Exposition

One thing about the pilot of Accidentally On Purpose, which has been mentioned by others including Myles McNutt, is that this pilot tries to do the equivalent of a movie’s worth of storytelling in one episode. It’s a “premise pilot,” where you have to show the characters before the premise is set in motion, and then get them to what will become the status quo of the series. But since this show is a Knocked Up knockoff, that means giving us most of the story of a 140 minute movie in 20 minutes. No wonder none of the relationships in the episode seem remotely plausible: the writer is completely focused on the mechanics of setting up every single plot point that will be used in the series. There’s no time for it to make sense.

You know my love of theme songs that explain the premise — a lost art, at least for the moment. (Networks don’t have time to do them, and HBO and Showtime, which do have room for longer title sequences, don’t want to do that kind of theme song, even for comedies.) But I was wondering which of these theme songs contains the greatest amount of exposition. That is, who gets the most information into the lyrics of a one-minute song?

Preliminary thought after watching act 1 of 90210 (I’ll finish the rest very soon and talk about it tomorrow): nothing has really changed when it comes to the ancient art of clunky exposition, has it? The first scene consisted primarily of the characters telling each other things they already know — they moved to Beverly Hills to be with Grandma, Dad’s the principal — just so we would hear it. It reminded me of that scene from The Simpsons: