Pre-planned SF shows or...?

[Christopher]

There's a huge difference between anthologies and episodic shows.

Obviously there is. I'm merely pointing out that people in the past favored episodic shows because of the prestige of anthologies. The ideal was to make a show that had the audience appeal of continuing characters (and the budgetary appeal of standing sets and reused props and costumes) but still had the flavor of an anthology. Plenty of '60s series were like this. Star Trek was designed to be a semi-anthology, with the characters visiting a different world and getting embroiled in a different SF situation each week, and interacting with guest stars who could grow, change, or die in the course of a single hour. The Fugitive used Richard Kimble's wanderings largely as an excuse to get him involved in the drama of a different cast of characters each week; the stories were really more about them than about him. The same went for many of the shows that emulated its formula, such as The Incredible Hulk. Many episodic shows back then were "stealth anthologies," just as a number of episodic shows today (such as House and Fringe) are "stealth serials," slipping larger arcs into their case-of-the-week formats.

Let me clarify: I'm not arguing this opinion on my own behalf. I'm merely pointing out that different generations have had different preferences. The only opinion I'm asserting is that opinions come and go and we should have a healthy sense of perspective about our own preferences.

What people decided to do in the past is neither here nor there.

Except to remind us that we will be "people in the past" before too long. This, too, shall pass.

 

[stj]

Daytime soaps constitute a huge amount of television. Yes there are night time soaps and nowadays many serialized shows but they are still the majority of serialized programming. That makes them typical. I don't see how this can be denied, it's just convenient to say otherwise.

Changes in character are a specialty of soaps, as is character driven drama These are hailed as proofs of good writing, as opposed to the inferior writing on episodic shows, which are plot driven and whose characters stay the same (for crass commercial motive of syndication.) The soap approach is very satisfying to many viewers, hence its popularity today, particularly given the increasing difficulty of keeping viewers---the sensationalism and the cliffhangers of serials give the shows hooks to bring the audience back.

Nonetheless, despite individual story lines or arcs being plausibly written, in the end, the plots lapse into absurdity. The characters become mush, undergoing random changes. Often as not, they change right back again, just to repeat a particularly satisfying scenario, albeit with minor changes. Repeatedly experienceing the same epiphany is especially popular! Although it is always fashionable to flatter the popular tastes, this is not the best kind of writing. Not criticizing the personal tastes, mind you---I have my own guilty pleasures!---but aren't we trying to really think this through?

What is most puzzling is how people can be so sure that well written serialized shows are successful. The best X-Files episodes were the stand alones and the serial story was a failure. Extremely well written serialized shows like St. Elsewhere and Roseanne are notorious for the disappointments they delievered in the end. Unless people have forgotten the original topic, pre-planned vs. make it up as you go? A multi-episode story can deliver more depth than a single hour or two if it has artistic integrity. That takes planning, i.e., writing. But isn't that a miniseries or a real TV equivalent of a novel, not a serial?

I do sometimes, in pessimistic moments, feel that serialized shows are so popular now because people can no longer empathize with the guest characters, that only the vicarious fantasy figures whose character "growth" enact the fantasy of self-reinvention hold any appeal (and ordinary people are just boring and contemptible.) I hope not.

 

[Harvey]

Daytime soaps constitute a huge amount of television. Yes there are night time soaps and nowadays many serialized shows but they are still the majority of serialized programming. That makes them typical. I don't see how this can be denied, it's just convenient to say otherwise.

I don't see anyone here denying the propensity of serialized programming that are soap operas. I also don't see anyone arguing that such programs are of any notable quality. Such programs, in my view, are unwatchable.

Which, as an aside, is why I never, ever could be a television critic. There's a certain magic that is felt when attending the cinema, even in the case of of going to see a bad film. I can name several cases where I've gone to see a bad film and still had a wonderful time. The same experience isn't replicated for me when it comes to television. When it is bad, for me, it is unwatchable.

