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Show Me A Hero: Do You Need An Active Main Character?

By Jacob Krueger

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Show Me A Hero: Do You Need An Active Main Character?

Today we're going to be talking about the new HBO miniseries Show Me a Hero.  I'm especially excited to be talking about this miniseries, because it stars Jacob Krueger Studio alum, Laura Gomez!  Laura, we're so proud of you!

But outside of our personal pride in Laura's accomplishments, it's worth talking about miniseries because of what writers of all genres can learn from them.

It's an incredibly exciting time for writers of miniseries. The genre was all but dead in the water a couple of years ago, but recently we've seen a resurgence in miniseries sparked by the success of True Detective.

In a way, the miniseries is the ideal form of storytelling for a screenwriter. In feature films, we are limited in many ways by page count, trying to squeeze a life-changing journey into an hour and a half.

But in the world of miniseries, we actually have the one thing that most screenplays don't have, the thing that novelists are blessed with and screenwriters long for: time.

And because we have time, we are able to explore structure in different ways, and fully capture things like world, complicated, intersecting storylines and multiple characters' points of view.

It’s not that these things can't be done in a screenplay. It's just that when we do them in a screenplay, we severely limit the number of pages we can dedicate to each character.

In a miniseries like Show Me A Hero, we can actually explore these multiple storylines without diminishing our ability to serve our main character.

But the reasons I want to talk about Show Me A Hero go beyond it's structure as miniseries, beyond its stellar cast, and beyond its extraordinary writers (David Simon of The Wire, and Paul Haggis of Crash who directed every episode).

I want to talk about Show Me A Hero because of the way it chose to break the rules. In fact, Show Me A Hero broke the most profound rule of screenwriting, the first commandment: Thou shalt have an active main character.

Well, Show Me A Hero simply does not.

If Show Me A Hero didn't work for you, there is a good chance that this is the reason. And if it did work for you, there is a good chance that this is the reason as well.

The choice to have an inactive protagonist is related directly to the theme and the ironic title of Show Me A Hero.

What is brilliant about the journey of Nick Wasicsko, its main character, played by Oscar Issac is precisely that he is not the hero we are longing for...

Now just a warning that there are spoilers ahead.

What's amazing about the character of Nick Wasicsko, is that Nick is not a hero.

Nick gets elected on a platform about keeping blacks out of a white neighborhood in Yonkers. And he doesn't get elected on that platform because he necessarily believes blacks should be kept out of white neighborhoods in Yonkers. In fact, he has voted similarly to the incumbent mayor on this issue, in all but one vote. The only difference between Nick and the current mayor is that Nick tried to appeal the decision to bring affordable housing into this white community, while the mayor recognized that it was an unwinnable battle, and chose the pragmatic course of actually governing in light of the decision.

In fact if there is a hero at all in Show Me A Hero, it's a very minor character of the Judge at the center of the trial.

This is the character that most people would have built a story like Show Me A Hero around. He is the obvious hero,