Parallel Worlds

In fiction, there are no limitations on the worlds you create. But once you establish a fictional world for your characters to inhabit, it becomes fixed. The rules of this fictional reality have to remain constant. Once your reader or audience has constructed an understanding for your world in their minds, changing the rules later on can shatter the fiction.

But a lot of our modern fiction is set in a world that is recognisably ours and this can cause problems for an imaginative writer.

An area where these limitations are very obvious is in television serial drama. The majority of television shows are rooted in fictional versions of our own world. In most cases, there is no conflict between the fictional and real worlds. The addition of fictional characters to inhabit a recognisable setting – an imagined detective in New York as seen in ‘Law and Order’ for example – doesn’t challenge our perceptions of the world we live in. No suspension of disbelief is required to imagine a detective we’ve never heard of operating in a city as large as New York, but when the fictional character is the President of the United States, the rules of the fictional world are tested.

Reflections of Ourselves

I’ve previously written about my adoration for ‘The West Wing’ and my ambition to one day grow up to be Toby Zeigler. Following the daily dramas of a fictional presidential administration, ‘The West Wing' is a perfect example of the risks inherent in blurring the line between the fictional world and our own. The rules of society are the same, laws are the same, world history is the same. Everything reflects the familiar. The deviation that creates the fiction is the creation of an alternate President and fictional characters in support of him. But every person in the audience knows this cannot be. We know who is in the White House. Therefore, ‘The West Wing’ the audience to buy into a specific fiction at the very beginning of setting up this parallel world, while presenting everything else as a reflection of our world.

Once an audience has bought into this fiction, the rules are set. The series would no longer work if, a few episodes in, it was revealed that Josh Lyman was an alien or if CJ were to reveal herself to be a Soviet agent and assassinate the President. That’s not to say an entertaining show couldn’t be written to include those themes – it just wouldn’t be ‘The West Wing’ and it had better clearly alert the audience to its more surreal logic from the outset.

Everything has to function as it would in our world, and follow a logic we understand. By doing so, the audience bring their own experiences to their understanding of the drama in front of them. Relationships unfold as we would expect them to, people behave as our own experiences predict. By adhering to the rules of reality in determining the fiction, the fictional elements are fenced in from ever straying into the surreal or bizarre and unknowable.

Pushing the Rules

Other television series’ manage to deviate far more from our real world by establishing a different set of rules at the very beginning. ‘Jericho’ is set in a recognisable world just like our own, until the mushroom cloud changes everything in the first episode. This creates a new, parallel world to ours, where the setting is dramatically changed, but the characters and the science are still rooted within the laws of reality. This creates the conflict in the series – a true “what if” scenario depicting how real people may behave in such a situation. The upcoming remake of Terry Nations ‘Survivors’ series offers the same observation, by presenting a similarly bleak but plausible future word for the characters to inhabit. Again, the set-up all occurs in the first episode, as a virus wipes out nine tenths of humanity, instructing the audience on the framework through which to view all subsequent storylines.

The more the real world setting is allowed to deviate from reality early on, the easier it becomes for writers to change the rules as the series progresses. With shows such as ‘Jericho’, the audience learns the new rules of this parallel world as the characters do, drawing them into the drama.

But if after so many years of ‘Law and Order’, a mushroom cloud were to appear in New York, the audience wouldn’t buy it. The intention of that series is to maintain a semblance of reality. This means the fiction can become straight-jacketed, particularly when the line between fiction and reality is more obvious.

The Bartlett Problem

This limitation occurred to me recently as I watched Series 6 of ‘The West Wing’. In one of the final episodes, Leo McGarry seizes on the rumours of Fidel Castro’s failing health to try and forge a new treaty between the US and Cuba. Of course, the treaty never happens and the status quo is retained. This is because, should the treaty have occurred, it would have been a significant departure from reality within the series. If the characters within ‘The West Wing’ began solving some of the read problems facing the US, the series would move further and further away from relevance to its audience and become less and less recognisable.

So the Jed Bartlett administration’s legacy was always going to be built on minor bills and insubstantial reforms that wouldn’t impact on the average viewer’s daily life. After seven years of the series, the real world was still a close enough approximation of the series to maintain the drama.

Interestingly, in the third series the real world turned this rule on its head by dramatically changing in such a way that the fictional world inside the Bartlett White House had a problem in maintaining realism. The 9/11 attacks posed a problem for the writers. To include this major shift in world affairs within the series would put them on an impossible task to predict and mimic real US government policy.

This is probably why the writers chose to deal with the issue of terrorism in different way. The 9/11 attacks were referenced once only, in the stand-alone episode ‘Two Brothers’. The episode was written so that it could be held outside of the series continuity should it be necessary. Beyond that, within the series, terrorism was always mentioned in the abstract. Eventually, a different terrorist threat was created, emanating form the fictional country of Kumar, to allow the series to take a step closer towards reality again. Even so, ‘The West Wing’ was exempted from the wider War on Terror.

Alien Invasions?

Another series that has fought to maintain a line between the real world and a clearly different reality has been ‘Doctor Who’. Throughout it 45 year history, it fought to maintain the idea that the inhabitants of Earth were blissfully unaware of the galactic events and threats that seemed to endanger them weekly. Occasionally, the paradox would be addressed by suggesting the government covered up any public knowledge of alien invasions. Considering the events of some episodes, it beggars belief that our world could continue on in such blissful ignorance, but to accept the probable ramifications into this fiction would forever change the nature of this depiction of Earth.

The relaunched series took the decision that continuing this paradox would be difficult The producers started to include storylines that would have significant impact, with no question of a cover-up. Daleks invading central London. Cybermen in every home. An alien spaceship crashing into the Thames. In the new reality of the series, the population gradually becomes very aware of alien visitors to Earth, to the point that the population of London now evacuate every Christmas. But how far can this go?

The Earth based characters in ‘Doctor Who’ still return home and carry on seemingly normal lives, even though the news reports thousands of people killed in invasion attempt after invasion attempt. The fictional reality of ‘Doctor Who is being tested. On the one hand the writers want to maintain a recognisable setting populated by real people. On the other hand, the scale of the storylines being told requires some acknowledgment of the ramifications. Unlike Donna Noble, not everyone can have slept through a Cyberman invasion.

This is the dilemma the ‘Doctor Who’ writers face. The moment the world in ‘Doctor Who’ is allowed to change, we start watching a different show. This is the tightrope the series has to walk if it wants to continue its current winning formula.

It’s yet to be shown how long a series can maintain this balancing act, when the central premise is a direct challenge to our notion of the real world setting. ‘The West Wing’ finished after seven years, but ‘Doctor Who’ is stronger than ever after 45. Yet, as long as writers can produce these convincing parallel worlds where someone else can be President or where aliens are a constant threat, we’ll be watching.