standalone episodes or serialized season for next TV series?

I do like the multi-episode story arc or continuing story line ie battlestar, I think it would be interesting to see a trek made in such a manner, but that is just my opinion

 

There was an interesting article today
Tim Kring Talks Downfall of HEROES; Thinks Future of TV Lies in Shorter Seasons

While Star Trek isn't quite the same animal his thoughts on shorter TV seasons do bring up the idea of standalone episodes vs. serialized seasons and a shorter season being better for serialization.
http://collider.com/tim-kring-heroes/68585/
via

Would we see a 12 episode Trek series?

 

No. Star Trek has always made its' money in syndication. At 12 episodes per year, it would take eight and a half years to reach the magic 100 episode mark needed for strip syndication.

 

What's been done in the past has no bearing on what will be done in the future. A future Star Trek TV show will reflect the trend of the network it is on when it airs. If the show were to air on CBS next season it would be 22 stand alone episodes. If the show were to air on Showtime it would be 13 serialized episodes. If the show were on TNT it would be 13-20 standalone episodes with light serialized elements.

 

I disagree.

The accountants will analyze all potential revenue streams and the likelyhood of the most expensive show on television turning a profit. Star Trek doesn't get back on the air if they don't think they can re-sell it into strip syndication to help recoup costs.

 

I absolutely loved "Heroes." I also loved classic Star Trek.

I think it is time however to go with the "Heroes" format, because five series of Star Trek have been all too similar. There have been recurring themes and even story arcs, but never a completely continuous, all-encompassing story like "Heroes."

Unfortunately Star Trek will be made for money not for love, and the average viewer hated "Heroes." And he seems to hate "Stargate: Universe" which has a continuous story. Mind you both of those shows had very gloomy stories and negative characters: perhaps a brighter story arc, or at least more humour could save a Star Trek storyline.

 

Kring is just making MORE excuses for his failure. That guy is a neverending torrent of excuses, all of which evade the problem. The real problem with Heroes is right here:

Less interesting to Kring, not to the audience. Exploring the characters established in S1 are exactly what Heroes fans wanted, judging from the chatter in threads here. The key characters at the end of S1 were still at the beginning of their character arcs, not anywhere close to the end.

If Kring was uninterested in his own series, he should have resigned, turned showrunner duties over to someone who was legitimately interested in doing the job, and then found another show to work on, more to his liking. All he ended up doing was making a gory, horrible mess out of a premise that had amazing potential, if only it had landed in competent hands.

The lesson to be learned here is that people don't do good work when they don't like their job. But if regular-length seasons "never work," then what explains S1 of Heroes? It was regular length and it was perfectly good. In retrospect, there were some filler-ish elements such as the Sanders family, and Hiro & Ando's Las Vegas adventures, but I'm not sure that was filler so much as good buffer, providing nice pacing for the season overall. Those elements aren't very re-watchable, but they were okay the first time around. I can just skip them when I re-watch the season on DVD.

Season length is more about network vs cable than anything else. Networks are sticking to regular season length for economic reasons. They have to maximize their startup costs. Cable gets some revenue from subscriptions and does not require as high ratings. That means cable can do shorter seasons and appeal to niche markets.

As it happens, sci fi is a niche market, and therefore will work best on cable, where shorter seasons also work best. So there will be a correlation between sci fi and shorter seasons, but it's indirect and based on happenstance.

Viewers hate Heroes after S1 and SG:U in general because they are terribly written (and not very well acted in many cases). There's no reason a new Star Trek series has to be that bad. Just hire competent writers and cast good actors. Plenty of series manage to do that, especially on cable, where all the prestige is now.

Absolutely. Series length varies according to the economic demands of where it is aired, which has to do with how the money is made (advertising vs basic subscriptions vs premium subscriptions). CBS isn't going to do a Star Trek series because it would be wrong for its audience but in theory if it did, it would find a way to make it work at 22 episodes per season.

If syndication is so important, then why don't TNT and Showtime do longer seasons? I think you're placing too much emphasis on syndication. The economics of the TV biz have changed in the past 20 years.

 

multiple story arcs with also standalone episodes

Like DS9, loved that show.

 

A mixture would be nice. Anything as long as the writing is up to scratch and the characters are interesting. The X-Files pulled off the story arc with the odd individual episode thrown in for good measure really well.

 

How about a set-up like classic Dr Who a series of 4-6 episode serials.

 

Just so long as they don't pull a 24... Miss one damn one damn episode and you're confused for the next three, I have no problem with serialized series. However I'd prefer a mix of arcs and stand alones.

 

Asked me 10 years ago and I would have said episodic but after a decade of watching shows I've realized writers can't write good entertaining standalones anymore. They just recycle the same old chestnuts over and over leading to very predictable viewing that holds no surprises.

I just don't think a Trek series could really offer anything new standalone wise that TOS or TNG hadn't done and done well. Just look at ENT's first two seasons or a huge chunk of VOY. Arc-based storytelling seems to force the writers to think outside the box and form series unique ideas, characters and storylines rather than just going to the old stand-bys and plugging in their characters.

Furthermore DS9 also convinced me all arc storytelling is the way to go. It was so frustrating having to sit through a bunch of ordinary filler for stretches of the time in S5/6/7 waiting to get back to the Dominion War same for the Xindi arc on ENT with pointless side excursions with episodes like "North Star", "Exile", "Extinction", "Chosen Realm", "Doctor's Orders", "E2"--so I don't think I'd be crazy about a mix of standalones and arc either. Full on serialization is the way to go even if they are single season arcs and not series spanning like LOST. They could even do a series of Circle-like trilogies or Occupation Arcs.

