Day 1: Storylining
On Monday night, Ferndale’s newest killer nurse dispatched a grumpy extra. He was on screen for just five minutes, but his death was months in the making. traces a bit-part’s journey from script to screen to morgue.
Mr Goodwin was an elegant corpse – skin pallid, face peacefully slack, eyes closed – and he stayed perfectly in character even as his body shuddered from the repeated CPR thumps from the nurse kneeling on the side of his bed.
‘‘He’s my patient. I’m not stopping!’’ wailed the nurse, whose name was Deb, as her arms pumped futilely and her eyes filled with tears.
‘‘Come on, let him go,’’ said her colleague Kate, drawing her into a comforting hug. ‘‘This is not on you, all right. It was his time.’’
Except that Deb (and any viewer watching) knew damn well that this was on her, and it wasn’t Mr Goodwin’s time. Deb had given Neville Goodwin a double-dose of the painkiller fentanyl, and earlier, she’d nicked his morphine to feed her own drug habit. As the script direction for Scene 24 of Episode 6295 of New Zealand’s premier soap opera put it: ‘‘She just killed poor old Neville’’.
To be fair, Neville won’t be hugely missed. He was a grumpy old bastard who deliberately ran his wheelchair into that nice orderly, Mo. He was a one-dimensional character summoned to life for the sole purpose of dying – a flesh-and-blood prop for a more important character.
Actor John Trevithick had just nine scenes, totalling 321 seconds, in which to bring Neville to life and death, and he made a very fine fist of it, but this was always going to be a short gig.
Yet, brief as it was, Neville’s life was complex. Like every moment on Shortland Street, his death, and his killer’s angst, were in the pipeline for months before reaching your screen.
Shortland Street is famed for a production process that spits out hours of cheap but effective soap in a fraction of the time of international equivalents. Multi-camera setups, brutal shooting schedules, and an acceptance of the trade-off between speed and quality all help, but also crucial is a continuous writing process that turns script-writing into a Henry Ford-style assembly line.
From mid-March to late July, I tracked a single storyline, watching as the raw materials of plot and character were processed into primetime drama. That storyline was the short life and tragic death of Neville Goodwin. On a Monday morning in mid-March seven people sit around a large table at South Pacific Pictures HQ in Henderson, west Auckland. There are notepads and many pencils, and in the middle of the table there’s a coffee plunger and Dettol handwipes.
Whiteboards lining the walls contain vital data: characters’ birthdates and current abodes, past medical woes (‘‘Boyd – left kidney tumour, angiomyolipoma; Drew – shot in LEFT shoulder, thigh, back...’’). A handdrawn calendar tracks which actors are on leave when. There’s a motto on a piece of A4 sellotaped to a small TV screen: REAL RELEVANT And occasionally RIDICULOUS.
The people around this table – producer Maxine Fleming, two story editors, a medical consultant and four ‘‘storyliners’’ (including Oscar Kightley) have just one week to produce detailed descriptions (but not dialogue) of enough fictional human behaviour to hold viewers’ attention for a week. Five episodes make a ‘‘block’’. This week they’re storylining Block 1259.
The yarns they spin must be consistent with their characters’ history and personality, while also steering towards futures sketched out in quarterly long-term story meetings. Their adventures must be interesting and emotionally engaging, and moreor-less believable (in a soap-universe way). And they must involve prudent use of locations, stunts, extras, guest actors, and other such extravagances.
Completion of this block by Friday afternoon is non-negotiable, because by Monday the stories will be in the hands of an army of writers who’ll each convert a storyline into a dialogue script.
Meanwhile, storyliners will already be breaking ground on Block 1260.
Fleming, whose dog Chewy spends half the session on her knee and the rest wandering the room seeking pats, launches discussion of one of the block’s major plotlines: Nicole (Sally Martin) and Vinnie (Pua Magasiva) will face a string of dreadful luck, including financial strife and serious illness for their son Pele.
Options are tossed about: What disease would suit Pele best? Does a flesh-eating superbug sound too comical? What about tetanus? What caused the money trouble? Does this connect to the recent volcanic eruption? At times it’s like watching dinner-party guests trade gossip about absent mutual friends – ‘‘they’re gonna remortgage’’, ‘‘they’re medical professionals and they didn’t vaccinate for tetanus?’’ – except the gossip is being made up on the spot.
The next big story involves the clinic’s new nurse Deb Randall, played by Gabrielle Henderson.
Deb’s a bad ’un. She has dark secrets, a drug problem, and trouble ahead. She’ll make moves on Mo, which will antagonise Kate, and her bad mothering will see her son Felix run wild and lead Vinnie’s son Michael astray just as Vinnie’s freaking out about Pele’s illness.
It’s totally fine if you’re not following this at all, I know I barely am, but the point is that even though she’s new, Deb’s fate is being firmly woven into the fabric of Shortland Street. Oh, and she’s also a killer. Which is where Neville comes in.
In fact, Neville doesn’t have a name yet. He barely exists. He’s just a