On my regular blog, I weigh in on the "Would Joan really do that?" debate sparked by the most recent episode of Mad Men ("Let's remind ourselves that Mad Men characters aren't real"), and I would love to get the perspective of the E.C. community on the importance of character consistency on a TV series. I also have a question prompted by this passage (spoiler removed) in James Poniewozik's criticism of the episode:
I can’t pretend to know what was going on in the writers’ room, but the storyline felt reverse-engineered. It played as if there was a certain place the episode had to end up ... and the story worked backwards to the precise chain of events, timing, deceptions and misunderstandings that would make that oh-my-God moment possible.
My impression, perhaps completely wrong, was that novelists, playwrights, and screenwriters often do write "backwards" from a compelling scene. Maybe a TV episode is supposed to be different because it should flow naturally from the previous episode? Sure, a writer can fail miserably in creating a plausible chain of events leading to a powerful moment. But is the technique itself suspect?