ABSTRACT
In a play, character is fate: a determination of will which explodes into action, which instigates the drama and impels it to an end -Macbeth's vaulting ambition, for instance. Television fabricates a supplementary drama from the uncertainties which plague it and damage its dramatic consistency. The necessity and inevitability which supervise the action of drama had been dethroned, and replaced by whim, guess, and the suppositious arc of the gambler's dice. But while drama was reorganizing itself as a factitious sweepstake, another, more authentically uncertain drama took over. The real drama was taking place outside the series, not on it. A series which is dramatically null can keep itself going by fomenting drama off-screen, which often contradicts the sedate fictions of the programme itself. It takes over the punitive formula of the detective drama, in which the investigator disinters the crimes sheltered by large fortunes, and turns that formula inside out.
