{"id":531000,"date":"2026-02-19T07:30:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-19T06:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/leregardlibre.com\/?p=531000"},"modified":"2026-02-19T11:48:11","modified_gmt":"2026-02-19T10:48:11","slug":"watch-listen-series","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/leregardlibre.com\/en\/cinema\/series\/watch-listen-series\/","title":{"rendered":"People no longer watch series, they listen to them"},"content":{"rendered":"

According to a 2019 study, 90% of people keep an eye on their phone while watching TV. This pushes screenwriters to focus on spoken text rather than image. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

- How do you think Justin's doing?<\/em>\u00a0
- I hope so. He was weird today.<\/em>\u00a0
- How weird?<\/em>\u00a0
- (sighs) Angry, scared, reckless. Well, not himself.<\/em>\u00a0
- Hopper too. He's not himself.<\/em>\u00a0
- If anything, it's weighing on us, undermining us (...) we can't see the end of it. I mean, we're starting to feel lost. I think we need a stroke of luck.<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Any good creative writing teacher would reject such dialogue. For one simple reason: it goes against one of the most universal rules of writing: \u00abshow, don't tell\u00bb. Show rather than tell, according to a concept attributed to Russian playwright Anton Chekhov: \u00abDon't tell me the moon is shining, show me its glow on broken glass.\u00bb <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whether in drama, prose or, a fortiori, film, a story will be more alive if it makes the reader feel what the protagonists of the story are going through. A spurned lover is not simply sad or depressed; she shaves the walls, shoulders hunched, face set and gaze turned to the ground, indifferent to the rest of the world... <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is all the more true for cinema, which can do without words: rather than dialogue or voice-over, a camera movement, a steady gaze, a close-up on a tiny detail that sums up the whole point of the scene, atmospheric music... <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Writers of <\/strong>Stranger Things<\/em><\/strong> failures<\/strong> <\/h3>\n\n\n\n

In the dialogue above, taken from the first episode of the new season of Stranger Things<\/em>, Justin's state of mind is narrated through the dialogue of two protagonists, Mike and Eleven, when it would have been more effective to... show it to us - which is precisely what the preceding scenes have done, making this dialogue all the more redundant, not to mention the fact that the scene doesn't show much, since the two teenagers are filmed from a distance, or from behind, or poorly lit. <\/p>\n\n\n\n