A while back I sat down and watched the edited (3 hour) version of Ingmar Bergman’s ‘Scenes From a Marriage’ in the wee hours of the the morning. That’s 3 hours of two Swedish people talking. The most notable thing was the way the direction emphasised the drama. There’d be these sudden close-up on the actor in question. Major disclosure – BANG – close up. It sometimes bordered on the comic.

True Tears is all about the management of moments of insight. Something is said, something is gestured. She loves him she loves him not.

Our main man wants to be close to his dream girl. To do it right and be allowed to see the side she hides, which will let him be there for her when she wavers. What we the audience are granted is a privileged position in which we can potentially know each waver of the heart in everyone on screen. We don’t know it all at the start, but the show builds up details to create (mostly) realistically detailed characters who are totally exposed to us.

The plot of the show is carried by the incremental exposure of the personalities of the cast to the audience and to one another. Complications consist of the odd piece of misdirection before more genuine revelations of character. The ultimate form of which would be a character crying.

Now tears are demonstrative – and they can be controlled. The reactions of which I speak are anything which just expresses the person’s mind (…heart) without any chance to control. It’s the breaking of artifice. You can trust someone enough to show them your tears; but as for reactions in general, you just have to trust yourself not to be so transparent, so powerless. Not to gasp or bite your lip at the crucial moment.

Lots of great comedy is in reactions and transparency. In the butt of the joke pretending something inadequately. In the transparency of people who think they’re actors.

In True Tears everyone is an actor, the cast are all fooling one another. This is a necessity for the series. After all, it takes people’s emotional lives seriously and invites us to care about who knows what. Which means that the actors are allowed to hide their hearts – granting them the dignity to keep their selves to themselves until they choose not to. Or rather, they can keep themselves from each other until they manage not to.

But on no accounts can they keep themselves for too long from the voyeurs at the computer screens. Mystique may hover around for a few episodes, but since the drama is reliant on exposure we know that the mysteries are all to be solved. They are not truly hidden aspects. We (the viewers) just don’t need that knowledge yet.

There’s an anecdote I heard some time or other about early, possibly Russian, silent cinema. It involved the attempt to express drama wordlessly without seeming obscene and unreal. They’d get their heroine and put her up on a cliff. Tell her to keep her face still and look out over the edge. The wind would blow right into her and, struggling to remain impassive for the camera, you’d get a strange look on her face. Something near imperceptible. A passing impulse. The audience were staring at her, and they could see the unusual, then empathise however they wanted to.

In True Tears the expression of character to the audience is directly dramatic. The content of each revelation is being tightly controlled for our pleasure – with little or no room for interpretation. It’s the show revealing itself to us, its true essence; maybe it’s even opening up to the chance of ridicule

Blushes, turns of the head, little gasps. The reactions are all “true”. They’re only saved from a (truly) theatrical absurdity by the fine execution of these moments in the show. By using these disclosures to foster an emotional truth for the viewer the artifice of the process is made less striking.

This, incidentally, is why Noe’s exaggerated personality is an issue – unlike those exaggerated gestures, her unreal childishness is not always tied to dramatically intense moments. The revelatory theatricality is generally obscured by our involvement in plot and drama. Noe’s unrealistic design is ever-present, and so more distracting.

But perhaps that’s the saving grace of the show? Because what Noe brings us isn’t just a metaphor, it’s a theatricality which goes beyond any character revelation.

In her queer madcap actions we have a major player who reduces the need for Shinchiro to be constantly mooning over his picture book. Instead, Noe can take care of keeping the thoughtful side of the show in the foreground.

Which somehow gets us used to the theatricality of the whole affair. It helps to define True Tears to the viewer as something worth thinking over, and sets up a mindset in which those moments of emotional truth seem less like diversions from realistically gradual development and more like necessary developments of explicit themes. That doesn’t make Noe herself any less troublesome, but it’d good for the overall dynamic.

And porn? Porn is sex as demonstration. In practise its theatrical rituals deny the existence of an inner life for the stars – of any mind that exists behind the show. They’re all external. All grunts and inane dirty talk. Porn is an invitation to a state of abandon. It’s offering you life as sex – where demonstration is not a façade but the entirety of the story.

What’s good about porn is this presentation of something which is (ahem) pure in intent. What’s bad is where the demonstration is about things that are evidently supposed to be sexy, but don’t convince. Where the external doesn’t feel like it really does signify the inner mind absolutely.

Just like pornography, True Tears is sometimes guilty of showing us what it think works instead of what does. Fake blondes with plastic tits in the one are like universally beloved protagonists and incest-bollocks in the other.

Thing is, when you make everything of the internal it works differently from the external triumphant. True Tears has to imply the existence of an exterior, where porn can deny the façade (faking). Which is why reaction porn operates only in moments within a story. Nevertheless at root this is a story which relies on our obsession with seeing the inner life demonstrated in absolute terms. It doesn’t go to the extreme necessary in pornography, but the trick is the same.

True Tears is offering us life as the discovery of emotional truth. There’s truth in every unguarded reaction, and in every opening of the heart. Like porn it makes human sensation into ritualised demonstration of what matters. And the very process can be mesmerising. Which is why an unoriginal story could keep my attention so consistently. It’s not necessarily the characters, it’s how I’m allowed to watch them.