 

I've had more time to reflect on my thoughts and I think a largely serialized story woven well into various stand-alone aspects would be best and key to a new Trek's success in the current television climate. Have a 'master plan' for a couple of seasons' worth of episodes but write plenty of accessible scripts so that it doesn't crash and burn.

This is a tricky thing to do, but if done right it guarantees a measure of success because both the long-run fans and the casual fans will be able to tune in often enough that viewer drop-off will only occur in significant amounts if the overall quality is poor -- which obviously none of us want.

A contingency plan for transforming the show into a full-blown extreme in case ratings and reception go down the drain would be a smart thing to have on hand. If the episodic nature doesn't go over well for some reason or if only the hardcore fandom remains after a couple of years then cater to what is needed and turn the show into something immensely serialized. On the other hand, should the overarching storyline seem ill-fated, either change it all up with a backdoor ace-in-the-hole or make it more TNG/VOY-ish and give us something more episodic for a while.

As for personal preferences, I've always enjoyed long-running storylines that are 'going somewhere' and well-developed characters more than anything else. Unfortunately, in the history of the television industry far more 'accessible' shows have done well, with notable exceptions. Even some of the most critically-beloved series like nuBSG still didn't resonate with the ratings after a time. It's often a very 'take one at the sacrifice of another' kind of industry.

 

Ditto.

I've not seen Lost beyond the first season, but B5 at least got it mostly right with long story arcs. Everyone else (DS9 included) has simply demonstrated they're inept at keeping such a show going. A change to standalones would be nice.

 

Stargate SG-1 had the right approach: start off as almost completely episodic but with certain callbacks and continuity nods and such, then gradually get more and more serialised as time goes on -- without ever losing the standalone episodes completely.

 

I like character arcs but have very little interest in plot arcs from episode to episode - those should be minimal, just what's required to support the development of the characters personalities and relationships. It's not stand-alone stories that limits shows like Star Trek, it's character amnesia.

 

It also depends on what the show's actually about. If it's just a straight explorer show like TNG where we never or rarely visit the same planet twice, then you make a very good point. But if it's set in one place like DS9, or if ongoing plot arcs are important to the setting of the show (getting home with limited resources for VOY) or can enrich the show (setting up the Federation's founding for ENT), then a strictly-stand-alone approach is really limiting to the show and ignoring potential plot arcs leaves the show weak.

 

But I would also argue there should also be mini arcs within, too. And when I say serialization, I don't mean 100% of the time on !00% of the episodes must be part of the Serial. An episode could be like 90% stand alone, as long as the rest ties into the advancement of the overall serial arc of the show, and advances both story and character development.

When serialization was implemented in Enterprise, it's what improved it. Serialization in is later seasons is what made DS9 great. While it had some arcs, lack of serialization is what hurt Voyager. I couldn't imagine BSG without serialization. Xfiles had a great mythology in early and mid seasons, and it got to a point where I felt standalone episodes were wasting my time, because I wanted to get back to the mythology. In fact, I would argue that with other shows like 24, babylon 5 Lost, Fringe, Buffy, various Stargates, and a lot others i am leaving out, TV has evolved to the point where you really need serialization to grab people's attention, in the sci fi genre.

 

serialized storytelling

came across this today for a scifi thriller tv series

Awake Producers Discuss Duality and ‘Emotional Science Fiction’

I can see how this would affect new audience to a new Trek TV series.

 

Trying to "sneak in" sf/f by making it a cop show in disguise is a very popular option now, but the results are mixed. SyFy has basically been taken over by cop shows with an sf/f twist. They get good sized audiences by basic cable standards. The fact that this format is working so well for them is the main reason why they might not bother with actual space opera shows, so it's hardly a good thing.

The same approach on broadcast is getting mixed results - not because their shows are worse, but because their ratings standards are higher. Grimm, Alcatraz and Awake are all examples. Grimm is developing pretty well, but Alcatraz is a bore and I'm far from sold on Awake. (This is a better track record than SyFy, where I haven't been able to get past the first few episodes of any of their shows, and for the most part didn't even finish the pilot.)

Anyway, this has little relevance to Star Trek, which can't be hammered into a cop show format, at least without destroying it. It can have some cop show elements - like TOS did - but that falls well short of what current sf/f cop shows are doing.

Looking at the sf/f broadcast and cable shows in development, I've noticed a very heartening lack of cop shows in disguise which doesn't mean that we're getting any space opera instead. Two of the few disguised cop shows are, you guessed it, on SyFy: The Dover Agenda and Rewind. SyFy's Defiance will probably fit that mold as well, just in a futuristic Western scenario.

What we're getting instead are shows where the characters, who are regular people, not necessarily cops, have some ongoing, threatening, ambiguous situation to deal with, not cases of the week: The Last Resort, Revolution, Beautiful People, 666 Park Avenue. I like that; there's more creative freedom to come up with something cool and surprising (or just go off the rails, but creativity always involves risk).

Or, there's a problem-of-the-week inherent in the premise - 99 Stories, The Selection, Do No Harm - that can provide more structure to the story but thankfully not in the overused cop show format.

I think it might be time for broadcast to jettison that kind of thinking. You can't get to syndication if your show is cancelled in the middle of the first season. Genre audiences aren't warming to cop show elements, at least not in the big numbers that broadcast needs. Leave that stuff to SyFy (and the Friday night deathslot on broadcast). Stop pussyfooting around and give us real sci fi, not half-assed compromises.