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faejilly:
glorious-spoon:
notemily:
k-she-rambles:
Dude, Leverage follows that storytelling advice that everything should either advance the story or the characters, and it follows it scrupulously.
Even something as small as why Eliot doesn’t like baseball (until he plays it): “I don’t like any game you can’t win on defense.”
“Winning through defense” (both as in sports and as in defending others) / “aggressive defense”? That’s how Eliot lives.
There are a lot of reasons why Eliot doesn’t like guns, but I bet this is one of them too. You can defend someone with a gun, but it’s always an offensive action, not a defensive one. You can guard, you can react, you can frighten away, but you cannot shield.
Anyway, nothing seems to be wasted on this show, and it’s fantastic. As a viewer I’m enjoying it, and as a writer I’m going “!!!!”
My roommate describes Leverage as “the only show that never let me down” and she has high standards. It’s not a perfect show, but unlike many (most?) multi-season TV shows, it never has a sudden dip in quality that makes people wonder what went wrong. If you like it, you’ll keep liking it all the way to the end. And it’s one of the only shows that has an ending I really like, too, which I’m pretty sure is because the showrunners had it in mind for a while and didn’t just pull it out of their asses at the last minute for shock value and plot twists. Ahem.
John Rogers has said that they ended every season in a way that would be a satisfying place to end the show, but left just enough hanging that they could pick it up again, and it works brilliantly. I wish more showrunners would do this instead of cliffhangers and endless escalation
John Rogers is legit one of my writing *heroes* he’s amazing. His disdain for TV cliff-hangers is definitely part of why. (Paraphrased mightily, but: IF! Your characters are not interesting enough that people want to come back to see more of them, YOU HAVE FAILED AT YOUR JOB, and a plot cliff-hanger that may come back to bite you in the ass because TV production is the most fragile of businesses WILL NOT SAVE YOU.)
I remember when Leverage first aired I kind of lost track of it during s3, partly because of the schedule of my life at the time, but also partly I *thought* they were doing something dumb with one of the characters; when I finally got around to rewatching it once it was streaming where I could see it all in a row, I realized that what seemed like sloppy production at first (because in *any other show* it would have been) was entirely on purpose and tied into the season’s over-arcing plot and it was BEAUTIFUL.
Leverage is still my favorite TV show ever.
faejilly:
glorious-spoon:
notemily:
k-she-rambles:
Dude, Leverage follows that storytelling advice that everything should either advance the story or the characters, and it follows it scrupulously.
Even something as small as why Eliot doesn’t like baseball (until he plays it): “I don’t like any game you can’t win on defense.”
“Winning through defense” (both as in sports and as in defending others) / “aggressive defense”? That’s how Eliot lives.
There are a lot of reasons why Eliot doesn’t like guns, but I bet this is one of them too. You can defend someone with a gun, but it’s always an offensive action, not a defensive one. You can guard, you can react, you can frighten away, but you cannot shield.
Anyway, nothing seems to be wasted on this show, and it’s fantastic. As a viewer I’m enjoying it, and as a writer I’m going “!!!!”
My roommate describes Leverage as “the only show that never let me down” and she has high standards. It’s not a perfect show, but unlike many (most?) multi-season TV shows, it never has a sudden dip in quality that makes people wonder what went wrong. If you like it, you’ll keep liking it all the way to the end. And it’s one of the only shows that has an ending I really like, too, which I’m pretty sure is because the showrunners had it in mind for a while and didn’t just pull it out of their asses at the last minute for shock value and plot twists. Ahem.
John Rogers has said that they ended every season in a way that would be a satisfying place to end the show, but left just enough hanging that they could pick it up again, and it works brilliantly. I wish more showrunners would do this instead of cliffhangers and endless escalation
John Rogers is legit one of my writing *heroes* he’s amazing. His disdain for TV cliff-hangers is definitely part of why. (Paraphrased mightily, but: IF! Your characters are not interesting enough that people want to come back to see more of them, YOU HAVE FAILED AT YOUR JOB, and a plot cliff-hanger that may come back to bite you in the ass because TV production is the most fragile of businesses WILL NOT SAVE YOU.)
I remember when Leverage first aired I kind of lost track of it during s3, partly because of the schedule of my life at the time, but also partly I *thought* they were doing something dumb with one of the characters; when I finally got around to rewatching it once it was streaming where I could see it all in a row, I realized that what seemed like sloppy production at first (because in *any other show* it would have been) was entirely on purpose and tied into the season’s over-arcing plot and it was BEAUTIFUL.
Leverage is still my favorite TV show ever.
