Kill the Mystery Box.

In March 2007, JJ Abrams got up on stage at the TED conference, and gave a speech that irrevocably fucked up storytelling forever. This isn’t hyperbole, this is a statement of fact. Cumulatively racking up five million views, which isn’t a ton in 13 years, it’s sort of like The Velvet Underground of bad ideas: Not too many people saw it, but every TV writer who did became worse at their job. The mystery box has largely ruined culture, and accelerated the end of what would have been the platinum age of television, replacing it with a gimmick that substitutes the hard parts of storytelling with easy ones.

For those fortunate enough to not be in the know, you can watch it here. To summarize it, though, the mystery box is a method of storytelling which JJ Abrams hyperactively describes a box from his childhood full of magic tricks that he’s never opened, because it represents hope and possibility or something, it’s the box equivalent of  Shepherd Fairey’s Obama poster, I guess. 

Anyway, he likens the blank page of a television script is a magic box all on its own, and in order to be worthy of his Macbook (true anecdote), he needs to fill those pages with all the mystery and withholding of information that the audience can be drawn into, attached to, and think about. The more mysterious, the more of a hook it is, the more the audience creates theories, ideas, and has a sense of intrigue about it. In essence, it’s withholding all plot exposition in favour of dangling the idea of a reveal, perpetually, in front of a viewer’s nose.  

Obviously, Abrams pays lip-service to every writer’s favorite thing to harp on, character (Because professionally, if you don’t say character is the most important thing in a script, you’re not a real writer. This isn’t necessarily wrong, by the way), but fundamentally misunderstands the characterizations he’s referencing.

Abrams, who has given us maddening non-reveals in shows like Lost, crept toward and never capitalized on the promise of shows like Fringe, and honed in on reveals ranging from the boring (Star Trek: Into Darkness) to the stupid (Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker) doesn’t seem to realize that for example, Jaws isn’t actually about revealing the main character’s masuline impotency.  It’s about a couple of really interesting people trying to kill a shark. These interesting people have problems and trauma that are made worse by said shark. The shark is not a metaphor. Abrams continues by talking about Star Wars and neglects to mention that Star Wars drops you into the world and actually goes out of its way to explain it along the way. It’s sort of what makes Star Wars such a beautifully paced movie. Star Wars could also be watched silently and understood fairly certainly, because its iconography and archetypes are so well articulated. As opposed to many bland people on an island. 

Maybe Abrams was sincere in his approach, but what the mystery box became was not. 

The mystery box is now so pervasive that it’s kinda crazy it was only twelve years ago. There’s a generation of writers and creators who have ultimately come to the conclusion that the puzzle is more important than the feeling. That the mechanism of storytelling is the mystery, and not the story or the plot, or yes, even the characters. 

Westworld might be the best example of this, poorly written characters buoyed by great acting discovering a mystery that the audience is halfway ahead of them and behind the writers on. This is Us and Heroes (RIP) dangle mysteries before us, asking to obsessively pore over the mise en scene to try and figure them out. Subreddits pop up dedicated exactly to this task, etc.  etc. There are entire guides dedicated to pitching and writing the next mystery box TV show. When was the last time you saw a movie with a sudden twist, and not one that wasn’t telegraphed or bubbling just below the surface beforehand? Empire Strikes Back’s twist is absurd, but it works because of how elegantly it relates to character. These days, we’d call it bad storytelling.

The real effect of this is that we become armchair addicts hungry for the next hit, the next I saw that coming, the next clue that will make us feel smart. The idea of having a relationship with a character has been usurped by undoing the puzzle box, possibly the most apt metaphor for living under late capitalism. How do we disentangle or even understand this? becomes a question more valuable than How do I relate or empathize with these characters? The idea of a simple mystery, or a macguffin that the characters are trying to unravel or solve is not reserved for network television, or seem a step below.

I was thinking about what made Picard feel so familiar in terms of its construction, and realized that it’s because the show has a mystery, but its construction isn’t a big fucking mystery all on its own. There aren’t brooding moments and scene to scene details that open up vast oceans of speculation. It’s about Picard finding his friend's kid and trying to figure out how and why she was made. It’s very easy to break down. At its heart is a great character, played greatly, surrounded by good characters played goodly. Picard can afford to get away with this in a television culture that’s built on twitter hype largely because it isn’t new IP. 

Largely, storytelling, in a pure way, has taken a backseat to the construction of itself. We are no longer watching many programs with characters that feel deeply, addressing their issues while trying to challenge their circumstance. We are watching characters that are pieces in a machine we are trying to unlock. It’s like an escape room or the video game Myst.

