And As

There's something that you see in the opening credits of television shows, or at least it used to be something you saw. I never could understand it really, and still don't entirely. You would be watching a show, and they would list the actors in the order of their prominence. The last name is what would be peculiar. Someone who was not a big name would often be listed last with both their name and that of their character. I never understood that.

I guess that it must be some kind of standard contractual thing. It occurs to me that it was typically an actor who had been around a while. It must be that it's some kind of perk that costs nothing to provide but which means a lot to the performers. I suppose that they must not be able to extend it to everyone, but I don't know why that is either. Maybe the layout of the credits suffers, but as it is the other actors must get jealous or something.

It's mind-boggling to me how much trouble there seems to be just in the arrangement of credits on the screen, as well as the placement of the actors' images and names in advertising. What may seem like a matter of no consequence, such as which of five actors ought to be front and center on a poster and which should be where beside them, but it probably entails no small amount of negotiations. Who could bear that kind of painstaking diplomacy?

I assume that's what it amounts to when some journeyman actor gets credited with "...And Joe Blow as The Chief". This must all be very obvious to some people- if not anyone reading this, then to people I know who are further along in the business end of show business- but to me it remains befuddling. At least it's something I can hope to know if I apply myself to it. The same is probably not true of trigonometry, I'm very sorry to say.