A friend of mine who had never watched Star Trek in any form recently decided—my endless nagging may have contributed—to check out The Next Generation. Halfway through season two he asked me, “Why do the characters start each episode acting like none of the previous episodes ever happened?”
For our purposes that’s a good definition of the “reset button.” (Some might say it’s a “soft” version of the reset button. The “hard” version would be instances of timeline modification that actually erase the events we’ve seen, or something equivalent. Star Trek: Voyager was often accused of both types of resets—more on that below.) Accustomed to modern serialized shows like Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, Orphan Black and Breaking Bad, the fact that, for example, Picard could uncover a conspiracy at the highest levels of Starfleet (“Conspiracy”), or Counselor Troi could become pregnant with an alien (“The Child”), or Data could be “possessed” by an egomaniacal scientist (“The Schizoid Man”) and then never again address these experiences, was both perplexing and frustrating for my friend.
And yet TNG remains a beloved series, one that’s been painstakingly re-mastered and released in Blu-ray (2012-2015), and will surely be much celebrated next year, during its thirtieth anniversary.
Could the reset button be a contributing factor to the show’s success?
Form should follow function: When Paramount was considering the re-launch of Trek on television, neither NBC nor the Fox network “were willing to commit to enough episodes to justify the massive start-up costs involved.” [*] Eventually Paramount went with first-run syndication instead, but what’s relevant here is that having a large number of episodes per season was part of their business model. Successful in the ratings from the start, TNG (1987-1994) went on to air 178 episodes over 7 seasons. The show was not conceived with serialization in mind—quite the opposite—but imagine if it had been: heavy serialization over the course of that many episodes would have meant an exhausting amount of character changes, or the continual rotation of characters, or the kind of reliance on plot twists and reveals we associate with soap operas rather than primetime TV (not that TNG didn’t have its melodramatic, soapish moments, but I digress…).
Most serialized shows today have far fewer episodes per season than TNG. The first season of The Walking Dead, for instance, had 6 episodes, and the first season of Breaking Bad had 7.
One of the first science fiction shows that did feature heavy serialization was Babylon 5 (1993-1998), and even that ended after five seasons, or 110 episodes, because J. Michael Straczynski had essentially told his story. One of the results of Straczynski’s novelistic approach to B5 was that the tone of the show varied a lot less than TNG’s. It was also harder for B5 to gain new viewers as it progressed, since chronology was necessary to understand what was going on. With TNG, viewers could pretty much jump in at any moment. (That was my experience; I discovered the show in its third season and had no trouble following along).
And yet TNG did have some continuity—namely its characters. I like how Brannon Braga describes it: “To me, the show was an anthology show like The Twilight Zone, an opportunity to tell the kinds of stories I was really into, which were mind-bending things. This was a show where you could do anything.” [*] Thinking about TNG as an anthology show helps to highlight one of its strengths: its enormous range of stories, themes, and tones. Such diversity helped keep things fresh (mostly) over the course of 178 episodes.
Morality first: Braga’s comparison to The Twilight Zone is apposite for another reason. Just as that canonical show was heavily geared toward the exploration of moral quandaries, TNG also often foregrounded the morality of its stories. A serialized show, in which each episode works in a manner analogous to a chapter in a novel, will have a tougher time putting on a variety of individual “morality plays” than an anthology show, in which episodes are more closely akin to short stories. These can be expressly designed to highlight a particular issue or subject, and that was often the case with TNG (for example, “Who Watches the Watchers,” “Ethics,” “The First Duty,” and so on).
Psychology and adulthood: While this is still a hotly contested topic, some psychologists believe that our basic personalities don’t tend to change much after the age of thirty, and that while changes continue, they slow over time. I think it’s fair to say that over the course of several seasons of a TV show, many viewers basically remain the same, even if we undergo a few life-altering experiences during that time. Having TNG’s characters remain fundamentally the same throughout, despite their many adventures, could be one reason why it’s easy to empathize with them. Note: I’m not saying this raised the stakes dramatically or led to better storytelling, simply that it may have made it easier for the audience to grasp the characters and feel like they were relatable on an ongoing basis.
