The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
Episodic recaps of the unspooling TV drama
Elki
get busyModerator, ClubPA Mod Emeritus
get busyModerator, ClubPA Mod Emeritus
Fully two months late, because that's how I work.
I'm a part of the problem if there is one. In my time as a person making post on the internet I have commented countless running shows, made threads in my many places, followed blogs. Considered making TV Club my homepage. You know the deal, and you're probably a bit like me. TV is great, and we're all over it. But for the past few months I've made my TV watching a mostly solitary experience, and I'm liking it. It's not because I'm no longer arguing with people about shows I like and they don't, or hate and they love. I never minded that. It's that community expectations of where the show will or should be going is no longer a conscious or unconscious part of my viewing experience. I am only left with my own vast collection of prejudices.
And then today I ran into this thing from David Simon. So let's talk about it, dickfucks.
Warning: some Generation Kill thematic spoilers.
I'm a part of the problem if there is one. In my time as a person making post on the internet I have commented countless running shows, made threads in my many places, followed blogs. Considered making TV Club my homepage. You know the deal, and you're probably a bit like me. TV is great, and we're all over it. But for the past few months I've made my TV watching a mostly solitary experience, and I'm liking it. It's not because I'm no longer arguing with people about shows I like and they don't, or hate and they love. I never minded that. It's that community expectations of where the show will or should be going is no longer a conscious or unconscious part of my viewing experience. I am only left with my own vast collection of prejudices.
And then today I ran into this thing from David Simon. So let's talk about it, dickfucks.
Warning: some Generation Kill thematic spoilers.
I think there's a fundamental disconnect with what certain types of longform television are now trying to build and the way in which they're consumed by the audience. And I don't know what to do about that. I don't know how to resolve that. It's beyond my paygrade to resolve it. I can't figure out what the alternative is. These things do have to air at a certain moment, they have to air in pieces, but a greater percentage of the audience is acquiring them singularly through DVDs or downloads, and they're not experiencing it in weekly installments in the way that television was traditionally acquired.
When we make the show, do we have anybody in mind? Do we have either viewer in mind, or the person who's trying to assess the show weekly? We don't. We're just trying to tell a story. So what is the solution? I don't know, but I do know this: when people who are blogging the show, I find in looking at some of those things, when people try to assess the opening chapters of a book as if they are the book, the efficacy of the exercise is damaged. And that happens, which is to say there are people who do it and do it with a certain amount of restraint. There's a skill to doing anything, and since this is a new dynamic, the people who are doing it acquire the skill to different degrees. Some people understand they're covering early chapters, and there's a certain caution, who write about what they're seeing on the screen with an awareness that these are the early installments, and there's a different dynamic at play here.
And there's other people who bring to bear assumptions about a show based on a previous show, assumptions based on where they think it's going in the future, about where they think the show should be. You would never see anyone review a novel in similar fashion. No one would read three chapters of a novel and go, "What so and so's trying to say here." No book reviewer would try to assess any work based on the entry point of a piece of a prose. Is television prose? No, but you can't tell me there isn't some correlation between the way certain television shows now are being structured and the way multi-POV novels are being structured.
If you watched the first half hour of "Generation Kill" andthe Marines were being crude with bathroom humor and barracks talk and they're cynical about the chain of command, and this guy becomes racially provocative and offensive with another Marine, you might think one thing. But you get to the end of episode six or seven, and this same Marine is explaining that's how they provoke each other. That it's all a stance that unit cohesion allows for the most vile kind of racial banter. And you find out that there's this low-grade contempt for command throughout the recon community indicative of the way their unit works. They're taught to question authority as few Marines are, but you're not going to get that in the first hour. So certain scenes are going to seem to be one thing. The Sergeant Major turns out, it's his job to be a dickhead. But it's only in the last episode where it's revealed that it's all been a front, that he's trying to make them angry at him on purpose, using things like the grooming standard.These things are known and planned out by people who are in charge of that, but they can't be evident from the beginning. Some people do with caution, great. But if they don't, then the story gets assessed for what it actually isn't.
Q: Okay, but whether or not someone would review a novel before they finished the final chapter, they would have reactions as it went along: "I like this character," "I don't like this character," "this plot twist was interesting," etc.
