Narrators

While there can be notable exceptions, my initial response to the general concept of a narrator in television or films is negative. Much like the laugh track on a terrible sitcom, narration can often serve as a condescending set of training wheels for an audience. Sometimes, an overly narrated show indicates that the producers do either do not entirely trust the audience to figure out what is happening or that the writers could not figure out a clever way to show us the events and instead have to resort to telling us about them.

We do not have a script yet, so it is of course impossible to know if we are showing and not telling, but it really jumps out at me when shows have characters either talk to the audience through voice over that freezes the real-time action, sit or stand around and recap events that we never get to see with one another, or if they do the Shakesperean big-army-you-cannot-see-due-to-budgetary-constraints technique, which often manifests with statements such as: “ohh goodness! Look at that colossal army and the epic battle over there in the distance!”