Back to the case at hand, your argument doesn't seem particularly geared against serialization, just bad serialization. We're in absolute agreement that serialized programs which continuously foster arbitrary change after change upon the characters in order to perpetuate the program are bad.

A multi-episode story can deliver more depth than a single hour or two if it has artistic integrity. That takes planning, i.e., writing. But isn't that a miniseries or a real TV equivalent of a novel, not a serial?

Actually, this brings up a relevant point. If serial, when applied to television, is used in the same way as it is used to describe prose serials, I don't deny that such creative efforts usually crumble to outside pressures and usually end up lacking coherency. I was referring to serialized programs as programs in which both the story and the characters continue and develop, as opposed to episodic television, which are programs in which the stories do not continue, but rather, are resolved each week (perhaps longer, in the rare case of multi-part stories, but these are always identified by the "Part 2 or 3" moniker, and in the end, the stories are resolved at the end of the cycle of episodes) and characters do not develop, but rather end each episode in the same manner they have ended up in with every previous episode.

Apologies for the run-on sentence there.

Developing on that point, would you call a program such as "Dexter" or "The Wire" or "Babylon 5" a serial, when key plot points have been developed at the beginning of each season (or, in the case of Joe Straczynski, before)? Or would such programs fall unto a third category that is not episodic nor serialized?

 

[stj]

Developing on that point, would you call a program such as "Dexter" or "The Wire" or "Babylon 5" a serial, when key plot points have been developed at the beginning of each season (or, in the case of Joe Straczynski, before)? Or would such programs fall unto a third category that is not episodic nor serialized?

Actually, I don't think of a season of Dexter as a true serial. It's one story, that was laid out (roughly, a rewrite of the first Dexter novel.) The fact that it took thirteen episodes to tell the story means it's literally a series of episodes, but it's still one story, which finished. The second season repeats Dexter's choice between some wicked person who would approve his killing and his normal life with Rita, Deborah, etc. It too was basically one story, merely told in a series of instalments. So, in one sense, Dexter (for me, so far---haven't seen third season) has just had two instalments, each of which merely took up a year.

The show has already started to repeat itself thematically! The curse of serialization strikes hard and fast, even in well written shows like Dexter. I suppose the final season can show whether Dexter quits killing, or gets caught, or kills himself (if the writers really screw up, he somehow just keeps on trucking along.) As part of that, Dexter must come to terms with the fact that in the end, Harry was monstrously abusive, not loving. Any Dexter storylines before the end are likely to be undone in preparation for the final resolution, because in the end they were just so much filler. Such at least is the problem, due to the serialization.

Mystery novels are commonly written as serials about the detective. Usually, the best one is the first one, and the others mostly repeat themes. Standalone mysteries are almost always the better novels, even though the serials usually sell better. Ruth Rendell's Wexford novels are always weaker than the solo titles. Robert B. Parker is actually a pretty good writer, but his Spenser novels are almost as individual as potato chips. The poor guy's so desperate that he's taking up writing multiple series. Sue Grafton is apparently mentally suffocating herself trying to slog Kinsey Millhone through the alphabet. She was so desperate that in one novel she had to have Millhone shout out an apology to the reader for having so little Millhone in it!

 

[Christopher]

I was referring to serialized programs as programs in which both the story and the characters continue and develop, as opposed to episodic television, which are programs in which the stories do not continue, but rather, are resolved each week (perhaps longer, in the rare case of multi-part stories, but these are always identified by the "Part 2 or 3" moniker, and in the end, the stories are resolved at the end of the cycle of episodes) and characters do not develop, but rather end each episode in the same manner they have ended up in with every previous episode.

The problem is, that's a false dichotomy. It's taking the most extreme examples of the two approaches and ignoring the fact that the majority of TV series fall somewhere between. There are plenty of shows where each episode tells a self-contained story from beginning to end, but there are still character arcs that develop over time. Sometimes it can be like House where you have a case of the week but the characters are going through a developing soap opera, or it can be like Trek: TNG where plot and character are both approached episodically but episodes can have sequels and form ongoing arcs that are told intermittently rather than continuously, and characters can undergo growth and change over time.

