A story that surprises us is fascinating, but it needs to flow perfectly so that when the screenwriter pulls the rug out, we end up laughing and enjoying the fall. Because “surprising” is a challenge, but one that unfortunately many put ahead of telling a good story.

There are pranks, there are nice surprises and there is just plain meanness. Do you know how we identify? I’ll give my guess.

Agatha Christie: the queen of pranks

All whudunit content is a bit of a prank, following the school of its greatest author: Agatha Christie. The murderer is generally the one we least expect and needs the detective to explain or the culprit to confess to make sense.

Although it seems ‘easy’, it is not. And I’m not talking about identifying the culprit, but rather making us follow the story without fishing for clues. If you don’t know how to play with the audience’s perception, the story will be empty. Death and Other Details is one of the examples in which we are in the sixth episode and the suspect has already changed six times. At this point, what does it matter? We just hope the cruise ends.

Here are five GOOD examples of surprises, both recent and old:

1- The Sixth Sense

I only killed the surprise because they told me it was completely unexpected so I reversed the expectation. It’s well tied, and clear from the beginning if you dared to think the worst.

2- The Usual Suspects

Who is Keyser Söze? I also killed the riddle but for the same reason as The Sixth Sense. The script is perfect to mislead and scare us with the truth.

3- Only Murders in the Building

I’m the puzzle expert, I nailed season 1 (one of the best) and came close in the others. Intelligent, full of tips, and yet, always with surprises.

4- The After Party (1st season)

The first season is perfection. I used the Agatha Christie strategy and caught the culprit rather quickly, but again, because I’m boring. That’s awesome.

5 – The White Lotus

Every success of the series is justified by engaging us to rack our brains and delivering an unexpected conclusion. Season 3 starts recording now, I doubt it will lose quality!

I also picked five more recent bad examples to reinforce my point.

In all the series below, the story drags on and challenges our engagement. As they make us believe in one thing only to throw it in the trash and show another in the next episode, it seems like we have time available to waste and throw it away.

It’s one thing to try to decipher the mystery, it’s another to realize that no matter how hard we try, the screenwriter will invent anything or suspect just to challenge us. It’s not a matter of “getting carried away”, it’s giving up trying to follow along, a huge danger if the person telling the story is ‘petty’ and wants to have the final word, even if it doesn’t make sense.

1- Death and Other Details

2- Murder at the End of the World

3- True Detective Night Country

4- The After Party (2nd season)

5- The Role Game

The Film Noir Formula: Every Detail and Name Matters

We all like surprises, but not deliberately being made fools of. If in a series of six episodes it seems like they ‘reveal’ the culprit in the 4th, it’s not your fault for getting the culprit wrong. They actually took 4 hours of your life so that you will feel like an idiot at the end of the next two.

It’s important to highlight that it’s not what Agatha Christie did and that some screenwriters got the trick: she distracts us, she even induces us to think something, but when the moment of confession comes, we laugh because she makes sense.

Film noir demands a little more attention. In general, we start the story with crucial information and go back in time to contextualize it, and, in general, there is a bigger surprise at the conclusion. Therefore, it is necessary to be aware of each and every name mentioned over time as no information is irrelevant.

Good examples:

1- Slow Horses

All the tips we need to follow Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) is to pay attention to what he ‘doesn’t say’, and Diana Tarvener’s (Kristin Scott-Thomas) reactions, in the cat and mouse game that sacrifice good people (and other not-so-much).

2- Hijack

The series with Idris Elba took so many turns that it almost made a mistake, but stopped long enough to engage us in the second part, where we already know who is to blame and how, but we’re still not sure how the story ends. Perfect!

3- Double Indemnity

No less than 80 years have passed since its release and this is still a perfect film, a contact in flashback and a classic of noir style classics.

Of course, the woman is seen as ‘fatal’ because of Barbara Stanwyck‘s character, a man telling a woman to “shut up” was still seen as sexy, but there are many important elements in the narrative and construction of Double Indemnity that is possible to keep on the “Must see” list.

4- Chinatown

Chinatown is a must-see, but if you haven’t seen it yet and when you get to the end you get the feeling that ‘I didn’t like it’, that’s okay. Those who love the film are mostly due to the unbelievable surprise of an extremely confusing but tied-up plot.

5- Citizen Kane

The brilliance of Orson Welles‘ film has been the subject of master’s theses for over 80 years, deservedly so. It’s on the list not because of the murders, but because the mystery is simple.

A reporter wants to understand the last words of an eccentric millionaire and we search for clues throughout his life. When we discovered what “Rosebud” meant, it was an exciting surprise and to this day a perfect example of how to create an intelligent story, as it would be impossible for us to guess but not a single second of what we saw makes us feel like we wasted time. Perfect!

Revert expectations: only if it makes sense

The screenwriter will always have control of the narrative, but this Power demands talent. If you know how to guide us on a road full of curves, hills, and obstacles, when we arrive at the final checkpoint the surprise is only welcome when it completes something for us. Which I’ve already repeated a thousand times in this post.

Besides The Sixth Sense and The Usual Suspects, few manage to do a 180º turn without irritating us, and it is films like The Others (in the school and contemporary of The Sixth Sense) and one from the 1980s that I recommend devouring: No Way Out.

In both, all the details we need to know or notice are offered from the beginning, even more so than The Usual Suspects and The Sixth Sense, which kind of deliberately (albeit cleverly) hide and confuse us.

