OUR CHARACTERS.

Here's my take, for better or worse. At some point every religious film that I've watched reaches a moment when the story seems to grind to an awkward halt. It looks out of the screen, stares you in the eyes, twists your arm, and tries to force the filmmakers values on the audience. In effect, it tries to tell you that the material that has been presented is (and I'm going to put this in all caps for effect) THE TRUTH.

At that point, you either agree or disagree. You either remain with the story or you don't. And almost every time, I don't.

I have always understood that a spiritual relationship is a very personal thing directly between myself and deity. I like to think that connection exists between me and God, and that we have an understanding about what his expectations are for me personally. I don't want a film, a film that I've just paid for (in ticket sales or time) to point its finger at me in judgment, especially when I feel like I know where I'm standing in that personal relationship.

As Mormons especially, we have a very clearly defined hierarchy of stewardship for judgment. And at no point did I sign up to have my entertainment preach to me about my personal relationship with God.

I hope that makes sense. But I've always understood unrighteous judgment to mean holding one individual responsible for the expectations of another.

The way I always explain it, we know where the iron rod is and we know where it leads. But nobody tells us how fast we have to walk along beside it. I was always struck by the fact that the scriptures seem to support the idea that we are each held to a different standard, and that grace makes up the slack.

We know from the New Testament that a single mite can outweigh a bag of gold, because only God really knows what we are holding back in our pockets. Or to put it into another context, some of us really do only have two talents. And if we come back with four, that pays the price of admission.

So how does this figure into our storytelling philosophy?

First, character design. The cool thing about tightening the story around a group of LDS neighbors all living in the same ward, was that I could assume a certain base of common belief and tradition. From there, I narrowed my sights onto a group of four guys and their wives and kids. These guys are all in their mid-thirties, and they get together a few times a week to shoot hoops in somebody's driveway. They're all pretty active, have kids. What I'm trying to say is that they share common goals. Everybody's got their hand on the rod, and they're all shuffling forward into the mists of darkness.

They're not perfect, but they're trying. And each one of these characters holds themselves to a different standard. Some hang out in the foyer during sacrament meeting and check sports scores on their iPhones, others feel like they need to sit in the front row. But, they all recognize the value in getting to church on Sunday morning. These aren't stories about right versus wrong, or good versus evil; but rather stories about the conflict between good and greater good... If that makes sense.

I started to play these scenarios out in my mind and discovered that there was an incredible amount of drama letting these good people with different standards interact.

I didn't need to take these characters full-throttle into crises of faith, because on a smaller level they were all dealing with crises of commitment. These people don't need to necessarily be evil in order to have conflict, and nobody needs to question their testimonies, because they can keep their beliefs while failing to measure up to their own expectations as the personally understand their relationships with God.

I decided that I didn't need to tell the stories of the people in the great and spacious building, not when there was so much happening alongside the iron rod.

Second, story design. Once I'd figured out how to handle my characters, I needed to shake up their own senses of well-being. Like I mentioned in an earlier post, the pilot revolves around one of these four guys accepting the calling to serve as bishop. He is as worthy in the beginning of the episode as he is in the end... But, what has changed in his life? Expectation. From his church, his friends, his wife. He's suddenly responsible for living a higher standard. And we follow him a little bit as he adapts his decision-making to encompass this new responsibility.

It's his first day on the job, he makes mistakes. And those mistakes have consequences. But nobody needs to trespass the laws of God or curse the heavens to create drama.

I've planned a lot of these moments for the series. And in the end I hope that you'll see that each of these characters, despite their bumbling along the way, have managed to 'double their talents' and become better versions of themselves. Because that's the greatest success I could wish for any of these characters.

Hopefully, along the way, you identify with a few of these people.

THE RULES OF OUR SERIES.

I want to give you a little context about how I am approaching the story before I go into detail about the limits that Chris and I set for our storytelling. If I'm going to be straight with you: There's quite a bit of seemingly conflicting expectation out there about how the drama in an LDS TV should be handled.

On the one hand, there's manifest desire for so-called 'real characters' with 'real problems' and somehow there always seems to be an assumption that dealing with those 'real problems' necessitates pushing the audience into uncomfortable ground in terms of: A. Keeping within a family-values standard, or B. creating a sense of moral morass where 'evil' is rationalized.

Simply, when there's talk about 'the real', it seems to assume questionable content; while showing 'the ideal' is deemed too soft to be taken seriously. It's a black-and-white expectation that's been built up by shortsighted storytellers that can't seem to find any drama in a religious context beyond characters questioning the foundations of their beliefs.

There seems to be only one viable question for the characters in these films: Do I believe or don't I? That's the only 'real' question for these characters.

The problem is most of you don't spend your lives teetering on the edge between absolute heaven and absolute hell, do you? And I'm telling you, that doesn't make you uninteresting people and that absolutely doesn't mean that you have no drama in your lives. But, you've been lead to believe that somehow an LDS film either needs to challenge your core beliefs (the so-called 'real') or confirm your core beliefs (the so-called 'ideal'). One or the other.

Once we decided the types of stories we were interested in telling, we set about designing a set of operational rules to keep ourselves on track. The goal of these rules is to safeguard the quality of the show by keeping ourselves clear of what we felt were the pitfalls of religious film in general.

Okay, if I don't stop droning on and on, I'll never get to the point. So here goes:

1. Our story will never criticize the hierarchy of the Church.

I always felt like the stories I was interested in telling here were local stories that revolved around a small group of people. I want to take a look at how being a member of the LDS Church influenced the way in which these people made decisions or how they interacted with each other. That said, I wanted to push the structure of the Church into the background and create a sort of base of assumed belief. I'm not here to explain an old grudge against the Church, or to 'air dirty laundry', as it were.

