The "superseded" scripts of USA's "In Plain Sight" are more interesting than most shows' final ones

In last week's episode of In Plain Sight, "Crazy Like a Witness," Bradley Whitford played a black-ops-type specialist who goes into Witness Protection with his son and is persuaded that his old company is out to get him. Episode 3 of Season 4 airs tonight at 10pm ET on USA Network, with the usual all-week repeats.

by Ken

Two episodes into the new season (with the third up tonight), it has been great having USA Network's In Plain Sight back. The creative team has by now established the personal and professional lives of Witness Protection marshal Mary Shannon (Mary McCormack) so solidly that they have a wide range of opportunities to play with. In an ingenious turnaround from previous seasons, Mary has to grapple with the possibility that her alcoholic screw-up mother (Lesley Ann Warren) and her perennial blond bombshell screw-up sister Brandi (Nichole Hiltz) may actually have straightened their lives out, and maybe she can't keep blaming the mess of her own personal life on always having to deal with theirs.

Meanwhile at work Mary remains Mary. In the season-opening episode, as her boss, Stan (Paul Ben-Victor), the regional WITSEC director, interviewed candidates for a new deputy director, the eventual winning candidate got her foot in the door by declaring herself up to the job of dealing with "the Mary Shannon problem." And the relationship between Mary and her fellow marshal Marshall is so well laid out that we know its boundaries, which means that we can also be surprised when they're breached.

BUT THAT WASN'T WHAT I WANTED
TO TALK ABOUT, EXACTLY

As the show is normally structured, near the start and at the end of each episode there is an establishing and then a summing up of Mary and the Albuquerque WITSEC office's relationship with the the episode's witness, done in part with voiceover narration by Mary. What anyone who has used the show's closed captions discovers is that for these opening and closing voiceovers, the actual voiceover and the CCs come from fundamentally different versions of the script.

We're not talking about the usual, expectable deviations between CCs and actual dialogue. We're not even talking about one version being a rewrite of the other. (Presumably the version in the CCs would represent an earlier script stage, since the version that's broadcast is, after all, the version that's broadcast.) We're talking about different scripts.

By way of demonstration, I made my best effort to transcribe both versions from last week's episode, the second of Season 4, "Crazy Like a Witness." By way of background:

* Bradley Whitford plays an ex-Army dark-ops "fixer" type who had been working his "magic" for a Blackwater-type firm, Genesis, until he turned whistleblower over corrupt dealings by the company and its omniscient chief -- a typically absorbing performance by that wonderful character actor John de Lancie. At this point Adam's wife is killed in a hit-and-run, and as Adam and his high-school-age son go into Witness Protection, Adam's conviction that his old boss had her hit, and that his son is now in danger, comes to seem pathological to the people dealing with him, with the notable exception of Marshall.

* At the same time Mary is dealing with the indications that her seemingly hopeless sister Brandi really has straightened herself out, and really will marry the incredibly decent, not to mention prosperous, guy (Joshua Malina) who seems genuinely crazy about her.

Now I'm not going to make any attempt to key the voiceovers to the action unfolding on-screen. You have the general idea of the setup, so here is --

THE EPISODE-ESTABLISHING (EARLY-SHOW) VOICEOVER

ACTUALLY BROADCAST VOICEOVER

MARY: For all five years of high school, Brandi could never get off the phone. It didn't matter which guy, it was always the same. "You hang up." "No, you hang up." It took all I had not to rip the phone out of the wall. I never got that -- the unquenchable thirst for hanging up.

In my experience, holding out for closure does nothing but prolong the pain. The Stones got it right. Lance the boil, rip off the Band-Aid, and get on with it.

CLOSED-CAPTION VERSION

MARY: When relationships break apart, we naturally look to clean up the broken pieces, tie up loose ends, leave no emotion unexpressed.

For a person entering Witness Protection, this need for closure seems prerequisite to starting life anew.

In my experience, seeking closure only prolongs the pain. The Stones got it right. Lance the boil, rip off the Band-Aid, and get on with it.

THE EPISODE-SUMMING-UP (END-OF-SHOW) VOICEOVER

By the end of the show, nearly everything that can go wrong has gone wrong, except that neither Adam nor his son has been injured, and since they have ceased to become a threat to Genesis, their lives no longer appear to be in danger.

ACTUALLY BROADCAST VOICEOVER

MARY: [PART 1] One of my earliest memories was of a beachfront and a flagpole, and of lightning flashes headed for the shore. As grownups ran around, frantic, gathering beach towels, flip-flops, and five-year-olds, one kid in particular went racing toward the storm.

[PART 2] I watched that five-year-old at the beachfront clinging wide-eyed to the flagpole as pretty bolts of lightning lit the sky. Then his mom ran out -- or a lifeguard, or an aunt -- and pulled him down to ground [???], to live another day.