In both, if we use Agatha Christie‘s learning (she’s always the one we least expect) with the noir formula (all the details matter), we get the truth, but it’s so out of the box that we deny it until we have to admit it and hand it over to the screenwriter. his recognition as a great storyteller.

Lost, Sopranos, and Game of Thrones: Fan Revolt

When a non-linear narrative debuted, mixing drama with action and mystery, Lost became a worldwide sensation. There were flashbacks, the mystery of who the ‘unlucky’ passengers were, what was on the Island, and how they would get out of there.

Flashforwards came, but there were changes in the cast and a plot so complex that the ‘spiritual’ conclusion made the mistake I already mentioned: it made the audience feel like they wasted time, and the journey wasn’t worth the delivery.

However, Game of Thrones managed to go beyond the controversy when author George R. R. Martin had no less than five books ahead of the series and arrived in 2024, six years after GOT went off the air, with no sign that it would one day conclude the series. saga.

Showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss gained notoriety, awards, and praise while they had Martin’s material as a basis (and there’s plenty of it), but, with HBO’s deadlines and their professional commitments, from the 6th season onwards they started using the basic line of the author’s argument for the ending and had complete freedom to direct the story that is the biggest pop phenomenon of the last decade as they wanted.

Where did D&D go wrong? Many point out many details, but the main one (the conclusion of Daenerys’ (Emilia Clarke) plot) was announced to anyone paying attention and it was part of Martin’s formula: reversing expectations.

I hate this concept because it’s a complete joke. Or it could be. In the case of Game of Thrones, the writer’s proposal was to show that 1) the winners dominate the narrative and 2) the hero is the villain for the other side. At no point would Daenerys – the classic heroine – end her days rescuing the Iron Throne without being committed to the corruption of Power. We follow the journey of a complex and empathetic villain, that’s a good story!

In general, the constant surprise of Game of Thrones was never to surprise us with the unknown but to shock us with the improbable. Like, we start the story with Ned Stark (Sean Bean) as our hero, but he dies one episode before the end. Then, we root for his son, Robb Stark (Richard Madden) to see him betrayed and massacred in season 4. Nor was the formula “kill anyone”: it was to be ruthless with plausible consequences.

When it was up to D&D to follow through with this, they were worried about pulling the rug out from under us, about giving us the fear of losing Jon Snow (Kit Harington) only to resurrect him in the 3rd episode of the season following his murder. In the clash between the living and the dead, only those who already had the full bow died, there was almost no fear like we had in the Battle of the Bastards or Hardhome. Worse still, fans’ most anticipated deliveries for 8 years (Arya killing Cersei, Jon killing the Night King) were reversed just for the grace of, yes, “reverting expectations”.

The first question is why revert expectations? The surprise was clearly not what they wanted after seven years of waiting for these two things (seeing Bran embodying the Dragon was another, but it could pass as it did without and we swallowed it).

Being stingy, not delivering what is expected because it could deny that pleasure, made GOT one of the best examples of a clumsy conclusion to a phenomenon. The Sopranos‘ black screen doesn’t rise to the level of problems. If you want Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) to have survived that’s an option, but if you’ve followed the noir formula you’ll know that his death has been explained and announced several times before: it was simply brilliant.

Peaky Blinders fell into the surprise trap and Vikings attempted a GOT

I’m in love with Peaky Blinders and Vikings too, but both hits also had a few misses.

Vikings, less so, but somewhat inconsistent in plotting the surrender of Ivar the Boneless (Alex Høgh Andersen) and, in the end, taking his life at the hands of a random soldier. It was as if Arya Stark (Maisie Williams) had taught her the error of killing the Night King instead of Jon Snow. Ivar had to die less grandly, outside of battle, in something trivial. Nor did he have to show a fear of Death: he was educated all his life to face the path to Valhalla head-on.

Of course, the fear and tears were to humanize him, a random soldier was to take importance away from him and it was more of a suicide than a defeat, but still: I would have preferred it to have been Alfred (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) or a domestic accident.

Lagherta’s (Katheryn Winnick) death at the hands of Hvitserk (Marco Ilsø) instead of Ivar also felt a bit like Arya Stark. But next to GOT, Vikings was perfect.

Peaky Blinders has relied on prank formulas over the years. Whenever we believed Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy) had gone bad, it was always part of his plan and not at all what we were expecting. Sometimes they were, but rarely.

Unfortunately for the series, actress Helen McCrory‘s health got in the way of what would have been the main conclusion of the Shelbys’ drama: Polly Gray would have to choose between her son Michael Gray (Finn Cole) and her nephew Tommy, promising a powerful end to the series. With the premature death of the actress, the character died off-screen, in a sequence of events that had their weight, but lost their magic. Tommy managed to get rid of his enemies, but he lost his wife who gave up on him and his beloved daughter. A broken man again, but alive!!! Yes, we will have the film, and Cillian Murphy – Oscar or not – says he will return to the Peaky Blinders universe. Really?

So here’s a tip: more than the screenwriter’s talent, we depend more on the generosity of the showrunners when telling us a story. If they want to prioritize a good plot, they will get the surprise right, there is no doubt. But if they let their egos get the better of them and want to “show who’s boss,” they generally fall flat.

Do you have a series or movie that you think got it right or wrong that I didn’t mention? I bet so!

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