Getting out of bed in the morning: Seeing someone cope with all sorts of difficult experiences and essentially emerge undamaged can be refreshing, even inspiring. You watch TNG episodes like “Identity Crisis” or “Violations” or “Schisms” or “Frame of Mind” or “Chain of Command” and think, “If Geordi and Troi and Riker and Picard were able to come out okay from such apparently brutal experiences, I should be able to survive my 3 PM meeting with management on Tuesday.”
And if TNG doesn’t feel immediately realistic on these grounds, perhaps it’s because we’re unfairly judging the characters by our own limited standards. TNG is saying, “These are advanced, 24th century people. Look at what they can handle. They’re incredibly resourceful and resilient. They hardly ever succumb to self-pity, they continually focus on self-improvement, and no matter what, they keep trekking on. We’ll get there one day.” Escapist, sure, but unlike many of today’s serialized shows, which regularly threaten, traumatize, or outright kill their core characters, TNG’s approach is more optimistic and uplifting. It aligns nicely with Star Trek’s overall hopeful message about a utopian future, perpetuating the aesthetic that drew many viewers to Trek in the first place.
Voyaging home: One reason TNG’s “anthology” approach to storytelling probably didn’t serve Voyager well is that the two series’ fictional mandates were starkly different. TNG’s mission was, famously, “to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no one has gone before.” We were explicitly told that in the opening narration. Voyager didn’t have an opening narration, but if it had, it might been something like “Fleeing from the perils of the Delta Quadrant, the U.S.S. Voyager leads a ragtag crew, on a lonely quest—for a shining planet known as Earth.” While TNG was conceived as an abstract exploration of endless possibilities, Voyager had a concrete mission: to safely get back home. Serialization or heavy continuity would have been a better strategy to chronicle Voyager’s epic journey, and I believe viewers were ultimately disappointed that the show didn’t take that approach. We’re back to function and form; these series had quite different functions, and yet were molded with the same form.
Ronald D. Moore has always been fond of continuity, but quickly learned that Paramount wasn’t a fan. He first found resistance to continuity while working on TNG. He recalls, for instance, that when he conceived the episode “Family,” Gene Rodenberry “didn’t like the continuity from “Best of Both Worlds” ” [*] But in retrospect, as I’ve been saying, it may have been to TNG’s benefit that continuity was played down.
Moore later tried to readjust Voyager’s course, but ultimately—and for complex reasons—left the show after a brief stint. Here is Braga again, with some telling comments: “Ron came aboard as a writer and—God, I have a lot of regrets—he came aboard wanting the show to do all sorts of things. He wanted the show to have continuity. When the ship got fucked up, he wanted it to stay fucked up. For characters to have lasting consequences. He was really into that. He wanted to eradicate the so-called reset button, and that’s not something the studio was interested in, because this thing was a big seller in syndication.” [*] In this instance, I think the studio made the wrong call. On the other hand, their decision indirectly helped bring the reimagined Battlestar Galactica into existence, so we can’t complain too much…
“Cause and Effect.” This popular fifth-season episode may be the ultimate triumph of the reset button. In the episode’s teaser the ship is destroyed, and then act one begins as though nothing’s the matter. The show manages to reset itself four times, embedding its own resetting (a “temporal causality loop”) into the story’s narrative structure, and doing it quite compellingly. (Viewers were apparently thrown off by this at first, and called in to ask if something was wrong with the broadcast.) This is one of Braga’s triumphs: he’s taken a storytelling constraint and turned into an engine of drama.
