Back when I was a teenager, ten years ago, although cell phones were common in the outside world, they had yet to infiltrate the walls of our rural, isolated high school. Only a few, lucky students had the things, and in those days they were actually used “for emergencies” and to call your parents for a ride.
Meanwhile, in the land of high school television, cell phones were beginning to make their mark.
- By 2002, Buffy began communicating with Dawn by cellphone – she could now be called to be alerted to demonic danger at once.
- By 2003, Rory and Lorelai Gilmore’s never-ending mother-daughter communication began happening primarily by phone, as they wander around buying coffee and heading off to places.
- Come 2004, Veronica Mars could virtually run her own PI business through her phone. From mysteries involving racy videos, to fake contact numbers for a lost dog, to sending disposable phones through the mail, Veronica’s high tech world of mystery solving usually came back to her camera, her laptop, and her phone.
- That same year, the cellphone becomes such a crucial object of teenage affection that the threat of confiscation is what bends Marissa Cooper to her mother’s will.
- By 2008, not owning a cellphone was no longer a thing that happened. Homework-interrupting chats were no longer wired to the wall, but took place with iphones glued to girls’ ears. More and more screen time would be devoted to close up shots of text messages, or calls ignored.
Within the past 5-10 years, phones became not only objects that teens refuse to be without, but plot generators in themselves. As issues of teen “sexting” flooded the mainstream news media, 90210‘s Annie had a photo of her boobs distributed around West Beverly Hills High.
There are, in my mind, two fundamental issues with cellphones and compelling narrative fiction. The first is that conflict (and story) generally arises from a lack of information. Constant cellular communication removes a certain plausibility in the concept of incomplete knowledge. Excuses now have to be created for why you can’t just call someone and talk, work out details, learn the truth. Never again does it make sense for a teen to row a boat down a creek, climb a ladder, and discover a boy alone in his bedroom with another girl. Teens these days just wouldn’t come over uninvited without texting first. Or, if she tried it, her second complaint (after what’s going on?) would have to be “why didn’t you see my text?!” which, let’s face it, is kind of a stupid argument — and brings us to the second problem:
Phones are freaking boring! Incorporating cellphones into narratives means cutting to small screens. It means lots of weird scenes where characters have phones attached to their heads and wander aimlessly past some vaguely interesting locations to fool viewers into believing there’s some visual storytelling going on. It means talking through and about phones way more often than most people care to listen.
Sure, cellphones are an intrinsic part of everyday, contemporary society. So is eating, sleeping, transit, and going to the bathroom. They’re still boring as hell!
Freaks and Geeks and My Mad Fat Diary both got around this problem beautifully by being set in the glorious, cellphone-free past. Which isn’t to say that all shows need to revert back to that golden era of tapping on people’s windows and sneaking out of the house for private meet-ups.
Some contemporary shows do get away with it. Veronica Mars does a fantastic job of incorporating high tech mysteries into a vibrant and complex show. The opening sequence of Skins features an extended series of calls, and call waiting, which provides a fantastic introduction to the characters, and also some hilarious dialogue-at-a-distance. The key here is that overall, the series focused far more on human interactions, and cellphones generally remained those tools we use occasionally, stowed in pockets and purses.
There are certain things we sometimes need to cheat in TV fiction to make good stories: timelines, plausible lies, beauty standards – now can we please add cellphones to this list? Do we really need to be true to the reality of our over-reliance on networked gadgets? Probably not.
Make a good story, and unless totally necessary and not stupid or boring, just keep it in your pants.
