Note: The following is based solely on season 1 of both The Bear and Bloodhounds.
Rules are needed in art. There are rules for drawing, there are rules for music and there are rules for narrative. A rule for every medium. It isn’t a movie without the camera as perspective. More commonly we call these rules ‘structure’. In narrative specifically this goes beyond rules of grammar and so on, and is really found in things like the Hero’s Journey (Joseph Campbell) or other ways of telling a story with suitable rises and falls. The best stories ever told adhere to a structure. Just ask Kurt Vonnegut.
Think of Breaking Bad. The rules of television mean the structure has to adhere to a season, but you are brought to despair and joy with metronome like precision along the way. Up and down we follow Walt’s journey until, finally, the last season brings us succor. One of the best shows of all time had structure in spades. Intuitively one thinks that great art is achieved by breaking rules, but it is in fact by sticking to an outline that the artist creates perfection. Breaking Bad knew when to get in and when to get out, and everything in-between fed that.
Consider the following from Wyndham Lewis:
Nature abhors a vacuum, but also nature abhors a chaos. Order is as necessary to us as light. Form is a high variety of order. That nature favours the arts of human expression might be more difficult to convince people of than that disorder irks it, but since it prefers order is it not probable that it prefers a highly expressive order to just a pedestrian tidiness…we have nature on our side, or whatever is concealed behind that term.
Vince had an order for his story and for his characters, and Breaking Bad was achieved with highly expressive order. There was nothing out of place. When you are writing a story, character and plot are two sides of the same coin. They are a reinforcement loop, either positive or negative. The plot unfolds because the characters must act a certain way, and the characters become whole because the plot pushes them to their being. There is no clear delineation between the two and you must provide both with equal respect. Art is a sublimation of the inevitability of character and the surprise of plot.
Can television often achieve this goal? More than you know. Let’s consider the show The Bear, which has been highly praised and rightly so in some regards. It follows Carmen "Carmy" Berzatto who takes over his recently deceased brother’s (suicide) sandwich shop. The first season focuses on his turning around of the failing business, whipping the chefs into shape and bringing order to the line. The acting is mostly top notch and the editing in particular really leans into the TV medium. The music is great and the dialogue sharp. It’s also true to life (having worked in hospo, I can attest to this element) and it is drawn from the creator’s own life, so there is a sense of authenticity. The problem is that it is ultimately an empty vessel. It is all style and little substance. The characters are pawns in a plot that relies on cheap tricks. The praise is premature.
Compare The Bear to the Netflix show, Bloodhounds. Based on a webtoon series, Bloodhounds follows Gun-woo, a young boxer keen to make money to keep his mother’s business afloat. When she is scammed by money-lenders, he is suddenly drawn into a South Korean underworld which he becomes determined to fight. Where The Bear lazily drifts into an unknown motive, Bloodhounds provides a clear direction at the end of the first episode. This may appear avant-garde in a sense, where the episodic nature of the story lends to the effect of The Bear, but the sign-posted affirmative direction of Bloodhounds is the better device. The difference in storytelling is stark.
The Bear, like so much of modern Western fiction, is caught up in its own ennui, and the self-indulgent characters are a reflection of the audience who also suffer mild social and mental afflictions. Each episode feeds the ego of a different character, but almost always that of Carmy who can barely hold himself together. Bloodhounds, on the other hand, shows complex characters that Western audiences can barely comprehend. Gun-woo is a man of honour. Kim Myung-gil is evil incarnate. Every character in The Bear is a wishy-washy substitute for conviction. Why does Bloodhounds have compelling back story for each character whereas the personas in The Bear feel like they have over-written filler to back them up? Why does every moment of Bloodhounds lead to the next naturally where The Bear is a series of hipster interludes designed for maximum drama? What I mean by that, is that the plot of Bloodhounds is a natural outcome of the characters motivations and failures, whereas The Bear force-feeds action and character motivation to charm the audience.
The clearest way to say all this is to point point out the Save The Cat method of outline that is clearly at play with Bloodhounds. I recommend Save The Cat to all new writers, and it is the outline I have used for my debut novel. It has certain events occur at precise moments of the story. In Bloodhounds we have the False Victory at the midway point, we have the All Is Lost moment at 75% which follows the (literal) Bad Guys Close In part. We even have a five-point finale with training montage and everything. To the untrained eye this feels cliché. Token. Stayed. But what this structure does is that it allows the characters to be as true as possible and for the plot to proceed in certain predictable and yet entirely surprising ways. The theme is maintained the entire series and is satisfactorily answered at the end.
In contrast The Bear has a cop-out ending. The penultimate episode is magnificent in its camera work, but the final episode of season 1 does not do it justice. What we get instead is a deus ex machina where what our protagonist has been fighting against is washed away by wads of cash. There is no character pay-off either; Carmy apologises meekly to the two African-American characters he hurt the feelings of. No one has to work at anything and yet all their troubles are magically whisked away. There is no theme here, just various identities competing for respect and for which there are no stakes. The Bear provides entertainment, not art.
You need to follow rules in order to achieve what you want with a narrative. Following something as simple as the Hero’s Journey will reap huge rewards. The characters that are created feed into the structure and in turn the structure feeds your characters. The end is known only as a signpost. What actually happens is often a greater surprise as a result. Watch these two shows and note the difference in storytelling. It might save your manuscript.