But beyond its craft and entertainment value, I think the show can also be read as a meta-textual commentary on the part of TNG’s writers. Data is able to utilize his advanced positronic brain to send a short message to himself across loops, one so subtle it will be undetected by the rest of the crew. Kind of like the writers smuggling in small bits of continuity across seasons without the Paramount execs catching on, don’t you think? Ron Moore: “We very much wanted to do more serialized storytelling, and we would try to sneak it in whenever possible. You have casual references to other episodes or events or other characters just as part of the fabric of the show, but you had to be careful.” [*]
By the time Deep Space Nine came around, some of those restrictions were lifted, but as mentioned, I don’t think Ds9’s approach would have been optimal for TNG, either. Ds9 deliberately went for a darker, grittier tone, and was constructed around a stationary, relationship-bound premise, rather than an exploratory, star-hopping one.
The future: Discussing Star Trek: Discovery, showrunner Bryan Fuller recently said: “I would strongly recommend that we never do 26 episodes. I think it would fatigue the show. Ideally I would like to do 10 episodes. I think that’s a tighter story.” The show’s initial season has been reported as having 13 episodes.
Gone is the reset button, clearly. But beyond that, can we infer that the show won’t be as uplifting or utopian as TNG? Will it focus less on individual morality tales and more on sequential character experiences? Will its characters be more traumatized? Perhaps. But that won’t necessarily be a bad thing. With sufficient craft and skill, Discovery might help to expand Star Trek’s parameters, and what it means to contemporary audiences. It’s a tall order, but even partial success could make for interesting viewing. Science fiction is inevitably a reflection of its own present, and 2017 will no doubt be very different from 1987. That’s one reality even the most far-flung spaceship can’t escape.
[*] Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman. The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years: From The Next Generation to J. J. Abrams: The Complete, Uncensored, and Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek.
Alvaro Zinos-Amaro writes fiction, of the non-tingler variety, and non-fiction, of the technicolor kind.
I can understand the points you make, and I agree that it was good for TNG to be this way since it contributed to its longevity, and along with that, to having more Star Trek on TV. But I still wish it had been less like it was, and more like DS9, and hope that DSC will be more the latter.
I love the TNG characters because they were the first Trek I watched regularly (I had only seen the TOS movies and read the Blish adaptations of the show), but it can’t bem y favorite Trek due to the nature of its storytelling approach. Of course, IDIC, so there’s something for us all in Trek.
Serialised shows are a nightmare for me. I generally only have an hour here or there to spare, so if it isn’t one story per episode then it is not something that is going to work for me. Trek two parters are bout the most I can invest in, even then it is liable to be more than two weeks before I catch up on part two. Also I just find most serialised shows tell one episode’s worth of plot over 12 episodes, so it is five minutes to resolve last week’s cliffhanger one or two random scenes with actual plot in them, 30 minutes of filler, padding, and people speaking unnaturally so as to not accidentally give out any information that would lead to a resolution or understanding like a normal conversation would, and then five minutes to set up this week’s cliff hanger. Then you get to the season finale and it is a regular episode of a normal show except for the last five minutes which is a cliff hanger to set up the next season’s ridiculously over extended plot.
Bring back the reset button, it gives us more story per show and 100% less pointless bickering.
The first season of TNG came out in 1987. Even though it may seem strange to younger audiences today, nearly all dramatic TV at that time used the same “reset button” format. That’s just how TV was done then, and clearly the management of Paramount was not receptive to doing a serialized story at a time when such things just weren’t being done.
@3/cosmotiger: That’s basically what I was going to say. I’m confused by this essay singling out TNG, when its approach was the norm for nearly all prime-time commercial television until just the past couple of decades. In the early days of TV, it was the anthologies that were the classiest, smartest shows, while serialization was seen as the purview of cheesy soap operas and kids’ adventure serials. So even shows with continuing casts and premises aspired to be as anthology-like as possible, often built around characters who moved around to a different place and got involved with different characters and situations every week, like the original Star Trek or The Fugitive (or Mission: Impossible, where the actors effectively played different people every week). This fit the viewing patterns of the era, because there were few reruns, no home video, and no Internet, so it was harder to follow a series as a whole, and a missed episode might never be seen at all. So it made more sense to make each episode stand entirely on its own as a complete experience, not dependent on anything outside itself.
