The melodramatic essentially means that a piece of writing is sensational – it has elements of over exaggeration to hook the audience and arguably deals less with character than with plot.
Usually if someone were to describe something as ‘melodramatic’, it would be an insult. This is where the bad side of melodrama takes precedence – when used as an insult, it is more to do with when the action of a character seems out of place in relation to what has been written before. The act in question then sticks out like a sore thumb; the insult comes from the fact that there has been little to no building up to the said action, the melodrama in this instance comes from the unexpected nature of it which, if done poorly, can completely undo character development and the building of plot in favour of unnecessary shock value.
Here is the interesting thing, though: Melodrama is not always bad. The term melodrama is so intertwined with it being used as an insult that some people forget that melodrama can work superbly well so long as it is written with conviction. Look no further than novels like Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, or television shows like Luther and Hannibal to see that the difference between these pieces and bad melodrama comes from the melodrama fitting the fiction like a glove. In Luther, for example, the melodrama works because it is not just the serial killers that are grotesquely over the top – it is everything: the detective, the crimes, the plot twists. The same goes for the excellent Hannibal; once again, the killings are extremely exaggerated but in having characters react to these acts with disgust, or delivering character development which adds an element of the theatrical and melodrama, the horrific acts do not detach the audience, but entices them, because every aspect of the drama becomes part of the fantastical. There is no act which sticks out like a sore thumb because every aspect of good writing still remains within the pieces of work: interesting character development, edge of your seat plots, and gripping dialogue. All this means is that these elements are filtered through the lens of melodrama, as opposed to trying to force characters to do unrealistic things in a world where the act simply does not fit within it.
To show you what I mean, let’s do a bit of a mash-up: let’s take another popular American television show like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and mix it with Hannibal. Very quickly, you realise that it couldn’t work because CSI is a crime procedural dealing with crimes that are more based in the world we live in. If the crimes that took place in Hannibal were to happen within the world of CSI, it would seem strangely out of place because the world of CSI was not built to sell that level of grotesqueness or theatricality with any kind of conviction. The story telling, character development, everything really, would come to a halt to deal with the strange tonal shift. This example shows what good melodrama is: similar to Shakespeare’s tragedies, if you base the world you create on the theatrical, on the dark and gritty, then you can sell melodrama. The insult of something being melodramatic is only used when the writer fails to ground their work within a world they need to create in order to sell it with conviction to the audience.
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