Did you just take a sip from an empty cup?
Yes.
Why did you do that?
Just something to do.
We know television is fake. We know that when characters are walking down the street in
“New York,” they could very well be on a backlot in Los Angeles
and we accept this because we are not crazy people. We understand how fiction works.
It’s fake. It’s all for you I don’t understand
And the sky and the sea everything. It’s a set, it’s a show.
But television shows try their level best to appear as real as possible, to help engross
us in their stories.
And one of the ways they do this is by having characters do something “normal”:
drinking a cup of coffee.
You guys want to get some coffee? Yeah.
Coffee is a symbol of the everyday: It can signal the day is beginning, or provide an
excuse for two characters to interact;
But as much as this coffee cup is intended to immerse us in this fictional scene, there’s
one slight problem:
this coffee cup is probably empty, and television has a really hard time pretending it’s not.
And it drives me crazy.
In 2014, I started the #EmptyCupAwards hashtag because I realized this was not an isolated
phenomenon:
television actors are in general very bad at pretending the empty prop cups they’re
carrying contain liquid of any amount.
Sometimes, this becomes clear because the basic laws of gravity are being ignored
This hot chocolate, for example, should have flown out of that cup five times over.
Hot chocolate, be nice.
They’re not even trying to pretend it’s real, and it shows tremendous disrespect for
both the viewer and, well, science.
It can be a recurring problem for shows that consistently use coffee as part of regular routines.
Kara’s job as an assistant means constant coffee deliveries, and Calista Flockhart
nearly always gives the impression her hard-ass editor is perfectly content receiving cups
of hot air to start her morning.
And then you realize how many shows have built coffee into their worlds, and how consistently
this creates problems.
Every time I see assistants delivering coffee or characters consistently visiting a coffee
shop, I’m already on edge. And I’m instantly pulled out of the show.
And once you’re focused on it, you begin noticing subtler issues, like when coffee
trays get involved,
and the actors struggle to adjust the weight to account for an absent cup
and then you discover it’s not a new phenomenon.
The sheer volume of coffee consumption on Gilmore Girls makes binging the show a veritable
macchiato minefield.
And you like awake at night terrified of what awaits when the revival drops on Netflix.
And then you commit yourself to an asylum, because you’re obsessing over prop coffee cups in TV shows.
I kid. All we’re doing, I argue, is naturally responding to an inherent contradiction:
When actors carry around empty cups, it means that something included in scenes to make them seem more realistic is instead doing the exact opposite.
These empty cups are not just failing to immerse us in this fake world; they’re actively
reminding us that this world is fake!
So why does it keep happening?
Why aren’t actors required to go through some kind of, I don’t know, coffee cup training
before being allowed on set?
Why don’t directors ask for another take when the actor is grasping onto a cup with
one finger?
Why does post-production allow that hollow, empty sound to remain in the mix when cutting
the final episode?
And why, for the love of gravity, couldn’t they just put liquid in the cups, which is
so simple that even a Muppet can figure it out?!
Besides the fact that probably the majority of viewers probably don’t even notice this
issue,
the fact is the logical solutions would be difficult to prioritize in the fast-paced
and low-cost environment of TV production.
Real liquid potentially means real mess for the actors, and extra work for the props assistants
who have to fill them,
and extra money if wardrobe gets ruined from spills.
What ticks me off about this cup, Adam, is that there is nothing in it.
Oh jeez, there was something in it!
The fact is, directors are not focused on coffee cups.
Their job is making sure shows stay on schedule, and poor cup acting isn’t going to
make the list of things to force a costly second take in a space where time is money,
especially with a lengthy walk-and-talk scene, where coffee cups often reside.
The same goes for editors or sound designers, who are never going to choose a
worse take overall
just because the coffee cup acting is spectacular, and whose problem solving happens within comparable
constraints of time and money.
So, unless the investors on Shark Tank provide the necessary funding to manufacture my
Interlocking Adjustable Coffee Cup Weight prototype (patent pending),
we have a situation where the only thing standing between us and
the venti verisimilitude we desire is Hollywood’s greatest natural resource: actors.
And so let us use the #EmptyCupAwards hashtag as our way of letting those actors
know that somewhere out there, there are dozens of us placing our trust in them.
If you recoil at the sight of an empty cup being flung around onscreen,
take out your cell phone and document it for the world to see.
Let the hashtag be our way to bring somewhat irrational, mostly insignificant light
to an issue that for better or worse lies at the heart of television’s relationship
with the truth.
Television may be fake, but that does not mean the cups need to be empty.