There's an event that is important to the storyline, but instead of showing us the event itself, the writers have the characters telling us about it, sometimes in retrospect. Because hey,
it's cheaper. (Never mind that the first maxim people learn as writers, "Show, don't tell", discourages this very thing.)
Can be used humorously, by implying that we've just missed something much more interesting than what they showed us. When used dramatically... well... implies that we've just missed something much more interesting than what they showed us.
Another humorous variant is a staple of most traditional sitcoms, which is the format most likely to lack the budget or the running time to stage a comparatively elaborate stunt: Character leaves for strenuous/dangerous activity, airily insisting that 'I can handle it!'
Cut to some time later, when character returns, groaning and/or bandaged, to tell the story (or have the buddies that helped him home tell it for him, since they're generally the more with-it characters).
Second Hand Storytelling has a long tradition dating back to ancient Greece, where the traditions of Attic Drama insisted that
none of the action actually take place on-stage. Most of
The Odyssey, for example, consists of Odysseus telling other people about his adventures over the past ten years.
While a talented writer might be able to get away with it in a novel, it can be a problem in a movie or play, pointing to production constraints. As a result if a character tells a story, it's standard to show a
Flash Back.
Occasionally this is used for a
Take Our Word For It, or to set up
The Rashomon. Related to
Framing Device, but "framing device" applies more to cases where the second-hand story is a very large piece of the story and presented with all the vividness of the main narrative. Particularly
Wall Banger-ish examples have a tendency to turn this into a
Missing Moment Of Awesome. Please keep in mind, however, why this is
not always bad - making it impossible for anything important to happen if the protagonist is not present is, after all, a prime trait of the
Black Hole Sue. Compare with the
Noodle Incident, wherein the
Secondhand Storytelling incident is presented as something tantalizing that is only referred to obliquely.
Examples:
- This is why Weevil had to stop working for Keith in Veronica Mars.
- Whos The Boss frequently does this. For example, they show Danny Pintauro wearing a cast and telling Judith Light about how he got it from a nasty gymnastics fall rather than showing the fall itself ("Johnathan The Gymnast").
- Seventh Heaven has frequent (ab)use of second hand storytelling, especially in later seasons. For examples, check out their page on Television Without Pity
, and this season 8 review of their most poignant moments, which turned out to be mostly second-handed.
- All Grown Up!, "Brother, Can You Spare The Time?": The main plot is set up through an event that Tommy second-hands to the viewer: winning an award for a short film he made.
- Marion And Geoff is all about a chaffeur talking about these people.
- Hey Arnold!, "Career Day": We only hear about the most potentially interesting events today in after-the-fact conversations, as we see some woman thanking Gerald for saving her baby from a burning building he's currently putting out, and then Helga shutting the door on a police truck filled with some bank robbers and saying "My jujitsu lessons came in handy."
- Every episode of Grounded For Life makes full use of this trope in combination with flashbacks.
- Occurred at the end of the series premiere episode of Dave The Barbarian, "The Maddening Sprite of the Stump", as they were "way too cheap to show" the triumphant battle.
- Many key events in The Lord Of The Rings take place "off-camera" and are only related to the reader by the accounts of the characters within the book. Examples include:
- Gandalf's first confrontation with Saruman
- The discovery of the Ring by Smeagol
- Boromir's defense of the hobbits against the orcs leading to his being fatally wounded
- The death of Theoden's son in battle with the orcs
- The fall of Isengard at the hands of the Ents
- Faramir's stand at Osgiliath with the legions of Mordor
- The battle between the Dead and the Corsairs
- Saruman's conquest of the Shire.
- The movies show them, and go to great lengths to make them awesome.
- Parodied in an episode of Clerks The Animated Series, wherein Dante and Randal resolve not to leave the Quick-Stop for the entirety of the episode. Meanwhile, Jay keeps running in to inform them about the excess of plot occurring outside (including, among other things, the President having his head transplanted onto a gorilla's body and then turned into a vampire).
- Inadvertent example: The DVD of the first Dungeons And Dragons movie reveals several instances of Second Hand Storytelling. Sequences that were actually scripted and filmed were only described in the final cut, because they didn't have the budget to finish the effects.
- Played for laughs in the South Park episode "Best Friends Forever" where, as Kenny leads the army of Heaven in an epic battle against the legions of Hell, all the viewer sees is St. Michael vaguely describing the chaos and talking about how anyone who missed it would regret it for the rest of their life.
- Similarly, this Loserz strip, where focus returned to the three main characters after a couple of weeks without them.
