Breaking in a new keyboard, so...
I'd like to gush about one of the things I love about my favorite show.
Now, I love a good over-engineered misunderstanding as much as the next guy, and I get the impulse. Misunderstandings are a great way to make complications happen that don't demand a character arc and lesson learned to be satisfactorily resolved. But you want your misunderstandings to be... well... understandable. You (generally) don't want an audience to think one or the other character is especially in the wrong, but you also (generally) don't want to give the impression that their experiences are entirely disconnected from their choices.
It's almost a paradox. Telling a good story means making what's happening clear to the audience, but putting too big a gap between what the audience is shown and what the character notices erodes volitional sympathy. We want things to happen that are silly, delightful, and outlandish, but not so improbable that we feel the narrator's hand too heavily. From either side, we want audience buy-in on the premises presented.
But in the post-buzzfeed, nitpicking-as-a-cottage-industry, actually-Bambi-was-the-villain, cut-your-own-plot-holes age, where "I see what you did there" is said more often as a flex than a fistbump, there's pressure to write whole sequences on why a character missed the crucial text message (but aren't neglectful, or too stupid to turn their notifications higher, and don't pluck at audience insecurities about being neglectful idiots that deserve banishment to the phantom zone like all our memories of the seventh grade...) that resulted in wacky problems and hilarious misunderstandings.
All this to say, I love how willing Ghosts is to let mistakes be mistakes because people make mistakes. I love what a masterclass it is in letting characterization be the explanation. I love how every character, including/especially the episode POV, is sympathetically flawed in their own stories and softly unreliable in their narration. I love how their laughing-at is often gentler and more humanizing than many other shows' laughing-with. I know that's more a staple of British comedy in general, and I'm hardly an encyclopedia of the medium, but I do think Ghosts has an especially large share of that secret sauce.
My favorite example, I think, is in s3e5, "Something to Share", where the b-plot is all about Mike trying to make himself able to see the ghosts.
The setup? He just really really wants to. That's all. No treasure map or lottery ticket or secret he wants to keep. He just really, really, REALLY wants to.
How do we know? Roughly thirty seconds of him watching a party he can't join, atop two and a half seasons of establishing that he's a gregarious guy who's truly in love with his wife/best friend, and is always the rock-solid life of the party. Unlike a lot of sitcom couples, we know he doesn't just generally get childish and cranky anytime his wife is happy in a way he's not. In fact, that he says anything even a little petulant about how she's having a good time without him tells you that this one particular disconnect actually REALLY gets under his skin, and has for a while, and he's just been managing it because he's really not that kind of guy to feel slighted.
So he goes off and does some truly silly stuff. And I'm with him all the way. It's almost heroic, however daft, which is entirely his MO.
BUT WAIT (the buzz-feeding-frenzy might insist to meet word-count) isn't the end of that episode a PLOT HOLE?! Isn't Julian one of the ghosts he's seen ACTUAL pictures of? WHY would he think the art class life model is Julian when he'd KNOW it's not Julian? If the writers REALLY were clever wouldn't they have put in some plot about how Julian's got a twin brother who became a huge artsy hippie rather than Mike making assumptions based on there just being a tall blond man with no pants on in his house?
No. He makes that mistake because he's excited. You know he's excited. You can see he's excited. That's plenty. You don't need to make heart-shaped plots fit every possible head-shaped hole. He made a mistake, because he was excited, because he'd solved a problem, and was about to reconnect with his wife/best friend in a really wonderful way. We make mistakes when we're excited. Sometimes we make mistakes because we're good people in love. That's wonderful. Would it also be wonderful if Julian had a hippie twin that's part of his personal animosity to such things? Absofuckinglutely, give me that weird disneyfied shit, I love it. But the plot doesn't NEED that ten minute work-around in a thirty minute episode running four plots at once if it's got ten seconds of an emotive powerhouse like Smith-Bynoe breaking my heart with his genuine glee.
And they set us up to understand this kind of thing from the start. For the c-plot in S1e3, "Happy Death Day", Thomas hears a radio, and thinks it's his own brain finally breaking his writer's block.
ARE THERE NO STANDARDS?! (swarm the buzz-sharks,) Thomas would know what a radio is! He would know what hearing-things is! The house was part of the war effort! He's hears a car radio in the first episode! What cheap frivolous madness is this?!
He was excited. That's all. He's excitable and obsessive and makes literally everything about himself. He made a mistake because he was excited. For the other excitable obsessives in the audience, they show Alison humming along with the same song unconsciously as she takes down the curtains to remind people just how wormy an ear-worm can be, but they didn't really have to do that. Same way they don't need to contrive some especial state of inebriation or hypnotism to make it plausible that Thomas just would be that wrapped up in his own nonsense enough to run afoul of his own hatred of plagiarism.
But I do also love how willing the show is to put little justifications and explanations in the background, little heartfelt bits of narrative charity for us obsessives, subtle enough that they could just be side-effects of trying to write in a grounded way, without belaboring some "tell" of things they've already shown us. You don't get that except with writing teams that trust each other and check in with each other and advocate to each other to keep character at the center of the story. It's so good that I hardly ever notice it when it's not hitting me right in the heart, reminding me of some of the best times of my life or the best people I've ever known.
We know they know how to be clever. They throw around absolute gems as eight-word gags and blink-and-you-miss-it callbacks that other shows would milk for entire plot arcs. They also know when not to over-complicate the clever, how to be the best kind of idiot, the best kind of kind, when to not try to solve heart questions with head answers, and that's pure gold. Do I think every neat bit of serendipitous justification is intentional? Probably not. But you don't get it by accident so often unless you're doing a lot of other things right.
I just fucking love this show, you guys...
