Well, it’s Monday and that means the start of a new work week and I couldn’t be angrier. Let’s get rolling.
What the hell happened to television episodes? Recently I’ve been watching a lot of old school Trek and it has forced me to realize the shift that has taken place in the world of television. Up until a few years ago television shows have followed along with this definition of and episode: an incident, scene, etc., within a narrative, usually fully developed and either integrated within the main story or digressing from it. Yet now, the world of the television drama is more like a “mini” series that actually lasts 5 seasons long, spanning more than 100 segments.
If you enjoy watching 24, Lost, Heroes, Battlestar and the rest like them then just pray you have a DVR or the network masters will gain one more slave. Miss an “episode”? Forget it, you won’t know what the hell is going on and now you’ll have to wait until the DVD comes out. Of course when that happens they’ll already be on season 34 so you have no hope for ever catching up with the current plot line. You can forget casual conversation at work too, because they’ll all be talking about what happened this week. So what can you do?
Honestly I don’t know, I’ve personally stopped watching TV but it’s not really a protest so much as laziness. I have a DVR and even then when I realized I had 4 “episodes” of Heroes recorded and a new one was airing that evening, I just gave up. I liked the show but I really didn’t feel like watching 5 hours of it just to keep up with the Jones’.
The thing of it is, this “mini” series format has actually seemed to increase the quality of TV dramas by giving them cohesion and forcing the writers to keep the overriding plot in mind. For example, when watching season 2 of Star Trek (this is the original series were talking about, remember) there is an episode where an alien race from another galaxy took human form to commandeer the Enterprise. Spock points out that the odds of an alien race developing and evolving to be exactly like humans was a near impossibility and they realize these people don’t quite know how to be “human” after all. Of course, the very next episode they find a planet that not only developed humans, but America, Russia, the Cold War and the Constitution. Yes, this is Star Trek, it was pioneering, it was low budget, it’s campy and it was the first of it’s kind so there are plenty of excuses for this oversight, but the series formula of today’s TV dramas actually forces writers to think from “episode” to “episode” giving us smarter TV and far fewer of these incongruities.
So why can’t there be a middle ground? Why can’t we create a new Star Trek series that continues it’s episodic journey through the galaxy but plan it out? Write a series from start to end (plots only, I don’t expect every episode and all dialogue here) and pitch it that way, go Babylon 5 on it and plan for the end but let me miss an episode here and there without feeling hopelessly lost.
Ok, I’m better now.
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