing Speeches
In television, you can often solve a problem by giving a rousing speech. There’s an issue, a conflict, the world is going to end, what have you, and some intractable character who is blocking the solution will be swayed by a heartfelt, off-the-cuff lecture in which the pitch of the speaker’s emotion will insure that some truth is crowbarred open. In life, this hardly ever works. I know from personal experience that most of the time your partners and friends are simply not up for these speeches. They don’t care for them. Another reason this kind of thing doesn’t work in life is that people actually do not like to change their minds in front of you. Which brings me to:

Epiphanies
In TV shows, people are always having epiphanies that herald some new way of moving forward or of being in the world that amounts to a solution to all their problems. In life, I have about a million epiphanies a day, like I should live in the moment/be more organized/be more grateful/go to the library to research pickleball/stop drinking so much wine/switch to wine coolers/just try warm wine. But the question is, do people really change? They often do in TV, but in life I think the jury is still out. Maybe only after someone has a million of these epiphanies on the same subject do they start to fuse into something resembling a better way to be. Like, you finally, finally forgive yourself for your terrible SAT scores while waiting in line at the market, and this time it sticks. But that’s really hard to capture in a TV show. ♦