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It's certainly an interesting defence.
I like that he is both the heroic straight man *and* being the butt of jokes. That feels quite realistic to me. Clown and Straight Man are just constructs that have become the mainstay of sketch comedy, but real life isn’t like that, is it? Most people are both, aren’t they? I think this is something that Gervais and Merchant are going for. (Personally, I do think the same is true of Brent.)
Do you know what I mean? Why does a character like that not work for you in a sitcom? Is it a complexity thing? Do sitcoms need an interplay of one-note characters to succeed?
I tried to make the distinction above between complexity and inconsistency. I think many of us exhibit inconsistent behaviour in our daily lives. However, inconsistency in a fictional character, I think, threatens to make the character seem incoherent rather than complex.
When I wrote my post I had in mind half-remembered passages from E.M. Forster's book "Aspects of the Novel". I have now looked again at his section on "round characters" and he defines them as "capable of surprising in a convincing way."
I think Brent is in this category, because he's not just the horrific, embarrassing Boss From Hell: he also seems tragic and endearing, and we can glimpse his sadness and feel for him at times.
There's another book that I don't have here, which follows up on Forster's ideas ~I think it is Lennard J Davis' "Resisting the Novel". Davis suggests (as I remember) something else along the lines I was thinking above ~ that while we can accept real-life people as having inconsistencies, there is a limit to which this works in fiction. I think he gives the example that if Emma Bovary, who is a complex and round character, was also given a hobby of studying ancient pottery, it would be overkill and actually work to undermine our sense of her as a real character, rather than deepen it and help us think of her as complex.
There are a lot of things about my personality that don't fit together. I'm sure the same is true of you. But if someone was writing us as characters, I think they would have to simplify, or paradoxically those characters wouldn't seem "realistic".
Equally, a real half-hour in someone's life would not usually make a great sit-com.
We got pretty much that in several episodes of The Royale Family? Not real enough, or not a great sit-com?
Well, no, I'd say those are very much characters too. If you analysed it, you could maybe find one or two character notes for Nana, a couple of key traits for Anthony, more for Barbara. But I'd say they are more consistent than Millman, who just doesn't hang together for me.
I can't really believe that someone who sits appalled at his friends as they type "BOOBS" into a calculator (ie. an island of sense and sensitivity in an immature world) is the same person who tells a friend to pretend she's an autograph hunter (ie. someone absurd, ludicrously vain, involved in hopelessly pathetic stunts).
Within the half-hour that I experience Millman every week (even within the series as a whole) I don't really get a strong sense of who he is, apart from a barely-disguised Gervais. He doesn't seem to have any really clear and coherent character traits ~ he's worried about his reputation but continually sells out or compromises, he's ambitious, competitive, a ready liar and deceiver, he's concerned about his artistic integrity but also desperate for success, he feels superior to his friends but still hangs around with them, he's the sensible one in his group but also lives a kind of self-deluding fantasy where he's an entertainer like Bowie.
Writing those down, I admit it sounds like an interesting mix ~ but I hope you see what I mean in that I can't grasp who Millman is. To you, it seems, that's an interesting realism. I am less ready to believe Gervais actually knows what he's doing with the character and isn't just trying to put himself in the script, but combining it with Brent-style scenes which require him to be the butt of the humour and a quite different type of figure, inconsistent with other scenes in the same episode. |
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