The track DojaCat sampled might sound familiar to anyone 35+
The General Knight Rider thread.
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Ehhh. I understand the appeal, I guess, but to me it started to feel very same-y. BtVS is probably the first show where I consciously noticed it. Hell, they even had, "the Big Bad" of each season. But by the time of DISCO it just got on my nerves, though I also didn't care for DISCO's tendency to become, "The Michael Burnham Hour". It just feels as though instead of doing reset button episodes the shows are now doing reset button seasons, perhaps exemplified by PIC's annoying gear changes between seasons to the point where each season almost feels more like its own miniseries than three parts of a larger unified whole.
I'm watching The Legend of Korra now, and I think one reason why I prefer Avatar is because the latter successfully told a story that spanned three seasons, while the former largely tells four unrelated stories over four seasons (at least the main characters change and evolve over those seasons). In their somewhat defense, my understanding is that TPTB for the first season wrote it without any expectation of the show extending beyond that point, and would have changed elements of the season if they'd known the show would progress farther.
I hate it when shows settle into such formulas, where you know The Big Bad probably won't be conquered unless it's the season finale, and then you'll probably never hear from it again. I like my stories to remain unpredictable.
Oh I forgot about The 4400, I loved that show. It that did do a pretty good job of following one arc through multiple seasons. But I didn't think White Collar really had that deep of an arc, I thought it was pretty much just a case of the week show, with a few smaller arcs every now and then. I was a huge fan of that one too.
Oh OK, I haven't watched it since it originally aired, so I don't remember the details of it that clearly. I just remembered one other show occurred to me that had a pretty decent multi-season arc, Burn Notice. I think one of the secrets to that kind of thing, is to keep things fairly simple, it's when they start getting overly complicated that they really seem to start to go off the rails.
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I don't know if anyone remembers, but even in KR2008 (to return to the topic) there were some horizontal plot lines, such as the KARR mystery. Virtually every show has to have some sort of story arc. Or at least some kind of continuity (e.g., events that happen in one episode have repercussions on subsequent episodes).
Person of Interest is a special case. It started out as an episodic series, and then developed story arcs in subsequent seasons.
Person of Interest is a special case. It started out as an episodic series, and then developed story arcs in subsequent seasons.
It was always meant to have a bigger science fiction arc about the surveillance state and the rise of strong AI, but CBS pushed hard to keep it in an episodic procedural format as long as possible. It's important to recognize that it's usually the network execs pushing shows to conform to procedural formulas when the creators would generally prefer to do something more distinctive. Creators want to take chances, but executives want to stick with proven formulas and conventions, so there's a tension between them. As I mentioned before, that's why a lot of shows seem like ordinary procedurals in their first half-dozen episodes or so before the suits are appeased enough to let the creators start doing the shows the way they wanted to in the first place. Although sometimes it takes a lot longer to overcome the pressure to stay procedural, so you get something like Person of Interest or Lucifer.
I don't mind a show having a succession of distinct story arcs, but I'm annoyed by the contrivance of having them always take exactly one season. Especially with the modern trend of assuming that series take place in real time, so that, for instance, every Buffy big bad started to emerge around September and got defeated around May or June. (Though ST:TNG had done something like this first, always having a huge cliffhanger happen whenever the stardate year rolled back to 000.) I liked the way The Flash's later seasons broke up into 2 or 3 shorter arcs with the odd one-parter in between. I also liked the format of ST: Enterprise's final season, a mix of 3-, 2-, and 1-part storylines.
Still, I think my preference is for an episodic series with strong continuity -- something where the plots are episodic and the character development is serialized, and where one story's consequences are remembered and generate later stories or change the status quo in ways beyond merely driving a single long story arc.
Oh, yes, it's been one of the stalwart formulas for decades. Back in the '60s, if you wanted to get an unusual concept like Star Trek or Kung Fu on the air, your best bet was to sell it as a Western. But at least since the days of Law & Order being a huge hit, the most surefire way to get a show on the air has been to make it a procedural -- either a homicide procedural like Lucifer or iZombie, or an FBI-type procedural like Agents of SHIELD, which started out being a conventional ABC-style show about government agents investigating weird cases, and only gradually eased into the more comic-booky stuff and giving its main characters superpowers and so forth.