TV started to get a bit more serialized in the ’80s, with the rise of prime-time dramas like Dallas and Hill Street Blues. TNG actually had a lot more continuity than the original series; each episode was a self-contained story, but their events had long-term consequences, guest characters returned, the status quo occasionally changed, etc. It was reflective of the way ’80s TV worked in general, still episodic but with more memory of its own past.
Even Babylon 5, which basically introduced the modern practice of treating each season as a complete arc with a beginning and end, still had a fairly episodic approach, with each episode focusing on a specific piece of the larger whole and telling a sub-story that was complete within the episode, rather than going the fully serialized route of having each episode just contain a portion of several parallel storylines.
Personally, I think modern TV has taken serialization too far. There’s so much emphasis on the whole that the individual parts no longer stand out as much. I think a balance of episodic and serial elements, like B5 or DS9 or even TNG (and the many other ’80s shows like it), would be a good pattern to return to. Continuity and consequences are good, but that doesn’t require complete serialization.
What Cosmotiger said, kids.
TV back then had what I call Teflon characters. Experience just slid right off them after each episode.
NEXT GEN did follow a political arc of sorts, but you didn’t need to remember it to follow each enclosed episode.
And I certainly agree about the exhaustion factor for viewers. Sometimes, you just want to watch your favorite characters without worrying about the minutia of bizarro plots that take years to tell. That’s one reason I tend to avoid fantasy series where the characters just keep plodding along as things change without any sense of completion or accomplishment.
Reset button is one thing. Serialization is another. Even on an episodic basis, actions can and should have consequences on the long run. I think TNG mostly managed that. DS9 took further steps in that direction, even though it didn’t go full serial until the very last two seasons.
Voyager‘s problem is that it came at a time when TV was visibly evolving towards serialized storytelling and got left behind thanks to the studio’s mandate. An episode like Year of Hell was literally one hell of a concept that could have been explored much further. Thankfully, Braga held on to this plot and implemented it on Enterprise later on, yielding some very satisfying results.
I agree, however, that too much emphasis on serialization can dilute the impact individual episodes could have. That’s a recurring problem on several Netflix shows, namely the Marvel entries and also the likes of House of Cards and Narcos. You quickly lose track of what happened when (and in the case of Narcos, you also lose track of all those forgettable characters not named Escobar).
B5 probably had the best approach to story arcs. The first couple of seasons were definitely the most approacheable thanks to a fair amount of stand-alone stories, and focus on character introduction. Even early in season 3, there was still a balance in terms of simple stories mingled with long-term arcs. When the Shadow War broke out later that season, however, viewers had to strap on and not let go, because the story wasn’t going to slow down until the very final set of episodes.
I wish everyone – writers, studios, viewers, critics,… – would remember that continuity != heavy serialization.
And as someone who watched TNG first run, the constant reset button drove me up the wall – especially in the later seasons where they would do things that should have completely changed the universe, but then ‘poof’, gone the next week.
I wonder if part of the push towards heavy serialization is the advent of things like Netflx, etc which allows people to just binge watch an entire show from start to finish.
I agree with your assertion here that TNG works best as a more episodic show; as you say, it’s a more abstract, exploring type of show. A heavy serialized plot in some ways implies a conflict or at least a need to work through something, which in a way would be very different from the tone (as opposed to something like DS9 which has a different tone and a stationary setting that allows things to develop).
I think my favorite example of a good blend is Veronica Mars, in which each episode generally stands alone, but also has clues or tie ins to an overarching mystery/plot. Although admittedly towards the end of the season it’s focusing more on tying all that together.