Everything is a backdrop for the puzzle. And the way this dovetails from any sort of emotional or political theory in the subtext of series, or in the philosophy of character, leads us to fuel another extraordinary industry of generating things a show that we’ve invested in must be so it can be something. The Good Place, which is actually a good show with interesting politics, is no longer a good show with interesting politics, it is now a metaphor for prison abolition, here is my Medium article as to why Westworld is America. No, it’s an argument against identity politics. No, it’s about the 13 amendment. 

You get what I’m saying. Because our television is so obsessed with a form we can’t tear ourselves away from but largely says nothing, we must have some projection of meaning onto them. Which isn’t to say that character or the politics of television need to be explicit. But there’s a way to layer in those things through metaphor and story and character. You can even challenge those characters to create the story version of a dialogue.

I think about the shows I keep coming back to in terms of rewatchability and come up with these: Six Feet Under, The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood, Breaking Bad, and Mr. Robot. Consider the shows you watch, and ask yourself how many of them are mystery box fare? Of the ones I listed above, maybe Mr. Robot is, but I assert that it is a character study above all else, one that’s guided by a certain degree of mystery. I don’t know a lot of people that rewatch Lost, or a season of Westworld, or even Russian Doll.

I would also argue that these shows are politically or philosophically astute in different ways, ways that made me think about the underlying meaning of the what was happening, being said, or done, without grasping at straws or trying to figure out how the editing was a metaphor for something else. Deadwood in particular is ultimately a show about the corrupting, conquering power of capitalism. It doesn’t spell it out, it doesn’t address it, but it proves it through the way the character’s respond to their changing world. Westworld, on the other hand, is a mess of obtusity, of shifting, single goals, of no real memorable interaction or conversation, nothing that lingers aside from a spectacular credits sequence and a few high budget shots. 

Shows should have some mystery, some sort of hook that keeps you watching, but the mystery isn’t the show. The characters are. The story is. The way we fill the box should be more interesting than the construction of the box. You might buy an Apple product because the packaging is shiny, but the packaging makes the experience of getting to what’s inside special. At the end of the day, though, you’re still there for the laptop, not the box. 

JJ Abrams wasn’t the first to identify the mystery box as a form of engaging storytelling. David Lynch did it way back with Twin Peaks. But JJ Abrams catapulted it into the hearts and minds of aspiring writers who were eager to make a pilot that sold. In a cruel world of television, the mystery and the hook was a clean, sharp way to get the attention of a reader, and then an exec. What characters? Tell me the secret of the world. Our drive to stand out in the oversaturated world of media has effectively reduced storytelling to something that is fast, cheap, and out of control. It’s tedious, it’s overdone, it’s atomized us into niches akin to fast food preference, and it’s also taken a lot of the community out of watching storytelling together, as we’re all trapped into figuring the mystery of the one box we’ve attached ourselves to, while everyone else around us has picked another.

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather discuss Mr. Robot with my friends than with other compulsively obsessed people online. I don’t know how many people saw Watchmen, but it feels like it came and went as a blip. There was a box, we got to the end of the box, I’m having a hard time naming more than two characters in the show, and I finished watching it a month ago. For something so grandiose, it’s hardly memorable. 

JJ Abrams is, when you come down to it, a remix artist at heart. He’s at his best when he’s rinsing and recutting old films (Super 8 by way of ET, Star Trek by way of Star Wars, Star Wars by way of Star Wars) into fresh, slick versions of things we’ve seen before, rearticulating old school ideas with a modern aesthetic. His idea of the mystery box is a well meaning idea of demystifying storytelling but has emerged into the death of storytelling, something that actively perpetuates a culture of binge watching, of hyper analysis, and of real time reaction.

Abrams, I’m sure, didn’t intend this. He’s a hyperactive guy who likes shiny thing. He’s a new school-old school filmmaker who idolizes Spielberg and other pop cinema masters, but he’s also created something we’re not going to get away from, something that has ripped out the heart and soul of storytelling into flimsy narrative constructions, large puzzles to be decoded. If nihilism defines our current political era, our television is ultimately a nihilistic destruction. One of the best modes of changing it is to create media that aspires to greater, engages us better, and thinks deeper. We can demand better, and we can create better. Storytelling is a vessel for ideas wrapped up in questions of how human beings relate, connect, and conflict with each other, not elaborate visual crossword puzzles.

Is Lost an interesting show with interesting character? I don’t think so, but your mileage may vary. Did Lost begin a process of less interesting shows with less interesting characters and more high concept hooks? I don’t see how anyone can disagree. Maybe it’s time to kick the mystery box to the curb and crack a copy of Robert Mckee’s story, or something.

Because television sucks, man, but it really doesn’t have to.