Re: sf/f TV development news - 2012
But here is where we disagree. I could care less if on average episodic shows are as good as serialized shows. Because I am not watching every show on television. I only want to watch the best stuff. And episodic shows aren't even trying to be the best, they are rarely ambitious at all. Serialized shows are often disasters, but when they work, they are better than anything in the episodic format.
But that dichotomy does not exist anymore. There
are no pure episodic shows on prime-time television, and very few pure serial shows. Every episodic show these days has serialized elements, and most serialized shows have episodic elements. The majority of shows are both episodic and serial at the same time, with the cases of the week reflecting and supporting the ongoing arc of the characters and the mythology.
I don't want to spend twenty hours a week watching shows that are good. I want to speed four or five hours a week watching shows that are superb.
And there is absolutely no reason why a self-contained story can't be superb. Most of Shakespeare's plays didn't have sequels.
Twelve Angry Men wasn't a yearlong serial about a trial that dragged on forever. It's absurd to claim that short-form storytelling is incapable of brilliance, when we have thousands of years' worth of brilliant self-contained stories making up the bulk of our cultural heritage.
Back in the early days of television, in the '50s and '60s, the shows that set the standards for class and intelligence were the anthologies that presented adaptations of stage plays and original plays written for television. The most gifted and admired TV writers were playwrights like Paddy Chayefsky, Norman Corwin, Reginald Rose, and Rod Serling, people known for their ability to create brilliant self-contained plays. So anthologies came to be considered as the epitome of intelligent, quality television -- whereas serialization was seen as the stuff of lowbrow soap operas and old-time kiddie adventure serials. So even shows that had continuing characters, like
Wagon Train or
The Fugitive or
Mission: Impossible, strove to be as much like anthologies as possible, having their regulars get involved in different guest stars' stories or adopt different identities every week, with no references to anything that had come before. Now, this was partly because they didn't have home video or the Internet back then, didn't have our easy access to ways of getting an overview of an entire series, so their experience with television was more on a week-by-week basis, and their priority was therefore to get the most they could out of each individual story, to have each hour be complete and satisfying in itself with no dependence on anything outside of it. But partly it was just because anthologies had a better reputation than serials, so everyone "knew" that episodic, anthology-style shows were better than anything in the serial format. Now we simply have the opposite prejudice, and some are clinging to that prejudice even though most TV producers these days have decided that the best approach is to balance both episodic and serial elements.
I think it would be really hard for me to find a single friend who if pressed to list their top five TV dramas of all time would include any purely episodic shows.
That's because there aren't any. They don't make them anymore, not outside of animation. The closest thing I can think of to a purely episodic show of recent vintage that I've watched was
Batman: The Brave and the Bold, and even that had continuing character arcs.
