Voice-overs speak to viewers
By: Matthew Gilbert
Boston Globe
Nov. 11, 2004 03:50 PM
Imagine "Sex and the City" without Carrie's voice-over. It wasn't just that
her bad puns ("It's a cashmere-acle) and serio-comic queries ("Are we simply
romantically challenged, or are we sluts?") gave us an intimate tour of her
mind. They also set the tone for the entire show that it was from a woman's
point of view, that it wouldn't make the men into automatic heroes, that
while it invited us to worship at the shrine of its ladies and their fashions,
it would never be a male ogle-fest like "Ally McBeal." Stripped of Carrie's
narration, "Sex and the City" would've been the TV version of "The Catcher
in the Rye" without Holden Caulfield's adolescent skew, or "The Great Gatsby"
devoid of Nick Carraway's hero worship, or "Lolita" minus Humbert Humbert's
tripping tongue.
Using voice-over narration on TV is a rare, and risky, technique. It becomes
a distinguishing characteristic of any show that employs it. "Desperate Housewives,"
for instance, is laid out for us by narrator Mary Alice Young, the housewife who
killed herself in the pilot. "Scrubs" also relies on the device, with Dr. J.D.
Dorian confessing his neuroses, as does "Arrested Development," with Ron Howard
innocently detailing the psychotic misadventures of the Bluth family. All
three of these current shows would be radically different without the voices
that break through the fourth wall to give coherence and flavor to everything
within. Think of "The Wonder Years" and "My So-Called Life," both classic
first-person series that zeroed in on the angst, comic, and soap operatic,
of early life. They weren't about the stories so much as they were about
the storytellers.
The hyperbolic voice-overs on reality shows - "Can Barbie and Ken kiss in
the hot tub without making Skipper jealous?" - are as ersatz as those on
movie trailers and car commercials. But the narration on scripted series
such as "Desperate Housewives," "Scrubs," and "Arrested Development"
has a decidedly literary effect. It's a bold formal flourish that forces TV writers
to step outside the prime-time box, the invisible third-person omniscience that
most shows rely on. When everything the viewer sees is coming through the prism
of a personality, the script has an added layer of complexity. "Desperate Housewives"
is not just an objective portrayal of the strange events on Wisteria Lane;
it's Mary Alice's subjective look at her four former friends. Is she reliable,
or should we take her word with a grain of salt? That question is always in
the air.
On "My So-Called Life," we always knew that Angela's observations of her
teenage cafeteria traumas were just that - her observations. They weren't
reality; they were her reality. "Scrubs," one of TV's smartest comedies,
operates in the same way. It's as much about J.D.'s sensibility - male,
self-conscious, needy - as it is about the medical chaos at Sacred Heart
Hospital. The show is a journey into his interior monologue, with all its
anxieties and paranoid fantasies and delusions. We know we're viewing all
the other doctors through his exaggerating eyes, submerging ourselves into
J.D.'s world for 22 delightful minutes.
And his is an ironic voice-over, so that what J.D. thinks aloud to us ("Oh,
my God, do not say splotchy") and what he actually says to people ("Good
splotchy, Dr. Splotchy") are at comic odds. As J.D., Zach Braff beautifully
delivers the vocal inflections of a man awkwardly trying to balance his
male ego with his emotions. His voice-over is a vital addition to the humor
on "Scrubs," and not just a direct, novelistic way to tell viewers what is
happening.
Because Mary Alice on "Desperate Housewives" is reporting on her friends'
misery from the Great Beyond, we tend to think she's God-like in her
objectivity. She constantly slings truisms, as if she has been awarded
a PhD from the School of Human Wisdom: "People by their very nature are
always on the lookout for intruders, she pronounces, or "Suburbia is a
battleground." Without her dominant voice, the show would be more of a
straight nighttime soap, like "Melrose Place." Her point of view,
withholding and sardonic, gives it a stylish spin and an added dimension.
Alas, as the voice of Mary Alice, actress Brenda Strong is too strong.
Her vocal expressiveness has very little nuance; it's just bossy. In
the original pilot, Sheryl Lee played Mary Alice with a more distant
and mysterious quality. Her "Twin Peaks" cred - she played Laura Palmer -
also contributed to her intriguing presence. Unfortunately, she was
replaced in favor of, as executive producer Michael Edelstein put it,
Strong's "comic lift." But if the makers of "Desperate Housewives" are
trying to create a "Scrubs"-like comic tension between what we see
(suburban misery) and what we hear (Strong's upbeat voice), they're not
succeeding. While the show, a hit for ABC, is filled with promise,
Strong's narration is already tiresome.
"Arrested Development" is far more successful at establishing the gap
between what the narrator is saying and what we are seeing. The show is
a mockumentary, and Ron Howard, also an executive producer of the show,
is our guide. His cheerful, Midwestern delivery, with its remnant
associations to "The Andy Griffith Show" and "Happy Days," only makes the
insanity of the Orange County clan appear more absurd. With a voice that
resists judgment and/or wryness, he'll announce: "And that's when the
family realized that George Sr. wasn't dead, but was fleeing the country
that he loved so very much." His unornamented tone helps us laugh at the
Bluths, as it reminds us that they make life a lot more complicated than
they need to.
That same honest voice also tempts us to believe him every week when he
announces, "On the next Arrested Development". . . So what if we already
know the weekly coming attractions are as faux as Lindsay's charity work
and Gob's magic tricks.
When the creators of a comedy or a dramedy decide to mix voice-over narration
into the package, they must forgo that grating theatrical surrogate, the laugh
track. While a narrator may appear in, say, Thornton Wilder, first-person
narration isn't generally considered a "live" phenomenon. It fits most
naturally in the kind of deliberately fashioned product where it can be
synched correctly and wittily with the story.
And yet it is an underused tool of the medium, one that calls attention
to the relativity of reality as it focuses on the teller as much as the tale.
© Boston Globe 2004. All Rights Reserved.
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