@8/Lisamarie: Netflix has certainly pushed it farther, but serialization had become common well before Netflix started offering original programming. I think Buffy the Vampire Slayer was, in a lot of ways, the template for modern serialized, season-arc storytelling. Certainly it was the origin of the term “Big Bad” and the practice of building each season around a different main villain. And before that, it was Babylon 5 that started treating seasons as complete “chapters” in a larger saga, entities that came to narrative climaxes in the season finale and left a different status quo for the next season, as opposed to simply being seasonal interruptions in a fairly unchanging narrative.
One thing I don’t like about serialized shows is that they make the characters more self-centered. In older shows, the characters were focused largely on helping the guest stars of the week with their problems. These days, the narratives focus more heavily on the characters being caught up in their own problems, and even in case-of-the-week procedurals, the cases they’re working are secondary to the characters’ personal drama and ongoing arcs, and they almost always happen to be coincidentally reflective of whatever the main characters are dealing with that particular week.
@4/ChristopherLBennett: You make some excellent points about context, and I too wish more shows these days were less heavily serialized, because it’s simply not necessary for what they’re trying to do (though I think the storytelling approach should be considered on a case-by-case basis). I hope I didn’t give the impression that TNG was somehow outside the norm of its day in terms of being more of an anthology venture. As you and @3 point out, that was the predominant template at the time, and it certainly made sense for Paramount to stick to it.
In terms of having the conversation with folks who approach TNG a-historically, like my friend did, and many younger viewers inevitably will, the exchange can go, “Q: Why does it reset? Where’s the continuity/serialization?” “A: The reset was the norm for 1987,” and that’s certainly true and provides perspective. But I wanted to add to that conversation by pointing out a few reasons I think the approach served TNG particularly well.
@9/ChristopherLBennett: “One thing I don’t like about serialized shows is that they make the characters more self-centered.”
Couldn’t agree more. I had this problem with Dexter, for example, particularly in the later seasons.
Small point. Didn’t B5 finish its main story at the end of season 4? I read that they were unsure they were going to get a 5th season, so Straczynski combined the planned 5th season with the 4th, which is why two major story arcs, the end of the Shadow War and civil war with the Earth Alliance, were both featured in season 4. This would also explain why season 5 is somewhat, lackluster.
Since serialized TV sometimes means the 5th season of Lost, or any season of Under the Dome, there’s a lot to be said for episodic TV.
@12, yes.
@12/Jason: To expand on that a bit, JMS basically just shuffled his plans when it became questionable if he’d get a fifth season. He moved up the resolution of the main arcs and postponed some of his season 4 plans for later, while season 5 was built largely around ideas he’d planned for a sequel series, as well as incorporating some of the stuff he skipped in season 4, IIRC.
Straczynski had a pretty smart approach to advance planning: He knew what story threads he wanted to cover, but he was very flexible about rearranging the specifics as needed. Truncating the season 4/5 narrative was far from the first time he’d done that. He’d replaced three of the key characters from the pilot movie and reassigned their story arcs to different characters. He had to replace Michael O’Hare after season 1, and he realized that opened the door for making some improvements in the story arc. And so on. Even with its planned-ahead nature, B5 was in constant flux.
I remember Star Trek: Enterprise was very Episodic the first two seasons, then got Serial in season 3 with the Xindi arc, then spent most of season 4 trying to connect to the previous shows. (The Eugenics Wars and the Disappearing Klingon Head Bumps to name a few, and don’t even get me started on that finale…)
I don’t think the goal of good dramatic TV should be to produce something that’s easy to watch. Good TV should challenge the viewer’s expectations, preferences, etc. One good way to do that is to deal with the consequences of a character’s actions over the long term. TNG had very little of that kind of thing. The times they explored the continuity (like Picard’s reactions in “I, Borg” or Wesley’s longterm story arc) were some of the times the show transcended its normal even-handed quality.
I’ve enjoyed the shift to serialization for prominent TV series, but the shorter length of seasons is frustrating, as 20+ episodes went down to 13 and then to 10. Now, AMC is trying to push a 6-7 episode half-season as the norm. It’s very hard to get invested and stay that way when you really like a series.
