Surpassing the Gimmick
How often have you seen a television or book series that was fantastic in the beginning but totally fell flat in the ensuing seasons or books? Some TV shows I remember my family being really stoked about after watching the first season were Revolution, The Walking Dead, and Arrow. However, after the first season or subsequent seasons of these shows, we all became disinterested. How could these stories that we had all originally found so gripping, become so boring and uninteresting? The reason is that these shows failed to surpass their own first gimmick.
The gimmick is usually the first story thread, setting, concept or theme that manifests itself at the start of a series. The gimmick is the elevator pitch you give to your friend when you want them to watch a show or read a book. “Dude you have to watch this show it’s about zombies and it follows this guy who wakes up from a coma and it’s super violent and scary and if you don’t watch it you’re basically a loser.”
The question then is what are ways to surpass the initial gimmick of a series? How can a writer keep their audience engaged after the first gimmick has come to a close in their story? There are a number of methods, but I shall name three.
1. Avoid building the story around the first gimmick.
There is a common saying that a good writer knows how their story is going to end. This provides the author with a road map for their characters to follow logically. All actions taken by the characters bring them one step closer to that planned ending. When the story finally surpasses the original gimmick established at the narrative’s inception, the author has not run out of material. They know what needs to be done to carry the story to its end. Because the story has been built around the ending, and not the original gimmick, it has greater longevity. The later gimmicks instead serve as the added flavor. Consider the show Lost as the blueprint of what not to do, as the story had no foreseen ending and thus made no sense when the characters finally arrived at the ending.
2. Stretch the gimmick to its breaking point.
The problem I had with The Hunger Games was that there were not enough hunger games. This gimmick should have been exhausted and manipulated to its very limit in the story. That way, the gimmick that originally drew me in continued to draw me further and further along with the story. I would never be in want of the very gimmick that made me open the book in the first place. Companies do this all the time in advertisements. Take Progressive or GEICO for example. Progressive uses the same slogan or gimmick and the same character, Flo, to deliver that gimmick. The same is true for GEICO which uses the same slogan and mascot. It is the same repeated gimmick over and over.
3. Constantly create new gimmicks.
This method does take a large amount of creativity, but it guarantees that a narrative does not become stale. Shounen anime does this really well. In these stories, they go through gimmick after gimmick, constantly keeping the audience engaged with new and exciting concepts. In Naruto, the main characters do a bodyguard mission, then they take a ninja exam, then their village gets attacked, and so on. The story is continuously evolving, never stagnate. Likewise, in One Piece the characters are jumping from setting to setting with different plots, new characters and newfangled villains in every new location. The Lord of the Rings executes this method beautifully. The Fellowship is a DnD quest, The Two Towers is both an adventure narrative and an epic siege defense, and The Return of the King is a fantastical military narrative.
Perhaps it is time that writers not only worried about getting past the pilot episode but the season finale as well.
