Exposition

Recently relived the glory days by watching the pilot episode of Sliders on Hulu. I loved this show! Usually my brother and I would dominate the television for primetime when it was on.


There was a moment in the pilot where they had to wrap up a few storylines but didn't really have the time. How did they accomplish this seemingly impossible task? That's right -- EXPOSITION.

Exposition is that funny little agreement that we all make with film and television to let certain lines of dialogue slide. No one likes it, but everyone will excuse it from time to time. Writers will completely deny the use of it, even to the death. And no one will recommend it, unless that person's job is Executive or Producer.

Soap Opera's are notorious for using exposition to float along their wild and exotic themes and push their over-run storylines along. Here's some great examples we came up with in the car today:

When something needs to happen that they don't have the money to film, they use powers of exposition to create a picture for the audience. For example "You know I can't leave the house, not after the terrible car crash I was involved in last month."

When they need to change a storyline because of a missing castmember or because of current events, they just change the dialogue to incorporate it. For example "We can't make love right now, Jimmy is stuck in that well and that's all I can think about."

When they switch castmembers because an actor quits or gets something better, they change their sex or say that they died. For example "I am Johnny, I became a woman from a sex change operation that I purchased with the money from my dead wife."

But is it really all that bad? I admit Soap Operas are pretty bad. I can't stand to watch more than a few minutes at a time, if anything. In the case of Sliders it wasn't inadmissible, in fact it fit right in with the rest of the show. We didn't need to see all that stuff, it was perfectly okay for us to just hear it from the characters.

Sure we should avoid writing it into our scripts at all costs. But when the chips are down and we have no time to present our readers/viewers with the complete story - exposition is our hidden ally.