Lie to Me on Television

While watching “Lie to Me” last night – the television series in which Tim Roth plays Dr. Cal Lightman, a human lie-detector tackling corporate shenanigans and endless enclouding crimes --something hit me about the show. Something had been off; didn’t add up. Don’t get me wrong,
I rate the show, it’s hugely entertaining, and I’d walk a mile in most shoes to watch Roth act; but then I realized: “Lie to Me” was, itself, bluffing. And it was the Walk & Talk that gave it away.

You know Walk & Talk: those long single shot takes fixed on two actors, one divulging to the other some necessary plot point as they chicane energetically up, down or across all manner of weaving corridors, dodging trolleys and oncoming colleagues as they go. First used back in 1994, on “ER”--the NBC medical drama which not only broke but obliterated the primetime television mold, thanks in no small part to its cinematic styling--the Walk & Talk was an expressive directing trick, used to evoke the hectic life and death state of the emergency room. Equally, when “The West Wing” next purloined Walk & Talk, to portray the White House as some giant pinball machine around which staff breathlessly ricocheted, the message was clear: the surge of world politics waits for no man, woman or intern. Cut forward to its use on “Lie to Me” however, and its use merely delivers a bit of a fib.

The difference between “Lie to Me” and those other shows is that its directors use Walk & Talk for no other reason than to inject pace, to keep things moving. As with the proverb: it’s never about the arriving more the journey, if you clock “Lie to Me’s” use of Walk & Talk, its character’s destinations hardly ever matter; at least once a week Roth and some other will debate while hurrying through the labyrinthine corridors of their clearly gigantic offices. Yet, bizarrely, once they arrive at their endpoint the action cuts elsewhere.

Yet the shows interior maneuvers are a necessary distraction: because “Lie to Me” is all about the upstairs (internal; people’s thoughts), when it’s downstairs for the action-friendly running, jumping and fist-fighting. In other words, if “Lie to Me’s” characters didn’t Walk & Talk, all they’d ever do was stand around talking to each other.

Consider primetime 1970s television; say, “Starsky & Hutch.” I’ll safely bet the only in-motion dialogue that show delivers is when our heroes are driving. Other than that, exposition is nailed static within scenes; either barked forth in Captain Dobey’s office, ruminated over at their work desks, or if we’re lucky garnered shooting some cool breeze with Huggie Bear. To throw a frame around my point, every scene will have been captured by fixed cameras; mostly shot on sets for cost-purposes, and the only movement provided by film editing. Which is why those old shows are great in the mind, but dull as dishwater come the reruns: everything is static, and there’s less pace.   

Enter the Brown Stabilizer. Invented in 1976 by a guy called Garrett Brown, hence the name, the Steadicam (as it thankfully came to be known) was a gyroscopically balanced camera unit strapped to its operator, which allowed for mobile camera movement unhampered by the otherwise bumpy outcome of filming with wheeled camera units on uneven floors. Used for the first time that same year on “Bound for Glory” (the otherwise forgotten Woody Guthrie bio-pic), its next use on “Rocky” was the knockout, enabling that now-iconic spirit-rousing sprint up the 72-step approach to the Philadelphia Museum of Art (a scene so famous the location is now better known as the “Rocky Steps”). Yet it would take the Steadicam another eighteen years to hit the small-screen, but upon arrival this single device would motion a television revolution--via “ER.”

And so was born the Walk & Talk; yet, for all its energizing of shows like “ER,” the Steadicam also served to accelerate the pace of television drama itself; to the extent where actors on “The West Wing” had to be trained to speak faster than was natural in order to keep up. A demand which, had it been made of MTV presenters during the 1980s, would probably have exploded a media panic about frontal lobe melt-down. Yet, as the use of Walk & Talk in “Lie to Me” highlights, we live in an age of accelerated entertainment; where the suspension of disbelief is no longer to do with the act itself, more the speed of its delivery. And an ill-judged dramatic pause in our cut-throat multi-channel age may lose an actor more than just the moment--it could lose them (and their show) an audience completely, as viewers channel-surf elsewhere. Best, therefore, not to allow gaps in time for thought.

Besides, there’ll be another ad break along in just a short while.  

Photo: Fox Network.