For me, the issue is pretty similar to the business model for AAA video games. When I discover a game I’m going to love, I play it heavily until I’ve reached the end of the game or the end of my interest in it. I want more of the game when I’m at peak interest, not several months to a year later when DLC is released for the title.
The best products release updates with a good balance of content and timing to sustain my interest over a long period of time. By the time a sequel comes out, I’ve probably moved on. There are only a few game series where I consistently play every release and invest heavily in DLC.
I didn’t have a problem with TNG’s episodic nature when I watched it first run. But these days, I would prefer a Star Trek series with character growth and long story arcs. I hope the new series can deliver.
@16/LazerWulf: Most fans of ENT prefer to treat the series finale as separate from the rest of season 4. I think even the season-4 showrunner (or one of its producers, anyway) has said that the real ENT finale was “Terra Prime,” while “These Are the Voyages…” was more an epilogue for the franchise as a whole, one that its own writers have admitted was ill-considered.
I really liked the format of season 4. It was a mix of 3-parters and 2-parters with a few standalones here and there, a really innovative middle ground between episodic and serial structure. I loved it. Each storyline could be as long as it needed to be, rather than forced into an arbitrary length or forced to share space with half a dozen other storylines. A story could be told with almost novelistic depth, then wrapped up and followed by a different story, albeit with the degree of character continuity and ongoing relationship arcs that’s standard for modern TV. And it meant that the crew had fewer distinct adventures in the course of a year, with downtime between them, which is more plausible than having two dozen or more adventures per year, or existing in a continuous, unbroken state of danger and turmoil as in a serialized show. It was a really refreshing structure, and I don’t understand why no other show has done anything similar.
@6 – Eduardo: I’ve said it before on these boards and in other places: the Marvel/Netflix shows are not something I’d hold to the same standards of comparison (not quality, but storytelling-wise) than other TV shows, because they’re designed to be binge watched, maybe you won’t watch them all in a row yourself (I never have the time, so I watch the season over the course of a week), but you still don’t have to wait.
Each episode still has a begining, middle, and end, but mimicking a novel’s chapters, not an individual episode of a show like, say, Agents of SHIELD or The Flash; each Marvel/Netflix season is more like a long movie split into fragments, but still intended to be watched in its entirety.
Excellent article.
Changes in television aside, it really comes down to a matter of taste, doesn’t it? Some people, like myself, prefer short stories over novels—episodic storytelling over serialization. Each have their pluses and minuses. Serials of course give greater opportunities to explore the characters, but I do often find it tedious in the long run. As mentioned above, it does tend to make the central characters more self-centered, grappling with issues over the course of an entire season (“Like sands through an hourglass, so are the Days of Our Lives”) that would be wrapped up in no time on something like The Next Generation. Not everyone is into scrolling through endless Facebook timelines! To quote Monty Python, “Get on with it!”
@16, @19, I actually really liked Enterprise. The Dr. Whoish format that they used in the 4th season was a great middle ground between being episodic and totally serialized. I wish they would have continued on, but at least we got what we did. I didn’t mind the finally as much as I thought I would. It was a clever way of showing the crew “10 years later”. I just wish they wouldn’t have tried to place that in an existing episode of TNG. It would have been better had it been during Riker’s command of the Titan.
@17/Theo16: I think good dramatic TV can be done both serially and episodically, with little or even no character continuity (e.g. The Twilight Zone). Thinking about my favorite episodes of TNG, it turns out that many are standalone stories with little continuity to other stories beyond the characters themselves: “The Measure of a Man,” “The Offspring,” “The Drumhead,” “Data’s Day,” “Remember Me,” “The First Duty,” “Cause and Effect,” “Darmok,” “The Inner Light,” “Lower Decks”. I’d consider these examples of successful, engaging, thought-provoking dramatic television that doesn’t deal with ongoing arcs. Others like “Tapestry,” “Chain of Command,” and “Best of Both Worlds” probably require a bit more knowledge to be fully appreciated, but are still pretty solid as self-contained stories. Incidentally, most of my favorite episodes of The X-Files turn out to be “monster-of-the-week” episodes as well, rather than “mytharc” shows, with a couple of exceptions.