[PART 3] As with most things, hanging onto a flagpole is, in the end, a matter of balance a [???] to keep you steady while you stay alert for lightning, of the storms across the sea.

CLOSED-CAPTION VERSION

MARY: [PART 1] Day after day we struggle to get things right, desperate to sidestep the mistakes of the past. We rearrange our lives against the unforeseen, arming ourselves against what we cannot know.

[PART 2] You see it on the news every night. The tornado blowing off the plain, tectonic under ["one's feet"? -- can't read my writing], a bridge in the middle, scattered debris and kindling where a home used to be.

[PART 3] A wise man once said, "With one foot in yesterday and another in tomorrow, all we do is piss on today." Instead of grasping at straws, or grains of sand, we're better off throwing up our hands and living in the here and the now.

NOW DO YOU GET WHAT I'M SAYING?

As you can see, the "actually broadcast" version isn't a revise, or even a rewrite, of the version contained in the CCs. They aren't even necessarily going for the same point(s).

They're so different that it occurred to me belatedly that there might be some online chatter on the subject, and sure enough I found a thread on exactly this subject, from May 2010, in which a number of posters make exactly the points I've made above.

And wouldn't you know, they're sneeringly dismissed by a jerkwad who flaunts his self-professed inside knowledge of the closed-captioning process. The idea that the captioners could be working from a different script, he tells them patronizingly, is simply impossible, because that's not how the captioning process is done. It's done by transcription; the captioners never so much as see a script, and therefore all they can be talking about is minor transcription errors. Like, presumably the minor deviations in the parallel versions above.

Closed captions are often truncated to reflect what can be read in roughly the same amount of time as the spoken dialogue that's captioned. They have nothing to do with script changes; STTR's do most captioning.

What you're seeing is quite commonplace on television shows. The WGBH Foundation did most captioning at one point, but there are a number of groups now. Complaints should be directed to the FCC, although I'm not sure accuracy of captioning is all that high on their agenda.

You assume I don't use captions, or know the difference between truncation and alteration. I can't account for what you see on IPS, nor is this an argument I care to have. I just know how CC is done, and that it is done using STTR's who never see actual scripts. You've pronounced me wrong, so there's nothing more I can contribute.

I wouldn't call it an argument, just differing views. I have professional knowledge of how closed captioning works, and trust me, the captioners never see the scripts. As fun as it is to think the differences reflect changes made by the writers, they don't. Moreover, captioning is done in post-production, long after the final changes to the script are made, and the episode filmed.

It doesn't matter how often Jerkwad (not his/her actual screen name) is corrected, with actual examples presented. He has "professional knowledge of how closed captioning works." The only tiny problem is that, at least as regards the question raised regarding In Plain Sight, every single word he writes is 100 percent wrong.

As he would know if he simply listened to what he's being told. But I guess people with "professional knowledge" don't have to pay attention to reality.

BY THE WAY, ONE POSTER ACTUALLY CONTRIBUTES

In fact, cerulean's was the very first response to the original query:

In my experience, that is very common. The script changes after the closed captioning is recorded is my guess. They fixed it for the dvds of In Plain Sight, at least for the first two seasons. The X-Files was notorious for this practice.

I usually watch the closed captions to find these discrepancies, which I find interesting, as they give insight into script changes, but I am a freak. However, I agree that the captions should be adjusted to reflect the actual dialogue (although I have found most of the discrepancies to be in the narration in the case of In Plain Sight).

I also find it interesting to note that the closed captioning often edits profanity, when the spoken dialogue does not.

Maybe somebody has come up with an answer since May 2010, but then, here we are with a new season, and the same thing is still happening. Personally, I don't mind. I wish I understood what's going on, but like cerulean I find myself fascinated being able to see such different script versions. Again, it's hard to avoid the assumption that the CC version represents an earlier stage, simply because you'd have to assume the "actually broadcast" version is the "final" one. But I'm fascinated by this glimpse of a writing process that (episode after episode) includes such interestingly different versions. The rejected, or perhaps we should say superseded, versions are more interesting than the writing we find on an awful lot of shows.

As for our friend Jerkwad, well, he does indeed appear to be a professional at that.


UPDATE: NOW THAT'S WHAT I CALL ACTION

I got home late and just finished watching tonight's In Plain Sight episode, "Love in the Time of Colorado" (was that a humdinger of an episode?), and man, my post goes up at 9pm ET making a federal case of this dual-script business, and an hour later USA sends out the new episode with the right CCs for the episode as aired! Okay, in the wrap-up scene the CCs were mis-synched, but look how little time they had to shape this episode up.

Now that I know I have this power, maybe next I'll go after all that mind-numbingly crappy music on Tremé. True, if HBO took all that stuff out, each episode would shrink to about eight minutes, but would that necessarily be a terrible thing? They could devote the rest of the hour to previews of upcoming HBO vampire-zombie-Mormon shows.

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