In the final episode of Ted Lasso’s second season, Ted sends a text to his ex-wife that reads simply: “Knock, knock.” Nothing too unusual about that you might think, but whatisstrange is that it appears to be the very first message he’s ever sent the mother of his son. Stranger still, she has never previously texted him either. The blank white space above and below their messages reveals that the characters share zero messaging history.
It’s a problem that used to plague TV. Why is the first message Emily in Paris has ever received from her boyfriend: “Hey, how is Paris?” When Rebecca accidentally sends a text to her crush instead of her best friend in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, why is their history blank when we saw him text her about a housewarming party a few episodes earlier? In 2021, Wired journalist Zak Jason nameda whole litany of showsin which characters don’t have text histories – New Girl, Insecure, The Undoing – and argued that it was, “inexcusable, and unnerving to witness”.
It appears that studios and streamers alike were listening. Because nowadays, television writers put a huge amount of thought into getting a character’s text history right – even if it is only going to appear on screen for a matter of seconds.
In the currently airing dark comedyYour Friends & Neighbours, everyone texts regularly. When Jon Hamm’s character Coop wants to meet up with his lover, we see a long history of past booty calls and even the bottom of a sexy snap. When his son texts his crush, it’s apparent that she previously responded to something with the letter “k”. Meanwhile, recently released thriller seriesThe Stolen Girlfeatures emoji-filled logs between spouses and colleagues: “Grabbing lunch. Want anything?”, “I’m WFH today btw.” And Ted Lasso course-corrected in season three,showing viewersTed’s historic interactions with swathes of people, including a message to his upstairs neighbour: “I swear to you, I’m not playing music.”
“It drives all of us crazy when there aren’t text histories – it’s something we’ve fought for years,” says Dave Henri, a managing partner of California-based graphic design firm Modern Motion, which he co-founded in 2009. The company developedMagic Phone, a piece of software that can be installed on prop devices on set. The app is paired with a Bluetooth keyboard that allows crew to trigger notifications, or the bubbles that appear when someone is typing, so an actor can tap out any old gibberish and still prompt the right message to appear on screen in real time. Magic Phone also enables productions to add text message histories with plausible time-stamps, and thanks to the realism of the software, it has been used by numerous Apple TV+ productions including The Morning Show, Shrinking and Ted Lasso.
“I think the studios and creatives have embraced the fact that we are so used to seeing these devices that, if it doesn’t look right, the audience bumps against that,” says Modern Motion co-founder Chris Cundey. Or as Henri puts it: “A lot of thought goes into it now because people are aware that fans are taking screen grabs, posting them on Reddit anddissecting everything.”
Modern Motion employee Rob Rogers worked on Ted’s elaborate text history in season three; he says the graphics went through 25 to 30 iterations before they got it right. “We met with the writers, directors and all the showrunners to figure out what Ted would have said to his mum, or what he would’ve said to the doctor three months ago,” Rogers says. Some graphics were even altered after the show premiered, to improve them for people streaming later on. “If they realised a message couldn’t have been sent at 10:53am for whatever reason, they wanted to fix it to make it perfect.”
A surprising amount of work goes into something that is on screen for just a brief moment. “On just run-of-the-mill text messages, we would have 13 or 14 iterations. That comes down to thinking about what a character is named in a person’s phone, what their contact image is, or whether they know each other well enough to have an image,” says Rogers. In one throwaway gag for eagle-eyed viewers, we see that Ted’s mum has previously texted him to say that her internet is down, before attaching a picture of an unplugged router. “We had like three or four different photos that they provided of that router – that’s how deep we go.”
While it’s fun to add Easter eggs like this, past texts can’t be too distracting because then audiences will miss the “hero text” that is being sent or received as part of the plot. Script editor Charlie Niel battled with this on The Stolen Girl. While texts that were important for the storyline were written into the script by the head writers, he filled in the message histories, which were then signed off by the writers and producers. “The crucial, crucial thing is not pulling focus,” he says. Past texts can’t be “outlandish, attention-grabbing or long” because viewers’ eyes will drift up. “On the other hand, it’s a tricky balance because I also find it distracting if the messages are too generic; if they’re how no one ever speaks.”
Niel looked to his own real-life texts for inspiration. “I would think, ‘What do I text my colleagues about?’ And it’s stuff like, ‘I’m going out for coffee, do you want one?’” Sometimes he would throw in a typo to make things realistic. But he also had to be careful not to include anything that would inadvertently affect the story or change the way we see the characters. Continuity was king – if a character gets a text on one day, it needs to be visible in their history the next day – sometimes with a few random other messages in between.
In the end, Niel wrote between 10 and 20 historic texts for each interaction, for only one or two of them to ultimately end up on screen. At one point in The Stolen Girl, a character scrolls through the DMs sent to a media outlet’s social media account and Niel had to “adopt the voice of an internet troll” to write these messages. He also had to come up with the senders’ names. Because every name that appears on screen has to besigned offby the legal department – so that, for example, a journalist named Amelia Tait couldn’t sue if a journalist named Amelia Tait were featured – Niel christened some of the trolls after fellow crew members.
In the end, text message histories won’t make or break a show, but they are often appreciated by audiences. “Because TV viewers are so sophisticated now, they’ll notice if one little text that we say happened on 26 April contradicts something else in the script,” Niel says. Actors, too, often enjoy playing around on their phoney devices. “Making it easy for the actors, and seeing their reaction to it, is really one of the best things,” Henri says. Apparently Harrison Ford was a fan of Magic Phone on the Shrinking set. And Cundey notes that even actors who “hunt and peck with just two fingers” while typing can look like master hackers thanks to the software.
Nowadays, if characters’ text histories are missing, viewers can be a little more confident that it just might be on purpose. “When a typing bubble appears and goes away and appears and goes away and nothing comes, that’s a modern metaphor for something unresolved,” Cundey notes – texts can communicate so much with so little. And the crew behind these messages are happy that their work is starting to get noticed. “We are an often misunderstood or passed over vocation of the industry,” says Rogers. “But we’re also ever-growing.” Or to put it another way: ppl don’t say omg atm, but iykyk.