Why does the Networks love Procedural Shows?
You would think the audience would get bored of them after so many of them are on the air?
I concur, variety in story arc lengths is always good IMO.
I concur, variety in arc lengths & random odd single episodes really helps with variety.
As for main plot continuity, I like a mix of Single Season Long, Multi-Season, Multi-ep Mini-Arcs, & Random Single Episodes.
There should be no one Single Type of Episode Count to how long the Main Serialized Plot should last.
Variety is the spice of life.
One of the beautiful things "ALIAS" did was end what you thought was going to be the initial Series-long Arc half-way through the 2nd Season.
That was definitely something I didn't expect. Of course the series ran for 5 seasons, so there were many Plot Arcs through-out the show's many seasons.
As for Character Development, that should flow with time naturally while necessary to ensure that the character is living its life like it were real along with previous consequences affecting current & future behavior.
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I guess there's a certain comforting familiarity to them, plus you can just switch any episode on in any order and not be totally confused.
If you think about it, pretty much every show we've mentioned here is a procedural, no matter how imaginative or extreme the premise :
- A sentient hologram who... FIGHTS CRIME!!!
- A man who can transform into any animal and... FIGHTS CRIME!!!
- An alien who seeks refuge on Earth from a conquering race and... FIGHTS CRIME!!!
A man with a super helicopter who fights crime! (and sometimes terrorists and sometimes hostile nations)
But if you think about it, if you want to maintain an episodic structure, you're basically forced to use one of these three genres:
- sitcom
- procedural
- The Fugitive clones
On the contrary -- historically, the bulk of the viewing audience wants the same formulaic things over and over, which is why things like procedurals and "reality" shows thrive for decades while more challenging and innovative things have a harder time of it. Lots of people just want TV to be something they have on in the background as a distraction, or something to let them turn their minds off after a long day of work, or something that they can rely on to deliver cozy familiarity rather than making them uncomfortable with novelty or deep thoughts. Some of us welcome more challenging and original entertainment that makes us think, but we're not the majority.
Network suits want the things that get good ratings, and that's determined by what the audience wants to see. If a given format has proven popular with audiences in the past, that's what the suits want to see more of -- proven sellers, safe bets, rather than more unusual things that are harder to sell to an audience and might not attract more than a cult viewership.
Except that was a retool forced on the show by ABC executives, who didn't like the SD-6 arc and ordered the showrunners to wrap it up prematurely and retool the show. The further story swerves in later seasons were also the result of network meddling to boost sagging ratings, or shaped by other real-life factors like Jennifer Garner getting pregnant. It was all a hell of a mess. I talked about it more on my blog some years back: https://christopherlbennett.wordpress.com/2014/12/16/reflections-on-alias-and-fringe-spoilers/
While that may be true, it did work out for the better in the end IMO.
It's far better than ending things at the end of the season, even if clumsily executed sometimes.
Luckily we're not in the TV Broadcast Era Dominating the Main Stream anymore.
Modern Streaming allows viewers to choose what they want, so the options should allow for different shows to survive and find their Niche audience.
Much like YouTube where Creators can find their audience, so can various TV Shows & Franchises.
And then of course, there's the fact that we get shorter shows with 2-year gaps, which then have the added danger of people losing interest in them, which has happened to me several times with shows. It becomes harder to remember details and characters and often recaps don't do a good enough job of reigniting interest. I've often sat there wondering what made me interested in these shows in the first place.
Yes -- I'm surprised I didn't mention this in my blog post, but my recollection is that I was glad of the forced retool, because it was getting more and more silly that Sydney kept sabotaging SD-6 missions but was still trusted as a loyal operative rather than either a mole or a complete incompetent. But the fact remains that it wasn't the producers' plan, but something imposed by the network. Which just goes to show that network meddling isn't always bad.
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