It is completely false to define "episodic" as "devoid of any change or character development." An episodic show is simply one in which each installment features a whole story with a beginning and end, rather than telling only a part of a story. I.e. if you have story A, story B, story C, and story D to tell, then an episodic series will tell story A in one installment, story B in the next, and so on, while a serial will tell parts of A, B, C, and D in one installment, continue them all in the next, and so on. But there's absolutely no reason why the sequentially told stories in an episodic series can't have a larger continuity connecting them, or why a show whose main plots are told episodically can't have subplots with a serial element to them.

By the same token, a show isn't serial just because it has character and plot development. That just means it has continuity. A serial is a show in which, as I said, a single story is spread out over multiple installments rather than told complete within a single installment. There are serials that have little genuine character or plot development, just keeping the characters basically the same and moving them from one crisis to the next. The terms "episodic" and "serial" apply more to structure than content. And the tendency to treat them as absolute opposites just obscures the issue, because most shows have elements of both.

 

[cynical dreamer]

One of the first rules of drama and one of the first things they teach you in any screenwriting course is:

Know your beginning and know your ending before you start writing!

If you have that down the rest should flow fairly naturally and easily.

 

[Christopher]

One of the first rules of drama and one of the first things they teach you in any screenwriting course is:

Know your beginning and know your ending before you start writing!

If you have that down the rest should flow fairly naturally and easily.

Andrew Stanton talked about this on the commentary to WALL-E. He said he always teaches this when he gives lectures, but then he found himself breaking that rule in WALL-E, where he was working on the first act long before he had any idea how the story would end. There are exceptions to every rule.

And of course that rule only applies to a single story. It doesn't say that open-ended series are wrong or forbidden, just that if what you're telling is meant to have a beginning, middle, and end, then you should know what ending you're going for. For instance, you don't begin writing a murder mystery if you don't know who committed the murder. But if you're creating Murder, She Wrote or Monk, there's no need to know in advance what's going to happen in the last episode, because it's not one story, it's a series of individual stories.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Well then forget winging it - that was the only show I could think of where it might actually be working. Otherwise, I can't think of a single serialized show where lack of planning didn't result in some degree of disaster.

Well, how broadly are you defining "serialized?" Deep Space Nine was pretty much made up as it went; instead of having an advance plan, the producers just picked up on ideas and characters they liked and kept elaborating on them more and more. The planning was as much reactive as proactive -- "Okay, this is turning out to be interesting, now where can we take it next?" And overall, it held together surprisingly well, considering.

DS9 is semi-serialized by my standards and a good example for this disucssion because both the plot threads - the Sisko & the Prophets one, and the Dominion War one - ended up in a muddle at the end, most likely because of lack of planning. Sisko & the Prophets just devolved into a silly video game while the Dominion War was great right up to the final ending twist (the Founder just gives up because Odo asks nicely?), which any way you parse it, doesn't hold up to analysis.

The only logical way you can interpret that is that she was weakened by the disease into surrendering, thus validating genocide as a successful approach to warfare, and somehow I don't think the DS9 writers meant us to take that lesson away.

Even before the end, it is obvious that Lost is fundamentally a failure. For one thing, there are dropped elements like Mr. Eko. There are unsatisfactorily resolved elements already present, like the smoke monster (which is so pointless that it hardly deigns to appear, unlike the first season!) or the numbers that have to be punched lest the world be destroyed (except that, obviously, it wasn't true.) There are plot developments that damage characterization by pointlessly changing, then undoing changes, such as Jack's romance with Juliet. In fact much of the whole show for some time, in retrospect, was about Ben's conniving to get Jack to operate on his cancer. After that was done, the show went back to the regular story, such as it is.

