Thou Shalt Not Limit Thine Imagination

It’s a Saturday. You find me working at my desk. I tend to work on Saturdays, partly because I enjoy it, but partly because it’s in the Bible. It’s actually the fourth of the Ten Commandments in which the Lord says:

“Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labour and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” (Exodus 20:8-11)

Note the reason given for the Sabbath day (now switched to Sunday because of the Resurrection (long story): that God worked for six days and rested for one. He’s God. He clearly doesn’t need to rest, but this is how he has created reality. Humans are made in God’s image and we are to be like him, working six and resting one. So it’s Saturday. And I’m at my desk. Working until at least lunchtime, just like everyone used to in England for centuries.

Tomorrow is Sunday. On that day, I will not work. I will go to church and have conversations with fellow churchgoers afterwards. I will cook and eat a roast lunch. I will hang out with my wife and kids. I will loll about reading books, watching YouTube and then will probably watch an old Miss Marple with my wife in the evening. I love my day of rest.

I know it’s nearly 10am. Am I slacking? Not really. I was up at 6.15am. I spent the first part of my day studying the Ten Commandments. At around 9am, I made it to my office and finished a light edit of my podcast, The Stand-Up Theologian in which I was talking to my friend Nate Morgan Locke about the classic book by Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death.

This classic book from the 1980s builds on the well-known quotation from another media theorist, Marshall McLuhan, who said “the medium is the message”. Postman would broadly agree but focusses his attention on the great cultural wrecking ball that is television.

Postman argues that the dominant medium of a culture shapes how people think, what they believe is true, and how public life functions. He warns that print culture gave us rational public discourse, whereas television culture will always skew its audience towards entertainment. This trivialises and weakens public discourse which is, to him and probably you and me, a disaster. Hence, we are “amusing ourselves to death”.

Despite not being distinctively Christian in outlook or conviction, Postman refers to the Second of the Ten Commandments which says:

“You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them…” (Exodus 20:4-5)

Postman wonders why God should have insisted on not being literally idolised. He writes:

“We may hazard a guess that a people who are being asked to embrace an abstract, universal deity would be rendered unfit to do so by the habit of drawing pictures or making statues or depicting their ideas in any concrete, iconographic forms.”

That’s a long sentence (and I’m already concerned you’ve been ‘dumbed down’ by television) but the point is this: if you turn the ‘one true god’ into an idol, your vision of that god will soon become limited to or controlled by the image or picture you have created. The medium rapidly becomes the message. The created thing is such a powerful representation of reality that it becomes the thing itself, limiting our imagination.

So far, so theological. But this applies to situation comedy. It is a limited, concrete form of expression. It runs for about 23-28 minutes. It has a beginning, a middle and end. But really, a sitcom is all ‘middle’. It’s a permanent Act 2. Your characters are trapped in a situation from which they cannot escape. We will come back to this.

For now, my message to would-be sitcom-writers is this: don’t let the form of situation comedy limit your imagination. Your sitcom needs to be about something. It’s not a collection of funny people in a room swapping jokes and wisecracks. It has to be about something more transcendent.

It could be about the ennui of modern work (The Office) or being ignored as an older person (One Foot in the Grave). You need to be thinking bigger than the form, since the form will quickly dictate how the show is going to look and sound. You will need to keep this in mind as you build out your show, and think about characters, the situation and the plot.

If you have some larger theme or idea baked into your show, you will be able to resist the great temptation of the sitcom writer which is to throw story at your characters. You think of a funny incident in which your character is involved. This is then followed by a series of further unfortunate events. It is a linear story which is, essentially, a catalogue of disasters.

And we’re back to The Lab, and Olly on his first day that goes wrong: he ruins his shirt. His car won’t start. He’s running late. He gets a speeding ticket or jumps a light and is pulled over. He’s shown around the office. This is just a series of events that feel ‘sitcommy’. The medium is limiting your imagination.

A character in a hurry is, of course, funny. Who can forget Basil Fawlty beating his car with the branch of a tree? You definitely want to put your character under pressure. But don’t worry too much about the form of the sitcom too early on. Think bigger. In fact, we need to move up our eyes to the very first of the Ten Commandments. Seriously. It says this:

“I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me.” (Exodus 20:2-3)

Putting theology to one side – something I rarely do – let us note that the very first commandment in this famous list of commandments is about priorities. The Lord, for good reason, is asking for primary obedience because he has kindly brought them out of slavery in Egypt (See Exodus 1-18 / Prince of Egypt (Dreamworks)). The question that you could argue is posed by the rest of the Bible is this: “who, then, will you follow? To whom will you bow down?”

In the world of situation comedy, every character has an idol. There is one thing that they want above anything and everything else. You need to know what it is, even if the character doesn’t know it themselves. This is their consuming passion that dictates and drives their behaviour in pursuit of those goals.

Last time, I explained that Olly is all about success and, crucially, looking successful. You might argue that everyone wants that. Actually, they don’t. I’m don’t. I’m writing this book in which I’m saying that I’m previously-successful, now-failing sitcom writer.

Naturally I don’t want to look like an abject failure, but many will risk humiliation for some other goal – or persona - they hold in higher esteem.

By way of example, let’s look at Olly’s line manager, Sarah. She is highly intelligent. And she doesn’t care who knows it. She doesn’t need anyone else’s approval. If they gave out Nobel Prizes for Forensic Science, and Sarah was the winner, she wouldn’t care. If she was running an experiment that needed her attention, she wouldn’t even get on the plane to collect the award. Olly simply wouldn’t be able to understand this. For him, it’s about the award, not the science. But Sarah is all about being right. And that means she wants the facts. All of them.

This makes Sarah the worst possible line manager for Olly because she doesn’t give him the one thing that he wants: praise. Olly needs affirmation in a way that Sarah simply does not. Because Sarah doesn’t need praise, she instinctively assumes that Olly doesn’t. She has to get used to affirming him, but she hates doing it, and she thinks Olly is weak or vain for needing it.

Neither Sarah or Olly are the sinner or the saint here. As I often say, “No one thinks they are the bad guy”. It’s good to want a good reputation. It’s good to pursue objective truth. But a desire for a good reputation turned up to eleven is vanity. And the insatiable desire for truth can look like sociopathy, or intellectual arrogance.

Sitcom characters, then, want that thing – that idol, that god – so much, they will sacrifice anything for it, without realising they are doing it most of the time.

This stuff is fundamental to life itself. We all have besetting sins and preferences. We all desire and prize certain outcomes above others. Fortunately, these differences make a team stronger. Yes, there will be conflict. Yes, there will be wild goose chases, unintended consequences, embarrassing climbdowns and apologies. But this is life. That is why the Ten Commandments also points to the Lord’s Prayer which contains the line, “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.” We get things wrong. We run after idols and false promises. We trample over each other and need to say sorry.

That is why all victories in sitcoms are pyrrhic. And every episode is the same. Because we don’t learn. We don’t change. And we might say sorry. But everyone knows we are going to make the same mistake all over again. That is a sitcom.

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