Writing Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for the craft of professional writing, including fiction, non-fiction, technical, scholarly, and commercial writing. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
When the main character in Fleabag and Miranda TV series, talks to the camera, is that 3rd person or another technical term for the point of view?
It's often used in TV adverts I notice too.
They talk to the camera to convey their thoughts to the viewer. I can see it as the equivalent of the thought bubble in comics.
For a character to reveal private thoughts by talking is a soliloquy. The pretext is that the character is just thinking but has to talk so the audience knows them.
On the other hand, if you mean the character addresses the camera as the proxy for the audience, the character is breaking the fourth wall -- that is, showing awareness that it is a fictional story with an audience, and that the "fourth wall" to the room that is implied to be there from the characters' point of view is really the opening of the stage to the audience.
This sounds like the TV trope Breaking the Fourth Wall:
tvtropes - Breaking The Fourth Wall
But the precise thing that you remember might be a related trope. In the sitcom Liv and Maddie, the characters would often talk to the audience to explain what they felt or thought.
And those are called Confession Cam segments:
"When the main character talks to the camera, is that 3rd person or another technical term for point of view?"
"Point of view" usually refers to the point of view of the narrator, which can be omniscient, limited third-person, first-person, etc.
If a character breaks the fourth wall in a film – I emphasise "character" because I am assuming he doesn't stop being the character and become omniscient, or, even stranger, become the audience – then he's speaking. This is different from dialogue, different from a soliloquy too in that he's not speaking to himself, and it's different from introspection, but it's still a character speaking, and I'm assuming (see preceding sentence) he is speaking in his own voice. He may be telling us what happened yesterday, he may be speaking from the future and saying "At this point, I didn't realise X", and he may be addressing us as "you". But he is still a character. When he is speaking we don't hear the voice of a narrator, and the idea of "Nth person narrative point of view" doesn't apply.
That the fourth wall is being broken doesn't tell us anything about the narrative point of view. There may be no explicit narrator, given that this is a film. If there is an explicit narrator, perhaps only heard in the soundtrack, it could be a third-person one, or it could be a first-person one.
The answer to this question is actually neither of your thoughts. When a character talks directly to the camera and isn't in first person, it is called breaking the 4th wall.
You can most commonly see this in sitcoms such as "Call Me Kat", where the main character Kat, is constantly breaking the fourth wall to talk to the audience and making funny faces throughout the storyline. Another good example of breaking the fourth wall is in the theater production of "Spamalot", which is based on "Monty Python and the Holy Grail". At the end of the show, they are searching for the holy grail and climb into the audience, where it is randomly hidden.
There are of course many other examples of breaking the fourth wall out there, those are just the first 2 that came to mind. Feel free to look into it more, I know that there are a ton of articles and writing tips about it.
I hope this helped you out a bit.
