Popular Series Use Narration to Tell Tales

Popular Series Use Narration to Tell Tales

Published: 2/7/06, 5:46 PM EDT
LOS ANGELES (AP) - Once upon a prime time, TV series decided to use narration to help tell their stories. Today, nearly a dozen popular shows are using the device, with unseen voices coming from everywhere, including the grave.

"Arrested Development" invokes the prescience of Ron Howard to comment on the wacky goings-on of the Bluth family. "Grey's Anatomy," "Everybody Hates Chris" and "My Name is Earl" rely on offscreen talent to fill in the details. "Desperate Housewives" employs the voice of a dead person to begin and end each episode.

"Using voiceover definitely helps us," says Greg Garcia, creator and executive producer of the NBC sitcom "My Name is Earl." "We try to tell a lot of story each week. Almost every episode we do we could make it into a movie so we've got to move along quick. We can't just sit there and explain things in the body of a scene."

On UPN's "Everybody Hates Chris," much of the humor is carried by the hidden-but-heard Chris Rock, whose recollections of his wonder years in Brooklyn are the stuff of standup.

"A comedian knows how to twist a phrase and make a face and fall over a chair or whatever they have to do to get that laugh, that's what they know how to do," says series co-creator Ali LeRoi. "That's what Chris Rock does in voiceover."

Besides being a creative tool, voiceover has become a practical and, for some shows, necessary dictum in the ever-shrinking world of prime-time.

"Our half-hour show, when all is said and done, is less than 21 minutes long," says Bill Lawrence, creator and executive producer of NBC's "Scrubs," another user of narration.

"There are so many people faced with trying to figure out how to take care of their stories in a shorter period of time, shows are using voiceover," Lawrence says.

But there are limits to the off-camera chatter.

"We try not to have too much," says Garcia. "I've looked at first drafts of scripts where there's too much, and then I've looked at first drafts of scripts where it's too little and it starts to not feel like our show. So there's definitely a balance you try to find."

Lawrence also notes that narration runs the risk of overuse and that some thought needs to be put into the process. "If you don't find an angle on it, it's already starting to seem old and overdone," he cautions.

The CBS midseason comedy "Love Monkey," starring Tom Cavanagh, uses the device only if its "complementing a scene or adding a nuance or it's for humor," explains executive producer Michael Rauch. "It's a really good way to get the audience inside the head of the lead character."

A variation of voiceover also peppering prime-time these days is having actors break character and talk directly to the camera.

"George Burns did it way, way back," Garcia notes. Today, "Bernie Mac talks right to the camera." Even NBC's "The Office" implements the technique, he says. "It's documentary style, so they don't have narration, but Steve Carell will talk right to the camera as he's being interviewed."

Producers point to the nostalgic voice of Daniel Stern on "The Wonder Years" and Sarah Jessica Parker's omniscient narrative on "Sex in the City" for popularizing narrative techniques, which are as prevalent in today's TV drama as in comedy.

"It's the new paradigm for the television drama with a huge cast and a tremendous pace with a tremendous amount happening at once," says co-executive producer Peter Horton of ABC's "Grey's Anatomy." "It's basically a narrator saying, 'All this craziness means this.' It really helps audiences connect to the pace and complexity of the story that they're seeing."

One series that has gone against the narrative trend is The WB's "Everwood," which dropped John Beasley's quaint, off-camera storytelling as the town's resident author, Irv Harper, after two seasons. The producers wanted to quicken the show's laid-back pacing.

Some chat room fans say they miss the easy connection Beasley established between the show and the audience.

But Boston Herald TV writer Amy Amatangelo disagrees.

"I love 'Everwood,' but they didn't need the narrative," says the critic, also a columnist for Zap2It.com. "There are shows that lend themselves to it and there are shows that don't."

One that does, she adds, is Fox's "Arrested Development," where the narration provides "another layer of humor to the show."

In ABC's "Desperate Housewives," meanwhile, Amatangelo says the voice from the grave (supplied by Brenda Strong) "is like a fifth character we just don't see. Although now that the mystery of her death has been solved, I almost think they could not have had her (as the narrator) this season."

Some critics accuse producers of using voiceover as a lazy way around advancing the story through effective dialogue and action. "It's become a crutch for some shows," Amatangelo adds.

"What's getting really hard (to listen to) is the more self-indulgent voiceover narration. It's hurting 'Grey's Anatomy," Amatangelo continues. "The voiceover makes her seem more whiny and self-involved than she needs to be and I'm like, 'OK, shut up Meredith!'"

But it's unlikely that Meredith (played and voiced by Ellen Pompeo) will make quiet any time soon.

"I don't see myself lessening the narration for Meredith," says "Grey's" creator and executive producer Shonda Rhimes. "Meredith is wonderful and she's got a great voice and it's lovely to see the world through a specific set of eyes. That's important to the show."

And, quite frankly, Rhimes adds, "I wish everybody else would stop."
credit BellSouth