A guy, a middle-aged lady, and a pizza place

So I work at Pizza Hut. Not many people at Pizza Hut know that I write...I'm just that guy who doesn't mind delivering School Lunch on Mondays and Wednesdays. But the other day, during one of the many times when there’s nothing to do, I was working on the outline for my Chuck spec. My manager Betty asked what I was doing.

Now, Pizza Hut isn’t the greatest job, but there are positives. It’s a decent job, money-wise. Some not understand the prestige that comes with driving a white Honda station wagon topped with a Pizza Hut sign, but my reply to those sayers of nay: “Fuck you, it pays better than waiting tables, and any job that lets me sit my ass in my car and listen to NPR all day long is just fine with me.”Also, it’s worth it almost solely because of the characters I meet—whether they’re the overweight men in tiny tank tops ordering the pizzas, or my middle-aged, midget manager Betty who makes them.

Let me tell you about Betty. Betty was born with an irrational, compulsive need to speak. I don’t say this in the typical male “MAN those womenfolk can talk. Am I right? Am I right?” way. With Betty, it doesn’t really matter to her whether you’re listening, or if you even remotely want to hear about what she has to say, she’ll spout sound at you like an old webpage with an embedded MIDI that just won’t turn off. Her subject matter is diverse, including stories from the trenches of her ongoing battle with menopause, the details of her most recent bladder infection, as well as harrowing tales of her 20-year-old sexual exploits.

Anyway, Betty and I get to talking about Television, and I mention my senior project about homeschoolers. I try to say that I thought it was pretty okay, there were just some things about it that didn’t really work for me, and it still needs a lot of work. But she doesn’t hear that, because she’s inexplicably become excited about the idea. “No, I think that could work. You know, you can have the kids be the characters, you know and show them interacting…you can have their parents or their grandparents...you know maybe some kids have grandparents, some kids don’t...(5 minutes later) Yeah, I think that could work."

She went on, never mentioning any details about her newly created characters, or even what they would DO. But completely confident that she was providing some insight into the craft of writing, she went on to talk about all of the TV characters she’s liked through the years: Archie Bunker, Fred G. Sanford (and Son), and Rudy from Survivor. Again, she didn’t mention at all anything they DID that was particularly memorable, but really just that they existed, they sometimes said funny things, and they related to other characters.

I don’t say (blog?) this to make fun of someone not familiar with the craft of writing, just to say (blog?) that it made me realize one of the truths about television: with TV, people don’t remember the plot, or the exciting action sequences, or even the special effect sequences*. Sure, those’ll draw them in, make them watch the show, but what they’ll remember is the Characters.

What do you think people in 10 years will remember about today’s shows? I think even with a show as plot-heavy as Lost, I doubt it will be the slowly-revealed mystery of the Island as much as the infamous Jack-Kate-Sawyer love triangle.** Or with the Office: will people remember or care whether Michael got the corporate job, or will they only remember Jim’s pranks on Dwight...as well as his knowing glances from Pam?

Of course, you have to have the characters do something. If it was just Kate, Jack and Sawyer sitting around on the Island, I for one probably would get bored real quick. But the opposite is true: if there never doing anything but cool plot things all the time, you may enjoy the ride of the show, but in 10 years, will anyone care?

When I leave Virginia Beach, I doubt I’ll remember any specific day of delivering pizza to rotund single men, but I know that I’ll remember Betty. And also every detail from her post-strip-poker threesome story. That image is burned into my mind.

* Except the Galactica jumping into the atmosphere in “Exodus pt. 2” I think I still have goosebumps from that one.
** although, granted, they’ve certainly tried to make it a good deal more complicated than a triangle. It’s at least a quadrilateral now, or maybe a pentagon.