Do we really need mythologies anymore

[Set Harth]

Only about as much as tony does. Ok, more.

 

[T'Girl]

They never boil.

 

[RJDiogenes]

The critics always pan them.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Put a lid on it.

 

[xortex]

The pot calling the kettle fade to black.

 

[Kegg]

Serialization is a business decision aimed at retaining an audience by providing cliffhangers.

And episodic storytelling is a means of easily acquiring casual audiences, and retaining them even if they've missed a couple of episodes (or a whole season).

They both make a certain amount of business sense, which is of course why they both occur on TV.

If open-ended serialization produced decent stories that people would care to watch again, we'd never see another episodic TV show again:

It arguably has. Many of the most acclaimed dramas of the last fifteen years were open ended serials like The Sopranos and so on (which planned out season arcs, not the entire show).

That serial shows can be successful doesn't mean they've been successful to the point of automatically wiping out episiodic TV as a business model, though.

 

[stj]

Creatively speaking, the anthology is the true episodic form. It is certainly not the case that anthologies find it easy to acquire a casual audience, and it is even harder for them to retain an audience. The episodic series proper tries to retain an audience by telling its stories with the same cast of characters, relying on the appeal of the actors/characters to retain the audience.

I'm not quite sure why you hold up The Sopranos as an example of successful serialization. That show is notorious for being so schizophrenic even the writers couldn't bring themselves to write an ending. It had critical acclaim, to be sure, and had an unusally large audience for premium cable, but it is doubtful that HBO could make money by syndicating The Sopranos.

As a premium cable service, HBO has only a limited number of casual viewers, but it does still have a number of channels. Yet despite having many hours of HBO Z etc to fill HBO rarely (ever?) fills those hours with paid for serial programming that has already been broadcast. Even in-house, so to speak, HBO can't count on its serialized shows winning viewers. It seems to me that HBO spends a great deal of effort making sure its serials have only a limited availability. I don't think they even offer their back catalog freely on HBO On Demand or HBO GO.

 

[Harvey]

but it is doubtful that HBO could make money by syndicating The Sopranos.

HBO has been making money syndicating The Sopranos. Re-edited to soften the language and eliminate nudity and violence (a move that sparked some controversy and criticism), the program was sold to A&E in 2006 at a cost of $2.5 million per episode.

The series completed 86 programs, which would mean HBO netted $215 million from its initial domestic syndication of the program alone (in the future it will be able to syndicate the series in the United States again; this doesn't even take into account international sales, of which I've read the program earned up to $75 million while it was still on the air).

 

[Kegg]

Creatively speaking, the anthology is the true episodic form. It is certainly not the case that anthologies find it easy to acquire a casual audience,

Anthologies are pretty much the epitome of this kind of casual viewing, though. You can watch episodes of The Twilight Zone in any order at all, as many or as few watch the last episode first and the first last. It's a TV show ideal to be picked up at random on TV, watch an episode of, and move on.

Audience retention for anthologies may be harder than episodic series that have the same characters, but the same casual TV-viewing based hook is there.

I'm not quite sure why you hold up The Sopranos as an example of successful serialization. That show is notorious for being so schizophrenic even the writers couldn't bring themselves to write an ending.

The really obvious reason: It has a lot of critical acclaim and was successul financially. However exactly someone tries to 'measure' success of a TV show, the Sopranos was a success.

To the rest what Harvey said, with the note that the Sopranos internationally is HBO's second most sold show to other channels (behind Game of Thrones). There was a full from-the-pilot run of the Sopranos on British TV just last year.

 

[stj]

The fact that I never could find hide nor hair of The Sopranos in syndication misled me into thinking it was pulled as soon as feasible for low ratings. Plainly, HBO has made lots of money from it. And no doubt A&E and the British channel that reran the series also made lots of money from the higher revenues they charged for the larger viewing audience. With figures like that it is hard to understand why HBO doesn't syndicate more. There is the Disney medium where everything gets marketed, then withdrawn temporarily. Also, I was plainly misled by the notion that a series should have an end.