@21/Arthur: “Changes in television aside, it really comes down to a matter of taste, doesn’t it?”
Fair point. I love novels, but I’m a fiend for short stories. And on reflection, I’m sure this has influenced my television taste over the years :-)
@19 and @22: Season 4 of Enterprise also remains my favorite, for the reasons you point you.
It’s an age thing.
Continuing stories appeal to women more than they do to men.
Except for soap operas, there were no continuing story shows on American television which I can remember until Dallas.
Even traditional epics such as the Odyssey are quite episodic.
I think that’s a good thing for the ability of new comers to start enjoying the show without going to watch all the previous episodes, but then, I’m 60. 6 episodes a year seems ridiculously thin to me, but I understand that most modern viewers have a lot of choices and don’t necessarily wish to spend one night a week with one show.
I think broadcast and even cable television are losing their audiences to Internet content.
This pretty much guarantees that new versions of Star Trek will be continuing stories and that a dozen or fewer episodes will be made a year.
I also think Paramount made a bad decision when they forced the non-profit, amateur Star Trek show, Axenar, out of production.
Such shows carried the Star Trek banner for the years when there were no shows on the air.
The future belongs to many parallel streams.
The new Star Trek show could have shared the noosphere with other variants to everyone’s advantage.
@9/Christopher: “One thing I don’t like about serialized shows is that they make the characters more self-centered.”
Great point!
I also agree with the article that episodic stories are more diverse in tone and subject, and in a way even more realistic because serialised shows tend to have too many character changes. In real life, people don’t change all that much. Even when bad things happen to them, very often after a few weeks or months they are once again the persons they used to be.
@25/Raymond Howard: “Continuing stories appeal to women more than they do to men.” Are you sure? I don’t know of any statistics, but I’m a woman, and I prefer episodic stories. Random22 is a woman, and look at comment #2.
@25/Raymond Howard: “Continuing stories appeal to women more than they do to men.”
I don’t agree with blanket generalizations. That may be true on the average, but an average is just the middle of a bell curve. There are plenty of men who enjoy continuing stories, and no doubt plenty of women who don’t.
“I also think Paramount made a bad decision when they forced the non-profit, amateur Star Trek show, Axenar, out of production.”
If it had been non-profit, they wouldn’t have done anything. There were countless other Trek fan films that CBS (it’s not Paramount anymore) allowed to exist because they didn’t try to make a profit. Axanar was the exception because its makers got greedy and started trying to make a profit, trying to act like they were a professional production. That was a breach of the decades-long, unspoken agreement that other fan film creators respected, and that left CBS no choice but to crack down to protect their property rights. Maybe the terms of their new guidelines are a bit strict, but that’s because the Axanar people pushed too far and this is the counter-reaction. But CBS has no obligation to allow fan films to exist at all. They’d be perfectly within their legal rights to forbid them altogether. Yet they’re still allowing them to exist, under certain restrictions designed to prevent an Axanar situation from happening again — e.g. they must be strictly amateur, strictly non-profit, and limited in length. Yes, it’s more limited, but lots of creativity is done within limits (e.g. sonnets or haiku). And in time, probably, the strictures will be relaxed as the memory of this fades, provided that fan film makers continue to behave like the majority of fan film makers always have.
The problem with modern serialised shows is that you have episodes with padding and / or set-up + exposition. In the older mode the writers had to work harder in some ways to develop a whole scenario in one episode and then fulfil their predicament in the space of 50 mins. It meant that each episode was at the very least interesting and value for money and if you didn’t like it there would be something completely different next week. For so many modern TV shows if we do not like episode 1 we give up for good, knowing it is not going to change much.