I'll be honest, I've had good and bad experiences within the walls of the chapel. We all have. But those experiences were all the result of interpersonal interaction with other individuals. There's the old saying that goes something like, 'The Church is perfect, but the members aren't.' And so we decided that we were interested in presenting an idealized vision of the Church functioning as the context of our series.

So what does that mean exactly? It means that every Sunday School lesson or Sacrament Meeting talk will be well-prepared and researched. It means that the bishop will be above reproach in his calling. It means that the ward will function exactly as it should. It also means that the Church itself isn't going to be creating the problems in the lives of our characters.  Ever.

Why is this important? I want to take our characters, give them a solid base of instruction. And I want to look at how they in turn apply what they're taking away from Church. We all tend to live to different standards of belief. And there's the series conflict.

And if you think about it in this context, maybe it makes more sense. Did you ever watch FOX's House MD?

Every episode, you've got a sick person. He came into the hospital and we watched as House and his team try to diagnose and treat the problem. They fail and fail and fail, before House makes some brilliant deduction that saves the day. All these imperfect doctors trying their best to staunch bleeding and open airways and detect cancer.

But, nobody criticizes the hospital itself, or calls attention to the fact that House's Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital is an aesthetically perfect building, stocked with even the rarest equipment and capable of doing even the most random tests in-house. Real hospitals aren't like that, none of them are.

And the fact that House's hospital is so perfect, doesn't mean they can't show all the gory details of every disease that walks through the door. House warned me nearly every week: *Viewer discretion is advised*.

Simply: House isn't a show about criticizing the structure of a healthcare system, or pointing the blame at an underfunded institution. It's a show about a brilliant but flawed doctor doing his best to diagnose and cure the sick.

Likewise, our series isn't about criticizing an institution. The LDS Church is our context, our setting, not our character. And that's not going to stop us from showing all the awful things that human beings can do to each other. Believe me, but at the end of the day, these people have a support system that they can count on.

The ultimate failing of both realism and idealism, is that neither is 'real' or 'true'. There are plenty of people who are going to spend their entire lives inside the church without it ever failing them. And their 'reality' is just as valid as those whose novice bishops have offered bad advice (something our young bishop will do, almost immediately) or made bad judgment calls (again), but I want the focus to be on the failure and redemption of the individual, not the institution.

2. Our story will take place almost exclusively outside of the Church building.

If anyone is curious about LDS Church services, they can walk inside the chapel on Sunday, take a seat and observe. Or, the Church itself has produced a lot of material explaining the mechanics of LDS worship, including all aspects of our ordinance worship. We want drama, right? Not instructional video about how the Church itself functions.

Our story never enters the chapel.  Period.  We loiter around in the foyer before and between meetings, we walk down a hallway or two. We wait outside of the bishop's office. There's a little bit in the kitchen, and I'm planning on having a few scenes set in the nursery starting in the third episode. We might spend a little time in the cultural hall during a Young Men/Young Women service project. But, for the most part I want the drama to stay inside these character's homes and neighborhoods.

Why?

First, there are some of you that are always going to be uncomfortable seeing ordinances or church services on screen. I respect that it pulls you out of the story.

The second reason is purely logistical, our Church meetings aren't terrible interactive. With about 45 minutes an episode to tell my story, I don't want to spend five minutes listening to a character give a talk in Sacrament meeting when they could be speaking with each other. How many times have lazy writers taken us to the pulpit where their characters can deliver a drawn out monologue about what they've learned or why they've changed? There are better ways to tell a story.

If anything, we catch a sentence in the middle of a lesson before it's interrupted by crying in the hall. Or a bit of a talk through the foyer loudspeaker as a father checks sports scores on his iPhone (yes, it happens). We see the members bow their heads and close their eyes, but do we really need a whole prayer? That's precious screen time.

3. We are telling stories of redemption, not apostasy.

I have no interest in examining the process of characters falling away from their beliefs. I don't want to walk that path with them. I'm not going to lie to you, things aren't always going to be rosy but I'm not going to tell stories of those trying to find the great and spacious building when I can focus on those seeking the tree of life. Right?

In this regard, I'm taking my cue from the way that the scriptures tell redemption stories. Think about Alma, or the sons of Mosiah... We get a verse or two setting the context of how these people begin. We get the story of their conversions, and then chapters and chapters of the good works that they accomplish afterward. There's no glorification of the Fall, no lurid details of what they were doing as apostates. These characters don't owe you confessions of all of their past wrong-doings, no more than your neighbors need to come over and recite a litany of their past sins.

Having said that, and going back to the beginning of this, I don't think that most of us get to the point where we question our core beliefs. And as such, the so-called 'real' stories, the gritty 'is this true or not?' seems overplayed and false. If we restrict our story a bit to more subtle decision-making. This is what I was getting at when I was talking earlier about 'good versus greater good'.

There have been better explanations of this... I'm going to point you to one. Read Bruce Hafen's talk 'On Dealing with Uncertainty' from the August 1979 Ensign. Hopefully, that will explain more concisely than this rambling mess.

Along these lines, I want to tell stories about conflicting expectation: When either individuals fail to reach their own potential, or others unjustly measure their neighbors by their own personal standards.

Oh, and by the way, I'm hoping that you're just taking for granted that there's going to be an absolute absence of profanity and immorality. I don't think that we need extreme cases, when we can stick close to home, deal with close experience that's familiar to all of us.