Those are pretty minor quibbles - overall, Lost is the best example of a very complex story arc actually working so far. Eko was just one of a dozen key characters, not the most important by far. punching the numbers did have a "reason" - the key Desmond turned was a last resort, with unknown effects - so maybe that's a bit of a let-down considering the built-up, but it was a resolution. The smoke monster is yet to be resolved, as is Jack's romance with Juliet, which was really more of a passing attraction than anything else. Maybe they'll do something with it, maybe not. Either way would be okay. Ben's cancer was a mini-story that was resolved within the larger story.

Lost is fundamentally a success, but (surprise) isn't perfect.

One of the first rules of drama and one of the first things they teach you in any screenwriting course is:

Know your beginning and know your ending before you start writing!

Sounds a lot easier to pull off in a two-hour movie script than a multi-year TV series.

 

[stj]

People have been known to write murder mysteries without knowing who the murderer was. Raymond Chandler and Gore Vidal, to name two that I seem to remember. But I am perverse enough to think that did indeed impair the results, even if there were partially compensating aspects in those two cases.

Using the apparent majority definition of serialized as meaning more than one episode, serials like Dexter or Babylon 5 are pretty much planned out. They in my judgment succeed much better than other serials that were not. True Blood I haven't seen but since it apparently is based on the first novel in the series I expect it would be better written than most other serials. Since the subsequent seasons would come from an unplanned series of novels the overall story emerging season by season would in my opinion turn out to be less than the sum of its parts. Most novel series are unplanned, and sure enough suffer for it. Things like Rowling's Potter series are uncommon.

As to Lost specifically---Of course, it's not actually finished yet, and perhaps planning out the last two seasons will allow them to make a save. Obviously I'm skeptical. Also obviously people can have different opinions about the particular examples I've given. But are they all minor? (Forget about other examples for now.)

About the supposed ministory withing the bigger story about Ben's cancer, for instance, we've since seen the emergence of the storyline about the choice (or non choice) by the island of Locke, even as a child. Similarly, we've seen the emergence of a parallel storyline about the choice of Ben. The island's peculiar healing (or killing) powers are also a major plot element. Also a major plot element is the intricate interconnection and predestination of the Oceanic 815 survivors' arrival on the island. Given all this, Ben getting cancer and Jack curing it are not just an incident along the way.

As it stands now---first, the island gave Ben cancer, then it brought Jack to the island to cure Ben, except that it made Ben jump through hoops to make Jack do it, when for all we know just asking nicely might have worked. I mean, did the Others have to start off as sinister enemies? Now I know an island might not be expected to think like you or me, but I'm not so sure this complex arc is working so well. Plus, all this folderol just took up too many episodes to dismiss so easily.

Similarly, I don't think Jack/Juliet was meant to be so ephemeral, fitting in with the first culmination of Kate/Sawyer (and is it a mark of success that we're sure there will be another?) And yes it's possible that the new plan will retcon a reason for the near disappearance of the smoke monster. (Otherwise it's very curious that it waited until Greg Grunberg finished his exposition dump, isn't it? And waited until they dumped Eko to make a reappearance?) Since Eko's brother's plane played so vital a role in Locke's story (via Boone, who was Locke's last genuine human relationship after all) and in Charley's addiction, Eko and his backstory are still very important. But I definitely have to disagree---it was a very unsatisfactory resolution to the punch in the numbers to save the world storyline, and it happened because they didn't really plan it out.

But perhaps I am the wrong person to talk about Lost. By a curious coincidence, in the last five minutes a family member and I
were wondering whether Jack told Kate that Claire was his half-sister. I couldn't remember but concluded that since they never told each other things on the island, they wouldn't do it now either. I was then informed that the characters are not real and do not do anything when they aren't on screen! Plainly, I just---don't---get---it!

