Discuss - Ep #0934

It certainly isn't the actress's fault, when writers make her character a simple damsel-in-distress, or (as I suspect happened) when directors demand over-acting or over-enunciation.   I liked "streetwise" Amanda early on, but the purgatory thing in 1970, in which she whined and wondered who oh who would save her, over and over, was insufferable.   

The actor is the person the audience sees, who bears the brunt of it when directors or producers or writers mishandle the character.   All the audience knows is, "I don't like her anymore."   It's not fair.

It's not fair.

I'm not so sure about that.  There are extraordinary actors and actresses who can make you believe and sympathize even when their characters are doing things that are annoying and/or dreadful and/or head-shakingly stupid.   I think of a really good actor as a teacher - reading the written script and then, by his acting, making us understand far more about the character - and therefore about people in general - than I myself could ever have understood from reading the written script.

Here's what I said earlier in this topic about Amanda:

While yesterday's cliffhanger was being rerun at the beginning of today's episode, I had an epiphany: I finally understood why Amanda carried on so in the path from death to life.  She was being brought back from death!  I daresay there was something in her that was fighting hard against it.  And so she screamed, and so Quentin didn't scream, because he hadn't died, and so Quentin was patient and loving with her because he understood what was going on.  Quentin is a better person than I am, and yet he sees something different in his portrait.

I think a better actress could have found that and lots more in the lines written for Amanda right from the beginning, and I think if she had done so, the writers would have responded by making succeeding scripts better.  I don't hold it against Donna McKechnie that she wasn't capable of this, but I think it could have been done.

All I'll say this morning is that I've sometimes been convinced that a show had horrible actors, then the writing improved, and it turned out that the actors had been good all along.   It was just impossible to tell earlier on, since there's only so much one can do with bad lines.   I'm not wrong, am I, in thinking that Kaplan and Curtis and perhaps others were pushing actors to act harder, on the assumption that with this supposedly silly supernatural stuff, the viewers needed to be hit over the head?