A specifically clever bit of writing in a generally not too clever tv show
So I've been watching Your Friends and Neighbors, a new Jon Hamm show that I'd describe as "a glass of prestige tv warm milk." It's fun, it's very watchable, it's also the kind of television where a surly cop examines a crime scene and then unironically says "buckle up, Hernandez, looks like we got ourselves a murder."
Which is to say, the writing on this show is not that great. Mostly it's carried by Jon Hamm doing a late-career, bloated-and-sloppy version of the sort of handsome-but-deeply-flawed masculine figure he's been playing his whole career. A lot of the material here feels like it was written, honestly, ten or twenty years ago and isn't really up with The State of Society.
It feels like a show that was written in the immediate aftermath of the 2007 financial crisis but it's been in and out of drawers getting shopped around ever since.
But there's this one specific detail in the screenplay to the last episode that made me go "oh that's clever." Two characters have broken into a church. They are pretty drunk, they are talking, they are making out, they are about to have sex on the pews.
Now, the sex is pretty plot and character relevant here but the show doesn't just let it play out; instead, the pastor walks in, startles the two, and they leave the church in a hurry. But then cut to them having sex anyway in a hotel room.
What's clever is that in that cut they're saying a lot about what is happening with these two characters, without really needing to depict or think about it. It's very economical. Because when they get shooed off by the pastor, that feels like a natural set up to deflate the sexual tension, right?
Instead no, they have sex and the scene plays out basically as it would if they'd done it in the church, except now the audience gets the sense that they really really do want this; they went all the way to a second location fully intending to do it. It's a very economical bit of characterization in a show that's generally pretty uneconomical.