Heated Rivalry and Subtextual Obfuscation

Dialogue is an unreliable narrator, but writers treat it like gospel. We spend weeks tuning rhythmic patter, polishing jokes, and sharpening argumentative thrusts, operating under the polite fiction that characters speak to reveal who they are. In life, speech serves a starker function. People talk to hide, to deflect, to maintain standing, or to survive an uncomfortable room. When showrunner Jacob Tierney discussed adapting the hockey romance Heated Rivalry, based on the novels by Rachel Reid, he offered an unusually candid directive regarding the verbal interaction between his leads: "Body language is everything. Every line they say to each other until episode five is bullshit."

Tierney was not denigrating his own script. He was identifying a bedrock principle of dramatic construction: subtextual obfuscation. In sports locker rooms, corporate boardrooms, and family kitchens, spoken words frequently serve as active counter-programming to internal reality. "You have to see what they're doing," Tierney explained in V Magazine, "because everything that comes out of their mouth is obfuscation." The spoken lines carry posture; the physical behavior carries truth. The dramatic friction lives in the space between the spoken claim and the physical contradiction.

The Lie on the Page

Screenwriting software encourages an unhealthy bias toward speech. A dialogue block occupies the center of the page, framed by clean whitespace, visually demanding the reader focus upon it. Parentheticals feel clumsy. Action lines run the risk of turning purple if a writer over-directs the camera or dictates micro-expressions. Because of this typographical trap, scripts drift toward verbal exposition. Characters announce their jealousies, declare their wounds, or explain their moral philosophies over cold coffee.

Consider how classic screen drama solves this problem. In David Milch's masterwork Deadwood on HBO, characters talk in dense, ornate torrents of Victorian filth and frontier legalese. The dialogue functions as armor. When Al Swearengen negotiates, his threats obscure his terrifying physical vulnerability. The audience does not track what he claims about county lines or assay reports; we watch his hands scrub blood out of floorboards. The physical labor betrays the panic his cadence suppresses.

Tierney applies the same discipline to the hyper-masculine subculture of professional sports. When two athletes meet on neutral ice, the cultural vernacular demands posturing. To script them exchanging sincere acknowledgments of attraction would ring false and destroy dramatic tension. Instead, the dialogue maintains the abrasive cadence of sports media and team hazing, while the physical staging reveals terror, magnetic pull, and longing. The scene works because the writer trusts the actor to play the lie out loud while playing the truth in silence.

Writing the Physical Contradiction

Constructing subtextual obfuscation requires a structural shift in how an action block is deployed. Too many action lines merely explain logistics: who enters, who sits, who pours a scotch. In strong visual writing, the action block acts as an indictment of the dialogue line immediately preceding it.

Think of how Jesse Armstrong and the writers of Succession manage the Roy family dynamics. In season two, when Shiv Roy reassures her husband of her loyalty, the dialogue is clipped, modern, and pragmatic. But the stage directions track her eyes darting away to the television monitor, or her fingers compulsively adjusting cuff buttons. She tells him one story; her autonomic nervous system tells another. The viewer never experiences narrative confusion because the camera registers the split instantly. The irony enriches the scene.

When a writer builds a scene where every line is bullshit, the dialogue must sound plausible on its surface. It cannot read as cartoonish evasion. A hockey player barking about defensive coverage must sound like a real person talking about defensive coverage. If the audience catches the writer winking behind the curtain, the illusion collapses. The spoken text must remain sturdy enough to fool the room inside the fiction, even as the viewer reads the unspoken signals outside it.

The Courage to Let Characters Lie

Television writers often suffer from premature articulation. Terrified that an executive, an actor, or an audience member might miss a psychological turn, the room forces a breakthrough scene too early. Two characters sit down in episode three and finally tell each other how they really feel. It feels like craft progress; in practice, it relieves pressure that ought to build for three more hours.

Holding back that clarity demands genuine craft nerve. In Tierney's structure for Heated Rivalry, holding the obfuscation until episode five allows the emotional pressure to cook. When characters maintain a defensive screen over multiple sequences, every tiny physical tell gains immense narrative value. A shared glance across an arena tunnel stops being connective tissue; it becomes the climax of the sequence. A hand lingering on a jersey collar carries the weight of a confession.

Look at Todd Haynes' direction of Carol, scripted by Phyllis Nagy from Patricia Highsmith's source material. The spoken exchanges over lunch menus and glove purchases are models of social camouflage. The characters trade banalities about train sets and winter coats. The movie lives entirely in the hesitation before lighting a cigarette, the focus pulling to a gloved wrist, the sudden intake of breath. If either character had spoken their desire plainly in the first forty minutes, the picture would have dissolved into mundane domestic drama.

When writers sit down to revise a scene that feels flat, the first impulse is often to sharpen the banter. We look for a better comeback, a more trenchant metaphor, a prettier turn of phrase. Often, the cure is the opposite. Strip the wit. Let the line fall flat or read like empty social filler. Then, turn to the physical space between the characters. Ask what the body wants that the tongue refuses to admit. If the spoken dialogue is an absolute smoke screen, the scene finally has room to breathe.