 

[paudemge]

Like as has been said before, if it is written good, i don't mind if it is one long arc or just a bunch of stand alones.
I do want the stories to be internally consistent, to have a so-called writers bible, in the case of sf it is more important because they may have make up a lot of stuff. You don't have to even have all the rules written at first, but just when you make a rule or tech or something, you make sure you haven't already violated in an earlier story, and write it down so others will know to follow the same rule.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

With everything that's been going on with Lost, I can't see how Ben's cancer, Jack and Juliet's dalliance, or Eko's entire story is worth fussing too much about.

What I want to know: what is the Island? Why are people fighting over it? Who is fighting over it and why and how? How long has this been going on (centuries?) How does all the frakking around with space/time figure into all this? And were the passengers on Oceanic 815 "chosen" for a reason or were they just unlucky.

Oh yeah, and explain the four-toed statue and give us a Danielle flashback. Really that's the sum total of what I need to learn. The rest can be explained or not, I don't much care. I don't care why Aaron needed to not be raised by "an Other," why Jack's dad's apparitions wears white tennis shoes, why Walt had a comic book with a polar bear in it, or any other of the half-billion details the show has tossed at us along the way.

Here's another point of discussion: what serialized show has had a really good ending? B5 is the only one I can think of. BSG just might be shaping up to have one. But mostly, they fall flat or have serious deficiencies.

 

[stj]

With everything that's been going on with Lost, I can't see how Ben's cancer, Jack and Juliet's dalliance, or Eko's entire story is worth fussing too much about.

What I want to know: what is the Island?

Either the island is something that has a controlling intelligence (alien spaceship, temporal "ark" from the future or whatever) or the likes of Ben and Locke (when not wearing his father fixated martyr personality, at least) are simultaneously total idiots who still are smart enough to lead the rest by the nose. If they're all such halfwits, who cares how the story ends?

But if the island is a kind of character? In drama, characters are what they do. What the island has done, Ben's cancer, Eko's brother (hell, all the tailies---are any left alive besides Bernard, who is barely a character?) Desmond and Clancy Brown's character in the hatch, massacring the Dharma initiative, all of it, has been developing the island as a character. But it's gibberish. What the island is will be no more interesting in the end I expect than the question of how not punching in the numbers will end the world.

And I hate to obtrude nasty, stinky reality into mindless escapism, but---magnetism doesn't heal paraplegics or cancers. An island can't appear or disappear without creating a tsunami easily detected by seismographs. It is possible to create a mechanism to regularly enter numbers into a computer. And so on. The science part of Lost's science fiction is as low grade as Lost in Space or Battlestar Galactica. This show cannot deliver on that score.

Lost is incredibly imaginative, but itt is relentlessly soapy. More than anything else, it's the Jack/Sawyer/Kate triangle, the conflict between Locke and Ben, the Sun/Jin marital strife, Desmond and Penny find true love, and, oh yes, Sayyid wanders in and out of plots like some sort of floating kidney, vital but out of place. That's what Lost is about. All that amazing stuff that they dream up is just a kind of ornamentation. I don't have elevated tastes myself. The gaudier the better, and nothing is gaudier than Lost. Ever.

Here's another point of discussion: what serialized show has had a really good ending? B5 is the only one I can think of. BSG just might be shaping up to have one. But mostly, they fall flat or have serious deficiencies.

Quoting myself "What is most puzzling is how people can be so sure that well written serialized shows are successful. The best X-Files episodes were the stand alones and the serial story was a failure. Extremely well written serialized shows like St. Elsewhere and Roseanne are notorious for the disappointments they delievered in the end." So obviously I agree that serialized shows don't have good endings. I say it's because the real serialized shows are generally not planned. The plot contortions for an endless story ruin the series in the end. But in my opinion the current most likely candidate for a good ending to a serialized show is Dexter.

 

[DWF]

I thought the story arc on The X-Files was vertainly better than the standalones, I think that's what kept people tuning in each week. But story arcs work because tV shows aren't as long as they used to be, TV shows in the '60s were 50-51 minutes long shows nowadays are about 42 minutes long and the seasons are shorter as well.

