What TV can learn from Improv

I don’t know how many times I hear it from my var­i­ous Improv teach­ers and it’s this: “Start in the middle.”

The audi­ence is smart. Very smart. As impro­vi­sors we accept and embrace this con­cept. We need them to be smarter than us. So if you start a scene with the intro­duc­tion of two char­ac­ters, the audi­ence is already bored. For example:

It rings as the start to a British com­edy for me, but to most peo­ple it’s really bor­ing at this point. Or at least, it’s only luke warm in terms of excite­ment. As opposed to the lights com­ing up and the first words shouted on stage are:

The lat­ter exam­ple is much more inter­est­ing isn’t it? The audi­ence is atwit­ter with ques­tions and hooks that have them stuck to this story. Who? What? Why? Etc… Both are exam­ples I per­son­ally was part of.

So this is a con­cept well known in the world of Improv, start in the mid­dle. But it’s some­thing TV doesn’t do enough. They think that audi­ences need to be spoon fed sto­ries, they think we need to see the brick­wall being con­structed from the ground up when in fact we’re dis­cov­er­ing that the most addict­ing new shows do just the oppo­site. Lost, Heroes, Bat­tlestar Galac­tica, etc. For­get the setup, throw the viewer in and let them fig­ure it out.