And they may stop watching the show. And that is a risk where you can either make the show palatable to maintain the maximum amount of viewers, and now you're operating under the calculations that made network TV drama so unimportant. Once you're trying to keep everyone in the boat, you're losing what's important in drama. And one of the differences I'll concede between a book and TV is people are investing maybe more money in a boxed set. If they have to take HBO, and the show runs over two or three months, and you're one of the reasons whether they're going to keep or cancel HBO, or just making you put your ass in front of the TV to catch it, at a certain point, if people become disenchanted with a television story, there may be more incentives to quit. Whereas once you've bought the book in a bookstore, you've got to be pretty unhappy with first few chapters to not finish the book. At least me. Once I've committed to reading a book, if the guy can write a little bit, I'm going to try to see where he's going. And people's expectations about the first chapters of a book are not such that they demand all of the answers and certitude up front. I concede that. We've been living with books for so long that our expectations for the first chapters are plausible. Whereas television has always delivered the powerful pilot and the cliffhanger, under the belief, "You have no reason to come back to this story unless we give you a reason." Where you might pick up a book because you liked the author or the subject matter, and you'll stick with it for the same reasons.
But I think that's less true with every year. I think it's a minority, but a growing minority of viewers, that I think — I hope — now watch the early hours of a television show with the sense that something might be built, and that it might make sense in the end. If I'm wrong about that, then "The Wire" was just fire in a bottle, and it won't be replicated with any consistency. But maybe not. Maybe in some ways, the expectations of the audience in terms of television are changing.
Elki on
0
Posts
I do think the book analogy is pretty flawed, though, because no one takes nearly half a year to read the first few chapters of a novel unless they're having a really rough go of it, but that's what TV viewers are forced to do if they're watching a show on its first run. Using statements like "no one would just quit a book after the first chapter unless it was particularly awful" is thus about as useful as saying "no one would quit looking at a painting after only seeing one corner of it." The mediums are not similar enough to be able to use analogies like that usefully.
Also, much as I love the AV Club, I find myself skipping the tv reviews more often than not
Really? Cause I'd say the opposite is true these days. Most shows start out strong with a firm idea of what they are doing and start spinning out ideas and plots.
It's the backend where TV falls apart these days. They go on too long, loose steam, fail to wrap up plots and basically don't close the deal.
TV is a Stephen King novel these days.
People DO take into account temporal distribution issues when evaluating the entertainment they consume, but that doesn't mean they should.
The big thing that differentiates TV from, say, a book is that TV is traditionally episodic. Which changes both how it's made and how it's viewed. But even that is changing drastically as many shows are written more serially and, as David Simon mentions above, the DVD boxset is becoming a major way people consume television.
But largely I'd say he's correct. You can't know what a show is all about with only a few episodes under your belt. Or not always anyway. That kind of attitude is something actually hurting TV. Some of the best shows ever made, including The Wire, take several episodes to start really moving along. They spend the first bit laying out the pieces before the narrative really kicks into high gear. Not unlike a book and it's first chapters.
Hell, often shows don't even know they're definitely going to get a full season, so patiently laying out the groundwork for an exploration of big themes just isn't an option.
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
Like Bogey said, even most shows who are telling a linear meta-arc with their season-to-season narrative will keep their episodic nature intact by telling smaller stories within that narrative. GoT, however, is almost like old daytime soap operas, where an hour will be spent five minutes at a time on ten separate plots that have little or no immediate affect on one another, with no semblance of narrative momentum and no impetus to compound any single plot within the timeframe of an individual episode.
As an example it may be unique since many people assure me, "Hey, books. It all means something and it heading somewhere," but that's not a protection that would be extended to too many other shows. Without that promised precedent of literary intent and assurance, you couldn't reasonably expect an audience to wait patiently for a dozen loosely related or unrelated to slowly coalesce over the course of 20, 30, 40 episodes or more.
Getting back to the OP, in these cases it makes it difficult to execute episodic critiques for a few reasons, not the least of which is the collection of people who are already in the loop due to having read the source material, who just keep on and on about "Ugh! Just keep watching! Gah!" Because when I watch TV, I assume that each new episode will bring new answers and new questions, but the medium isn't accustomed to making the audience wait years and years for multiple plot resolutions, especially the more mundane.
The problem I feel, in this particular case, is that the format of the hour-long TV drama has a critical narrative mass in which a limit exists as to how many characters and disparate plots it can effectively juggle while maintaining a brisk narrative momentum, and five-or-so minutes per 50-minute episode often just isn't enough.
I am the same. I do follow a few threads to some shows on here, but other than that, I just watch the show and move on. I am following so many shows, its hard to also try and keep up with any discussions and articles about them on top of just watching them.
I do like to talk about it with my friends - if they watch the shows in the first place, which isn't the case as much anymore these days.
And that's probably due to the business of how television is made stateside.
Compare and contrast with the limited episode format used by the BBC. Lots of creator control over content, number of episodes per season ironed out ahead of writing and filming, and slotting in where the majority of the audience is able to catch the new stuff easiest.
Not going to say that the Brits have it right, there are some flaws with having a year or more go by between seasons, but given that there seems to a great deal of high quality, episodic television coming from there in the last decade, I'd be willing to start a network doing the same thing.
Most people will finish a book once they start it, unless it truly goes out of the bounds of their tastes, the same thing with people and watching a TV episode.