 

[Harvey]

And the tendency to treat [serials and episodic works] as absolute opposites just obscures the issue, because most shows have elements of both.

Reading back on my definitions, I've definitely oversimplified the definitions a little bit. You're right. Even adjusting my definitions into three categories as follows dramatically oversimplifies things. Just from the television I've seen (and, despite doing my best, I am not a prolific watcher of television), I can already find flaws in these definitions. The plots of Dexter, as stj has indicated, are begun and end (mostly) in the context of seasons. The same can be said of The Wire.

(A)
Characters develop and change over the course of many episodes; plot develops over the course of many episodes (i.e. Babylon 5, Dexter, Battlestar Galactica, The Wire)

(B)
Characters remain relatively unchanged at the end of each episode; plots are begun and resolved in just a few--and usually just one--episode (i.e. Classic Star Trek, The Incredible Hulk, MacGyver)

(C)
Characters develop and change over the course of many episodes, like (A); plots are begun and resolved like (B) (i.e. House)

In the end, I must admit my base of knowledge is too shallow to continue into trying to prescribe a general structure here. The best I can do is stick to the specifics:

(1) Dexter... I loved the first season, but will readily admit, as enjoyable as the second season was, it is, thematically, already facing repetition and limitation. Can't see it lasting as long as Showtime thinks it will last while remaining fresh (haven't seen season three).

(2) The X-Files... I prefer the mythology episodes to the standalones. Mostly, there was resolution (some threads outstanding), and there was the most growth of the characters. Episodes that were strictly standalone (beyond a number of notable episodes) could often be boring and pedestrian. The mytharc was never boring (just, in the final season, narratively confused).

 

[Christopher]

There's really no way to divide it into a finite number of categories. There's a whole continuum between episodic and serial approaches, and any show can be anywhere along that spectrum or even in two or more places at once (e.g. episodic plots and serialized character arcs). Really what we're talking about is continuity. The mistake too many people make is assuming that any show with continuity is "serialized," when that's really the extreme end of the continuity spectrum.

 

[stj]

Reviewing the discussion, it appears that there are two issues, each confused by the labeling into episodic and serial. First is the one in the thread title, whether the story is planned or cobbled up as the writers go along. I can't imagine that people can't see that practically all serialized shows end up badly, lapsing into extravagant nonsense that is still anticlimactic. I conclude they just don't care. For myself, it is absurd to argue that unplanned plots are best. Changes to plans are probably inevitable given production problems but that's not really the same thing as making it up as you go along.

The second issue, which most here do care about, is character development and change. Other claims to the contrary, there is a relationship between serialized shows and character development and change. Namely, in a serialized show the story generally ends up being about the constant elements, which is the core cast. The characters on such shows interact much less with outsiders, who would be gone after one episode. Also notable in such serialized shows is the remarkable number of unrealized characters, who are pretty much movable props in the chacter development and change of the stars. They are there from week to week but not really an integral part of the story. The problem with this kind of character driven story is that it's soap opera, in the pejorative sense of the word.

The complaint is that the core characters in episodic shows don't change. The power of bbs groupthink is displayed there in all its awful glory. People don't change very much in real life! In fact, so far as character development in a rational sense is meant, episodic shows can develop character very well, by showing us what they do in that episode's story.
Indeed, if the story for the episode is well constructed, the thematic content can penetrate into character very deeply. Confusing the soap opera character development with the serial form is natural enough I suppose.

PS If the X-Files mytharc was so compelling, perhaps it has indelibly imprinted itself into some poster's memory. Who here could do a recap?

 

[Harvey]

The argument against episodic television with a continuing cast is that the characters do not change at all. Star Trek can be viewed in any order with no effect to the characters--they are absolutely constant from one episode to the next. That's not real life where people change a little bit. That some--even most--serialized shows take character change to an unbelievable extreme is probably true. I can't say I find a lot of television compelling, and of most serialized programs this is no exception.

