I have this thing that a story should be like a piece of wood that you run your hand over: go one way, go forward in the story, and its shards should cut into you. Go the other way, go looking back over the story, and it should seem completely smooth. It should be that there are shocks and surprises but in retrospect, they worked, they were necessary, and there were not in any way contorted or conjured up.

I like this idea of mine, I just hadn’t thought until this week that I’m missing a little detail. Specifically, that it exactly matters where the cuts and the shards and the surprises are.

Well, of course it does. I haven’t thought about that because it doesn’t need thinking about, except maybe it is.

Because a surprise only works with a setup, you have to know what to be surprised about. Depending on you, for instance, The Sixth Sense either surprises you at the end or somewhere near the beginning. It doesn’t surprise anyone in the opening shot.

But where you place the surprise, I think about this a lot. Chiefly this week because I read Jennie Snyder Urman’s pilot script to Matlock, the new Kathy Bates-starring series, and you have time to back away before I spoil things.

There’s still time.

Not much.

But.

Okay, we are supposed to think that the new Matlock is a remake, a reboot of the old one. I’ve never seen the old one, starring Andy Griffith, but it’s famous enough that I know of it and that I could readily believe a studio today would leap on it as a known property.

I suppose it is what it seems, in that it is trading on the old show’s name. I suppose it’s also what you expect, in that it really has bugger-all to do with that old show, except the name and the vague premise of an older lawyer showing the youngsters the wisdom of his or her age.

But it’s not that. Or rather, it is that for about 4/5ths of the pilot’s running time. Then you get the big surprise. Just telling you there’s a surprise rather spoils the surprise, I realise, but I’m less interested in what happens than I am in when.

This is a specific and deliberate choice to put a surprise toward the end of the pilot, where it really sets up the series after 30 minutes or so of what appeared to be setting up the series. It’s meant to ensure we keep watching, it’s meant to give us what all pilots do and that’s the desire to come back for the next episode.

The surprise is fine. I think in this particular case that what it sets up for the rest of the run is a bit shaky, but it’s a set up and it sets up, so.

In this particular case, I think it’s the build up to the surprise that’s less effective. Reading it, I felt like yes, yes, old style lawyer procedural with a modern twist, and I did feel like it was old style Matlock rebooted. But I didn’t care. The surprise changes the show, yet for me I’m not sure I’d have necessarily stayed with it for long enough to reach the surprise if I weren’t reading the script.

Yet there’s an old BBC six-part drama, I can’t remember the title, where the lead character appears to be this cringingly put-upon weakling and it’s around episode three where he switches that persona off and reveals it to be a years-long plan. That one’s a huge jolt and it works.

Or around the middle of A Canticle for Leibowitz, the novel by Walter M. Miller, where there is the most enormous surprise — but the rest of the book feels a little flat.

Or Tenet, where it is so profoundly obvious who a certain character is that you can’t even pretend to be surprised if you try and are being offered cash.

But then there are shows like Leverage which routinely show you a story and then flash back to show you a slightly different element that reveals a surprise. I don’t know how that one works, but it works.

Or Marathon Man, which has quite a surprise in the film but a gigantic one in William Goldman’s novel. Or speaking of Goldman, his book Magic is a first-person narrative and when you realise who the narrator is, it goes beyond surprise into full-on shock.

I want to say that twist comes around 80 pages in. The Leverage reveals are in the last minutes of the 50-minute show. The Shawshank Redemption hides what Andy is really doing until around a fifth of the way from the end.

I’m reading Bonnie Garmus’s Lessons in Chemistry which I already knew had a shock quite early on because I’ve seen the TV version. Garmus cannot surprise me because of that, but she does it so well anyway that my reading speed slowed down as I knew the moment was surely coming.

Maybe the closest to Matlock, in a sense, is The Runaway Jury. There is a surprise in that which is designed to keep you watching, but somehow there’s enough before the surprise too. Everything before it is strictly speaking a set up, but it feels more than that. I don’t know that if the book or film didn’t have the surprise that I’d remember it now, or even have necessarily stayed to the end. But it was enough.

So a surprise in the opening shot is out — wait, Barbie opens with that great 2001: A Space Odyssey pastiche and it’s at least unexpected. Okay, I can’t think of many stories that actually open with a surprise, but from there on in is a potentially great spot for a shock.

Of course, if I were clever I’d now have a big surprise for you, like suddenly saying “Boo!”. But it would be cliché, and that rather goes against the grain.