The Scribal Culture of Television 6 comments

By Bradford Winters

Tomorrow night my episode of the ill-fated NBC series, Kings, a loose adaptation of the King David story in a fictional modern (and in many ways American) context, will air. Not that this notice does any promotional good, as it will post on the Image blog a full week or so after the episode has come and gone.

But that’s par for the course given the course that Kings has suffered in its first and last season, thanks in part to an initially sophisticated marketing campaign that ultimately caved, in my opinion at least, to Hollywood’s ongoing inability to deal with almost anything that smacks of religion, or, worse, the B-B-B-Bible.

And besides, tomorrow night is July 4th, surely the worst night of the year to have one’s episode air in America. Saturdays are the dregs of television anyway, but 8:00 p.m. on Saturday, July 4th? Good luck. Pass the ketchup.

And a beer while you’re at it.

Truth be told, though, it isn’t entirely my episode anyway. For starters, there’s the matter of the writers’ room, a typical feature on most TV shows in which the writing staff collectively “break” the episodes and come up with storylines, arcs, etc. Meaning the most memorable element from an episode that I wrote, that bears my name and mine alone in the credit sequence, may have been conceived by the person sitting next to me at work. That’s a given, and one that makes for great camaraderie in any healthy writers’ room.

Then there’s the matter of one’s script being rewritten by the creator/showrunner (usually but not always the same person) before it goes into production. Especially in a show’s first season, when it’s this person’s job to define the series, and keep it defined episode to episode with a unified voice, the degree to which one’s work gets re-worked at the top is often humbling and sometimes devastating.

Again, this is a given, but it becomes an easier or harder pill to swallow depending on the personalities on either side of the script.

For all its discomfort with the B-word, Hollywood bears at least a minor if unthinkable resemblance to that cultural behemoth of its own day, the Jerusalem temple.

Or so I couldn’t help thinking when I recently took up Karel van der Toorn’s Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible, a lengthy treatise that can fairly (and unfairly) be summed up by its title: it was the guild-based culture of temple scribes in the Persian era onwards that gave us the Old Testament as we know it, with nary a Moses or Malachi involved in the composition.

Forget revelation. Think committee. Or, to bifurcate T.S. Eliot, think tradition—in this case the means to manage the transition from oral to written—but forget individual talent. Not that there wasn’t any, needless to say, but that it was cloaked in pseudepigrapha for the sake of authority over authenticity.

Van der Toorn notes that this culture of scribal anonymity may have its closest modern parallel in an ad agency, where the forces of creativity are virtually unidentified, and thus disassociated from the message it is their mission to popularize.

It’s a sound comparison, but given the common textual ground of stories, as opposed to slogans, I would say that the ancient “temple workshop” (van der Toorn’s term) has a similarly close if not exact parallel in the Hollywood writers’ room. Yes, credit is given where credit is due (and often where it isn’t), and, no, you won’t find much in the way of pseudepigrapha where Aaron Sorkin’s name, for example, appears on a script of The West Wing that he didn’t write; if anything, his name will not appear on a script that he did (re)write.

But still, the corporate form of storytelling and its transmission to a broader audience begs the comparison. Imagine the showrunner as head temple scribe, with his coterie of scholars and sages.

Alright, maybe “scholars and sages” is going too far. But you get the point. We are the Writers Guild of America, after all.

Arthur Miller once said something along the lines that great writing wasn’t possible in television because of its being a collaborative enterprise. Miller’s unassailable stature as a playwright notwithstanding, I can name any number of shows currently or recently on the air—Mad Men, Flight of the Conchords, The Sopranos, to name a few—next to whose quality of writing the last play of Miller’s that I saw, Mr. Peters’ Connections, can’t hold a candle. The Death of a Salesman is a masterpiece; but so is the death of Moses (the Book of Deuteronomy being a principal example, in van der Toorn’s argument, of many hands with a mostly common agenda).

There is much to quibble with in Scribal Culture, as there is in the scribal culture of television. And while I may not be solely responsible for the writing of tomorrow night’s episode of Kings, neither was King David himself for every line of the Psalms.