The reasons people that will read an entire book series are the same as the reasons they will watch an entire shows series through multiple seasons, they are engaged with the characters/plot.
The episode:chapter is pretty close for how much plot you can introduce and resolve and character growth you can put in. And many series you cannot just jump into the middle of, much like you cant open a book to a random chapter and start reading.
MWO: Adamski
I've championed this approach for a while. While I think some of the British shows' seasons can be TOO short, having your show's bible planned out from the outset and having a clear focus on your show's intent can really bring the narrative into much tighter display.
The cable networks in America are really starting to figure this out; just about every major drama on paid TV has 10-13 episode seasons now, and they're really starting to rack up the viewership as well as kick all kinds of ass in the awards department. The great hour-long dramas are no longer on ABC, NBC, and CBS; instead, they're on channels like FX, AMC, and HBO. It's funny how good your shows can be when your business model doesn't depend on your least-popular shows pulling in five million viewers a week.
That's not the ONLY way to do TV thoguh. It's the traditional way, and employed to great effect by many shows, but at the same time a show like The Wire is really not that episodic and basically plays out much like what you describe above.
You seem to be confusing "lack of immediate resolution" for "lack of narrative momentum".
It's not the medium that's not accustomed to it, it's you. Or certain members of the audience. There's many shows that stretch out resolution and closure to aspects of their narrative over many seasons/episodes/etc.
I'd agree with your last bit here. Trying to juggle too many plot threads at once doesn't work well.
That is true if we are talking about say seasons 1-4 versus 5-8+, but a lot of shows have a significant jump in quality from season 1 to seasons 2-4. Just from the list of DVDs I own: Parks and Recreation, Fringe, Chuck, How I met your Mother, Breaking Bad, Supernatural, Babylon 5, Buffy, Angel, Justified and Farscape all had significant quality jumps going from season 1 to season 2.
If I had meant "immediate resolution," I would have argued so. I don't want immediate resolutions. That's what Law & Order is for.
The example of The Wire isn't even wholly apt (though I agree it's a great example of long-form narratives), because while elements of each season carry over into the next and accumulate, each season has a clearly-defined focused and conflict. And, above all, all the plot lines are interrelated and affected by one another within the immediate context of the plot; motivating actions happen several episodes before the payoff, not several seasons.
Well, no. No there's not. Because shows have to worry about being renewed or cancelled, so other than GoT there hasn't ever really been a show that asked the audience to wait four or five seasons for a completely unrelated plotline to even begin to affect the main story. If an audience can't tell if a story is actually going anywhere, they're not likely to stick around and see.
I'd use the example of the "Blackwater" episode as being the way shows should seek to more consistently structured like, at least while we're still moving the plot at more glacial speeds. You can tell a lot of different stories in a single season, but I'm not wholly convinced you should try to tell them all at once.
We're talking about shows that take several seasons to pay off long-winded unrelated plot lines, and you list shows that didn't even get three full seasons and/or never contained unrelated plotlines?
I don't get it. Your examples are all wholly inappropriate.
I was replying to the guy above you. All those show are ones that started strong and petered out to various degrees as they ran out of steam or didn't resolve shit.
Each season has a clearly defined conflict, but there's also a bunch of other stuff just happening. Characters that will be used later are kept in touch with, . Many of the main players from S1 just kinda sit around in S2 waiting for S3 to be put to the fore-front again. The S4 stuff with Marlo is a plot that hangs around most of S4 and only begins actually moving at the end of S4 as a plot-hook for S5. (although it does impact the climax somewhat). And there's others.
Plenty of serial shows dangle plots and mysteries and such out there and then let them sit for awhile before doing anything with them.
You are completely switching arguments here. You said " I assume that each new episode will bring new answers and new questions, but the medium isn't accustomed to making the audience wait years and years for multiple plot resolutions". You are speaking of the length of time it takes for plots/idaes/themes/etc to be resolve and of the need for movement during each new episode.
And yet easy examples like Lost and BSG show that it both has been done and people will watch it as it happens. And there's plenty of other examples of shows that do the same.
Shows may have to worry about being cancelled, but not for the reasons you state. It's simply not true that TV doesn't dangle plots that take a long time to be resolved. It's just that it didn't used to be as common. It's actually becoming MORE common now as many TV shows are becoming more serialised.
Agreed. But that's an issue with the way TV writers think (ie - not very far in advance) and not with the actual idea of long term plot threads.
Shows like B5 show the power of even basic planning.
I agree. I see this more and more, even in shows that I like. It seems to be most common at the cut right before the credits, making even the smallest plot point a dangling cliffhanger.
I don't mind a lot of time spent on character building, but not doing anything until the last three minutes of each episode (and then not completing that action) is just hacky.