Continuous Vs. Episodic Television
Until the early 90s, prime-time dramas, much like sitcoms and other kinds of series, were mostly episodic, meaning the show had a basic premise that was all you really needed to understand in order to tune in. You could watch any episode in any order without needing to see everything that came before it. Sometimes there was a slight progression or one episode that would call back to another, but if you missed an episode here or there, you didn’t have to worry that you couldn’t follow the next one. Every week was a new, stand-alone story with the same characters, similar to Sherlock Holmes stories. These shows tended to be somewhat formulaic in order to come up with enough material to do several seasons, often over 100 separate stories. Good examples of this are Star Trek: The Next Generation and the early seasons of The X-Files.
Series like Star Trek: Deep Space Nine or Babylon Five were seen as experimental but drew in large audiences because they took longer to tell big stories. Their characters went through deliberate changes, evolving with their grandiose plot arcs. Instead of occasional two-parters, every story would be bigger than one episode, sometimes lasting entire seasons or longer. The drawback to these sorts of shows is that they’re a long-term commitment– if you don’t watch the whole season, if you miss even one episode, you could be missing an important piece of the puzzle and be totally lost until you catch the rerun or wait for the dvds.
These continuous shows are becoming more and more common. Sci-fi fans are especially beginning to expect it. The most successful shows are of this type, shows like Heroes, Lost, and 24. The days of the formulaic and episodic sci-fi show, ala Quantum Leap, seem to be mostly behind us. Why is that? I hear a lot of talk in director commentaries and interviews about this being a positive step forward, that we’ve moved to this kind of storytelling because it creates deeper, changing characters and more complex stories can be told. That’s certainly one of the pluses to the continuous format, but I wonder if that isn’t more of an effect than a cause.
This trend is best illustrated by Smallville. The first season was mostly episodic– you really didn’t have to see the episodes in order (except maybe the pilot) to understand another, even though minor details would come back here and there, and there was a slight build up to the season finale. Slowly but surely the show moved in more of a continuous direction and now it follows the Lost and Heroes thread– you need to see pretty much every episode of a season to follow it. In fact, one of its biggest problems these days is that it still does lame, contrived one-shot episodes in the middle of season arcs that bog down the story. So why didn’t it just stay with the episodic format? I think it’s because writers keep covering the same territory. There are only so many one-shot sci-fi plots you can do in a show. A lot of completely unrelated shows have reused a lot of the same premises. For example, how many times have you seen the fight club scenario? A main character gets kidnapped and forced to fight to the death, and the supporting characters have to rescue him/her. I’ve seen it in Star Trek: Voyager, Angel and Smallville (just last year!). And get this: Birds of Prey was an episodic show that only got 13 episodes, and ONE of them was a fight club episode!
Voyager, “Tsunkatse”
Smallville, “Combat”
My point is, these huge stories that go through an entire season or even a whole series, in the case of Lost, is thriving, I think, because there seems to still be some unexplored territory there. Granted, it’s been THE popular format for close to a decade now (after shows like Deep Space Nine were no longer simply experimental) and so a lot of that ground has been covered. What’s nice about them is that very long stories can look more original, even if they aren’t really in essence, because so much more can happen within them. If the fight club scenario was a six-episode arc, it’s possible something more than the same old formula could be done with it. Heroes has been criticized as being just a live-action X-Men, and yet it’s extremely popular. Is that because the stories are so complex and the characters are given time to mature and grow, so we really don’t mind that the initial premise is something we’ve seen before?
But I sometimes wonder if expecting your viewer to watch every single episode of a show is still too much to ask. A lot of networks have begun putting full episodes on their websites in case you miss something, which makes it a lot easier to catch up if you miss something. But I find it a lot harder to follow a lot of shows at once this way, not only because I have to see every episode, but because there’s a lot to keep track of. With 24, you have to remember everything that’s happened in a day and you have to readjust from it’s hour-to-hour format after watching anything else (which is pretty jarring until you get used to it). With Heroes, I have to keep up with a lot of characters and how they’re all connected, and ditto with Lost, except there I have to remember pretty much everything that ever happened because it all ends being important to understand anything that’s happening!!!
I realize the episodic format isn’t dead. A lot of cop shows still keep this and I think CSI is too, though I’ve never watched it. Chuck is an interesting hybrid of both, with contained stories but a lot of through-lines that only matter if you care to keep up.
So what do you think? Do you prefer the current trend of continuous shows or do wish you could just tune in whenever you wanted and didn’t have to make a TV show a six, seven, or even a ten year commitment? I’d love comments on this.
LLAP
-Cap’n Logan
Tags: 24, Chuck, Deep Space Nine, episodic, Heroes, Lost, Next Generation, quantum leap, Sci-Fi, Smallville, Star Trek, superheroes, Television
April 23rd, 2008 at 1:53 pm
Interesting article. First a brief comment on your terminology. I always thought of episodic television as being the ones that continue the story from episode to episode and referred to the other style as “stand alones.” As “continuous” TV becomes more common, I wonder how the terms will settle out. As for the idea, I think it is mostly a product of writing and writers egos. The best stand alone series often use/used a lot of guest writers (sometimes very well known and a great source of NEW ideas and episode concepts) and the new trend seems to be for a writer or group of writers to be packaged with a series concept such that they will be at least consulting writers for ALL the episodes. When the same writers are doing the whole series, I think it is somewhat inevitable that they will start to run out of fresh ideas and become formulaic. (and yes, I DO mean TOS vs Berman and Braga!)
April 24th, 2008 at 3:20 am
It’s a fascinating phenomenon. This shift is what really allowed fro Ron Moore’s reimagining of Battlestar Galactica. BSG really can trace it’s heritage more to DS9 than to the 1970s BSG. Moore has even retold TNG stories in a different way in BSG. (Specifically, in the TNG episode that introduced Hugh, Picard opted not to use him to destroy the Borg, whereas Adama made just the opposite decision when they found the infected Cylons.) That’s another story, though.
Two things are responsible for the shift to serial TV in prime time (daytime TV has done it for decades, or course). They are DVD and TiVo.
Once the studios realized people would actually buy an entire season of a show on DVD, it made it possible to move to complex serial shows. TiVo had a similar impact. The biggest fans could binge on an entire series.
Cromely’s last blog post..Good to know