As television has moved from more episodic stories to dramatic arcs, there’s been an increase in willingness to kill characters that have been around for more than one episode. This is less of a new thing in books, although the death tolls of some recent series, such as a Song of Ice and Fire, are legendarily high.
The cost of using death is obvious, if the death is real, you can’t tell any more non-flashback stories using the character. I’m not really talking about killing off lame characters here, as the downsides are much more minor. The advantages are also important. First off death is part of life and having plot advancement and character growth in more dangerous settings will involve facing that. Second, death increases the drama of putting characters at risk. The occasional death keeps viewers or readers on notice that bad outcomes are possible. This secondary effect can also be achieved by character failure or non-trivial wounding, but with failure there’s a risk that that plot advancement will also suffer. Similarly, if the wounds are psychological, characters can just become broken ground out shells.
I think having a few deaths in a series is normally a safe bet. The risks come in when it becomes a more regular phenomenon. I’d argue the structure of the show or book, as well as the practical realities of the medium, have an important impact on whether regular death is a mistake. For this purpose, I’d argue that there’s three main types of structures.
- Static team: By and large from one arc to the next the cast is stable. If someone is replaced it will often be in close succession with the arrival of the replacement.
- Rotating team: Common in team stories, particularly in comics. Characters may leave and return, assuming they don’t permanently die. The cast may vary greatly over time, although there’s often a few central stalwarts.
- Farm system: These stories have a wide range of characters and are often told from multiple viewpoints. New characters are fairly regularly introduced, are less likely to be killed within the short-arc they arrived in, and those that resonate often stick around.
Hybrid systems are fairly common. The main cast, supporting characters, and antagonists may each have a separate structure. The use of a rotating team or a farm system often means that the boundaries between main cast, supporting cast, and antagonists are permeable.
Books and shorter firm mediums like films and miniseries have the most freedom to kill characters. There’s no actors involved so the real-world consequences are minimal. In Japanese anime, the series often follow plots from written manga and thus death is more commonly expected. Comics in the short and medium term tend to be more like books but for major franchise works their habitual resurrections show a real fear of losing characters.
Despite the increasing lethality of some modern American television series, I don’t think the underlying model has changed that much. A variety of shows with arcs: Battlestar Galactica, Babylon 5, post-TNG Star Trek, and to a lesser extent shows like Buffy and Angel have stable main casts and are most likely to change if there’s a problem with an actor or actress. As a result, if the show is more lethal, it will tend to express this lethality by running faster through supporting characters. Under the old episodic system, supporting characters that weren’t star cameos would probably have never lasted beyond the end of the episode, so this is still an improvement. However, and I’m thinking most clearly of Battlestar Galactica here, the lethality denies us some of the benefits of a strong supporting cast. As the relative safety of the main cast becomes widely noticed, the dramatic boost that the lethality provides will be undercut.
Thus, I think unless a show or story employs a rotating cast or a farm system for the main cast, it should avoid being too lethal or risk undercutting the supporting cast enabled by arc-based storylines. Similarly, if a show wants to go more than three seasons, I think it should also be careful with psychologically wounding a static cast. Shows like Buffy and Angel tend to run into this a lot as the main characters are all ground down by a war of attrition with comparatively few reinforcements. I think this also was beginning to take it’s toll on Battlestar Galactica, but since the show only ran four seasons it was easier to stick through the pain because an end was coming.
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