With the Angels Ep.4 “Welcome Wagon”

I have a new neighbor!

4 Swirlies

“I’m gonna bake her some cookies.”

Taffy tries to meet her new neighbour, but has a hard time when her neighbour goes all new agey. “Have you heard about The Secret?”

What I think is interesting is that the commentators on YouTube really take this fictional character to task for her clinging to her Christian beliefs, not not being open minded to her neighbour’s ideas. I think that’s interesting for two reasons.

This is fiction. You can see in the way the actress plays the moment that she’s not entirely comfortable with the hard line she takes, but it is the only point of view that she knows. To me, that’s the point of the episode, that Taffy is having a hard time getting rid of her old self and learning to thrive in her new, more cosmopolitan environment. But angry people on YouTube just slam her for the surface of her dialogue without taking a moment to consider the subtext – the “author’s” intent. (In the case of scripted content, I like the think of the author as the collective collaboration of all involved, but especially the writer, director and actor.)

And second, this is fiction. Clearly, this series, while sticking close to a first person mockumentary style, is a fictional story. I don’t think all the commentators on YouTube miss that. So why are they addressing the fictional character with a sense of personal betrayal?

As script writers and content producers, we used to live in a bit of a glass bubble where the people we engaged with directly when creating all spoke the same language – all of them were behind the scenes in some fashion. (Unless you were doing plays, but even then how many audience members speak directly to the playwrite if they have never met them before?) There existed a sort of mutual understanding about certain stuff – like how characters were understood by the audience.

But now with the web, and more and more as series move from a TV base to a online video base, your audience can reach you more directly, and I think many of us won’t like what we find. I think we’ll find that creators and audiences – even successful creators and die hard fan audiences – don’t really speak the same language, and have very different expectations of how the other is engaged with the work. I think there will be some shocks on both sides.

What? Oh, right – the episode. Watch it for the subtitles that the actress brings to the last confessional piece. And read some of the comments and let me know if you agree with me.