Seven Things “How to Get Away With Murder” Can Teach Us About Strong Writing
So I can admit it: I’ve become a bit of a TV-head since the work-from-home days began. It’s been six and a half months now. Here’s to the day I thought to myself, “Well, if I’m gonna be home for three weeks, why not rewatch all the Harry Potter movies?” Those were simpler times.
Around April, I was already running out of shows. I grew so bored one night that I rented CATS. CATS, people. Do you understand how serious that is?
Luckily, Annalise Keating swept in to save my brain, and it became my nightly ritual to watch one episode of How to Get Away With Murder as my night was winding down. Some nights, I got a little carried away and just kept going, but I averaged about one a day when I could help myself. By the end of season two, it was official: After 10 years, a new show had finally dethroned LOST as my favorite TV drama. I’d found a new guilty pleasure, while at the same time, my writer brain was soaking up some lessons to mull over for my own craft. I can’t say HTGAWM is perfect writing, but it does give us a gold mine of techniques to think about. So, let’s talk about seven takeaways we can use as writers.
(This is also a great time to put up the SPOILER ALERT! I’m going to do my best to keep things loose for folx who are still early in the show, but there may be some big reveals especially toward the end, so proceed with caution!)
On Diversity and Representation:
Diversity and representation is a hot topic in the literary world today. We still need more of it, and we also need for it to be done well. When not handled appropriately, there’s a risk of creating more problems: cultural appropriation, or writing about a marginalized experience you don’t understand as opposed to providing a voice and space for underrepresented groups; and/or tokenization, tossing in a marginalized character whose only purpose to the story is to be “the diverse one”, without any real storyline of their own.
Feel free to chime on this if you feel differently, but I was incredibly happy with the diversity of the cast in HTGAWM, more importantly how their identities were portrayed. The show does not shy away from topics of power and privilege, particularly through the lenses of race and sexual orientation. Annalise is the perfect lead for this show. She’s a strong, confident Black woman, and we see all the ways that the system has oppressed her for her intersectional identities. We also see how she’s gained power and privileges from her level of education, and how she uses that to benefit those who are even more oppressed (particularly in season 5 with her big trial.) But she’s not a token. She’s positioned firmly within in a community that can round out her character and interact with those identities in various ways.
In episode one, I was convinced that Connor was going to be the “token gay man,” and while he defies many stereotypes that are so easy for other writers to reach for, he isn’t portrayed in a very positive light at first. I’ll say more on him later, but the rest of the show did a great job of complicating his story so that it wasn’t all about his identity–it was a story that anybody could’ve had, while fitting his identity neatly into the context of his character. This is so important because nobody’s ever just one identity with a spotlight on it at all times. Identity is salient in some contexts and more internal in others, and remembering this is one way to get representation right. 