Speaking of compelling, I don't see how ease of plot summary and compelling are equatable in the case of the X-Files. Nevertheless, after I finish with class and homework today, I'll take a stab at it, nearly a year removed from watching the series in full.

 

[Harvey]

On second thought, why bother with my own words, when a Google search can provide a satisfying and concise answer. I have other things to attend to today.

It begins with a meteorite that crashed to Earth millions of years ago, carrying the so-called Black Oil, a sentient and controlling life-force that can jump of its own accord between species. The Black Oil has infected most life-forms in the universe, including a race of Grey Aliens who possess green blood (toxic to humans). The Greys begin life in an outwardly hostile state, all literal tooth and nail. They eventually shed their skin to become more benevolent and intelligent, though the timing of this process depends greatly on temperature (i.e.: the hotter it is, the quicker the transformation; the cooler it is, the slower). The infected Greys aid the Black Oil in achieving its ultimate goal: the complete colonization of each and every planet in the universe.

Among the infected Greys are the bounty hunters, shape-shifters of similar face and body who police the colonizing operation, while an opposing force of rebel Greys (all of whom have mutilated their faces to prevent infection by the Black Oil) continually aim to hamper the colonization plans. The infected Greys wield a pinpoint dagger forged from magnetite, an element that is found on Earth in various forms of rock. One of its more prevalent sources: Roswell, New Mexico, specifically in and around the mountainside pueblos of a lost Indian tribe known as the Anasazi. It is here where a low-flying alien craft was downed by magnetite in 1947, an incident that brought the aliens and their clandestine plans to the attention of a group of men known as The Syndicate.

The Syndicate, which is in cahoots with the alien colonizers (though not without dissent among their ranks), has gone through various incarnations. Its primary backers had ties to the Nazis and have counted among their members William Mulder and C.G.B. Spender (aka The Cigarette-Smoking Man), respectively the spiritual and biological fathers to FBI agent Fox Mulder. Mulder, in the company of his partner Dana Scully, has attempted to counter the colonization plot through the exploration of unsolved cases known as X-Files.

Both Scully and Mulder have been abducted by the forces behind colonization, nearly dying in the process. They have also lost family members due to their efforts and discovered new ones that they didn't know existed. Eventually the duo became lovers and had a child, William, though it was later proven that members of the colonization plot had influenced the pregnancy from afar (William was the first organically conceived alien/human hybrid). It was Mulder's half-brother Jeffrey Spender, initially an antagonist to the X-Files, who cured William of his alien condition by injecting him with a magnetite-derived antidote. Thus made human, William was given up for adoption by Scully just before she went on the run with Mulder. The X-Files were thereafter shuttered and the plans for colonization, which involve the genocidal spread of the Black Oil via genetically altered African honeybees, remain in effect, set to take place on December 22nd, 2012, a date corresponding to the end of the Mayan calendar.

LINK.

 

[chrisspringob]

The argument against episodic television with a continuing cast is that the characters do not change at all. Star Trek can be viewed in any order with no effect to the characters--they are absolutely constant from one episode to the next. That's not real life where people change a little bit. That some--even most--serialized shows take character change to an unbelievable extreme is probably true. I can't say I find a lot of television compelling, and of most serialized programs this is no exception.

I'd also add that most good, compelling stories are of a kind that they're chronicling some really important events in the main characters' lives. If you take a random 5-6 year period from a person's life, they may not change that much, but if you're chronicling what may be the most eventful 5-6 years of that person's life, then it would make a lot more sense that they would change.

 

[blockaderunner]

It depends on the format.


If it were animated, like Avatar: The Last Airbender was, which was probably thought out from beginning to end and the principles were voice actors who had very flexible schedules, the pre-plan route is the way to go. If it were live action, which is pretty expensive and loaded with actors who either don't want to be tied down with one project, probably sees the project as a stepping stone to bigger things, or could get fired at any point, then there has to be some wiggle room with the story.