Comments on: Continuous Vs. Episodic Television

By: Laurie A. Buchfuhrer

Laurie A. Buchfuhrer — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 02:03:55 +0000

The Kindle is very cool.

Notwithstanding the Apple Corps members at my meeting last night who assured me that when Apple comes out with its tablet computer, it will kill the Kindle. You know who you are. Problem is, I don’t agree with you.

The point is, I don’t want this damn thing to be a full-fledged computer. I want to read books on it. It doesn’t have to be a Swiss Army Knife solution.

So far the only thing I dislike is the position of the HOME and PREV PAGE buttons. I would prefer them reversed. Sadly there is not even a software setting to do that.

I also understand that there is no way to organize books into folders, which when you think about it is pretty damn dumb, but I knew that before I bought the device.

Bottom line, it’s a hell of a lot better platform for reading e-books than my Treo.

Nice job, Amazon.

By: GigabyteFan

GigabyteFan — Fri, 15 May 2009 10:00:47 +0000

Thanks for the great blog! Keep up the great work. GigabyteFan's last blog post..Amazon Kindle DX Pre-Orders

By: Cromely

Cromely — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 09:20:04 +0000

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

By: josette collins

josette collins — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 19:53:01 +0000

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!)