- Parodied by Monty Python in their movie And Now For Something Completely Different. The "Killer Cars" animated skit featured an apocalyptic battle with a giant monster cat which suddenly cuts away to a man reading a narration of the story to a young child. The man then mentions the cat being destroyed in "a scene of such spectacular proportions that it could never in your life be seen in a low budget film like this. You'll notice my mouth isn't moving, either".
- Used in the Danish 50's drama-series Matador, describing a dramatic fight on a roof. Of course, in this case it was actually done so well, that decades later when the show was rerun, people called in to complain about the fight scene missing. The scene had never actually been shown, just described very vividly.
- The original Dune novel by Frank Herbert. Interesting scenes or important plot points, such as the initial journey to the planet Arrakis in a spaceship of the mysterious Navigators Guild or Paul Atreides drinking the lethal Water of Life, are either touched on only fleetingly or narrated by characters in retrospect, several weeks later. The chapter simply ends and cuts away from the action about to unfold to a different scene in the next chapter, with characters sitting around their camp fire and telling each other what happened. In both movie adaptions (the 1984 movie and the 2000 three-part mini-series) we actually get to see it on screen.
- The later seasons of the Science Fiction Space Opera TV series Andromeda frequently made use of this trope due to low budget. Large-scale shoot-outs or space battles were not shown directly, instead the audience saw the protagonists stare at a computer screen, commenting on the carnage.
- 90% of plays, out of necessity.
- Especially Shakespeare. This was an extremely good strategy for him: not only did Elizabethan theatre use minimal sets and props (making elaborate scenes difficult to stage convincingly) but, more importantly, Shakespeare's greatest strength by far is his use of language, and so he really can describe a scene (even one that would not require elaborate staging) much better than he could show it. Scenes that might appear odd or even narm-ish if simply performed on stage can seem much more meaningful when a character describes them, and allows us to hear the character's thoughts about the events as they tell it (Hamlet's "antic" confrontation of Ophelia, which we hear described from Ophelia's point of view, is one such scene). Nonetheless, many modern film adaptations seem to feel obligated to show the scenes on camera anyway, sometimes with a voiceover, because people have come to expect movies to show everything.
- The Bill Brasky sketches in Saturday Night Live used this for comedic value. They consisted of several men sitting around, drinking and telling stories about their absent friend Bill Brasky. As the sketch went on, the stories grew increasingly ridiculous and over-the-top. The punchline: when Bill arrives, he's The Faceless, but shot at an angle that makes him look gigantic - implying the stories really happened.
- Isaac Asimov made such use of this trope that in the introduction to a collected edition of the Foundation Trilogy, he called himself out for it, rather apologetically.
- Used late in the first A Nightmare On Elm Street movie when Nancy's mother finally gets around to explaining the original death of Fred Krueger.
- In Doctor Horribles Sing Along Blog, the titular character's first (and failed) attempt at his initiation into the Evil League of Evil is relayed to the audience by him through his video blog. To wit: "Captain Hammer threw a car at my head."
- Twelve Angry Men is third-hand storytelling. The entire play/film takes place inside the jury room and consists of the jurors arguing about events that they themselves only know about second-hand. It's also an intensely gripping film, regularly appearing around #10 on the IMDB top 250 list, proving once again that Tropes Are Not Bad.
- Used to great effect in Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca.
- The fate of Miss Kitty Fantastico
- The ending of Burn After Reading has two minor characters discussing the aftermath of the whole plot.Contrary to what you'd expect, this ends up creating one of the funniest scenes in the whole movie.
- This is arguably the (worst) problem with Ben Ten Alien Force and likely why some fans of the original series don't like this series. The biggest example is that the time gap didn't show us how the three main characters changed. But if you see it another way, it's likely that they grew up and changed: Ben was a brat and now he's more mature, Gwen was a Bratty Half Pint and no longer annoying, and Kevin was a villain who probably realized what he was doing as he became older and changed his ways. Another major problem, albeit less buggering, is that at the end of Season 2, Ben appeared to have all new aliens, but in Season 3, he has the same ones plus some old ones from Ben 10. It seems lazy (And it sort of is), but as long as you realize you could at least guess on what happened, it's not as bad.
- Primer, Primer, Primer. Half the reason the film is so mind screwy is because several key events are described rather than shown... and the characters doing the describing are geeks who would rather be laconic than descriptive.
- This is the premise of the central story element of Reservoir Dogs. We see before and after The Caper, but never the actual heist itself, or even the planning stages of it. According to Quentin Tarantino, the whole idea was to have a heist movie without the heist.
- An episode of Natsu No Arashi! Akinaichuu involves the cast traveling back and forth through time in a series of hijinks involving a rare pottery cup. Different from the usual, the action stays entirely in the present. We only hear about what happens when the characters travel back in time, and considering the rules of time travel in the show's universe, there are apparently some very close calls.