@28/Ken: That’s a surprising point of view. Over the decades, I’ve often heard episodic shows get accused of having a lot of padding to fit an obligatory length. If you only have one main plot and a subplot, that may not really be enough to justify 45 minutes or whatever — or the whole B plot can be fairly gratuitous padding. TNG was frequently guilty of this — they’d do an A-plot that was character-driven, but would tack on a random technobabbly ship-in-danger subplot just to meet the obligatory quota of action and danger. Sometimes the two plots would mesh quite poorly or the B plot would get in the way of the more interesting character stuff, and after a while, the repetitive “We must tech the tech before the other tech blows up the ship” plots got pretty boring. “Cost of Living” was particularly guilty of all of those things.
Conversely, the case could be made that a serialized show is less likely to have padding, since the subplots are usually part of the ongoing character arcs and thus they have consequences down the road.
Although, on re-reading your post, I suppose you mean “padding” in the sense that serialized shows are often slow to get started because they start out in a more case-of-the-week vein and take time to lay the pipe for their bigger story arcs. I can understand that criticism, and I feel that there’s often pressure from the networks to follow an episodic/procedural format at first, and that shows often start out operating on a fairly basic and formulaic level to soothe wary executives before gradually easing into the more daring stuff. On the other hand, though, I think there’s something to be said for starting slow, giving the audience a chance to get to know the characters, their world, and their status quo before you begin messing with it too much. The trick is to find the balance between making each episode interesting on its own and making them work as part of a larger narrative, and that’s not easy to do.
It’s a bit of a Catch-22 these days: a lot of new genre shows have to take the kitchen-sink approach for their first half-season, because they need to establish that baseline for future arcs, and work out the links with the characters–the actors need to get a handle on them, those ensemble dynamics need time to feel organic, maybe the writers realize Character B isn’t super interesting like they thought and Character F is the true break out star, etc.
But in the old days there were maybe a half-dozen genre shows at a time and we were willing to stick things out a bit in the hopes things would get good. First season of TNG is pretty bad compared to many mediocre shows today, but compared to its contemporaries it was the best SF on TV. Today we’re spoiled for choice and if a new genre show doesn’t distinguish itself pretty early on, it’s not going to last long enough to get good.
I don’t know that the characters are more self-centered in serialized shows, rather they are given more of a character arc to focus on. In the original Trek, most of the cast were cyphers. They did what the script needed and didn’t have lasting character arcs. In a serialized show, changes to characters stick and there is more of a character to deal with, rather than one who remains static throughout the show.
@30/joeinformatico: “But in the old days there were maybe a half-dozen genre shows at a time”
Your “old days” sound a lot more recent than mine. When I was young, a half-dozen genre shows at a time would’ve been an impressive number.
@31/Jason_UmmaMacabre: “I don’t know that the characters are more self-centered in serialized shows, rather they are given more of a character arc to focus on.”
That’s exactly the point — that the plots become driven by the main characters dealing with their own personal issues and relationships, rather than helping other people with their problems. Everything that happens in modern shows has to center on the main characters themselves. The big plot threads tend to revolve around the central characters. The archvillains often turn out to be members of their families, or the big crises are the result of their own past mistakes. Even in procedurals where they’re nominally doing jobs on behalf of others — detectives, lawyers, doctors, superheroes — the cases of the week (as discussed) tend to reflect the leads’ current personal drama and tend to be subordinated to it in the writing.
For an example, look at the original 1980s Beauty and the Beast TV series and its recent CW remake. In the original pilot, Catherine Chandler was rescued by the mysterious lion-man Vincent after a criminal assault that turned out to be merely a case of mistaken identity and had no story significance except as a catalyst for Catherine to meet Vincent and to leave corporate law and join the DA’s office so she could help people. In the remake, Catherine Chandler was rescued by genetically engineered supersoldier Vincent Keller when her mother was murdered to cover up her work for the evil organization that created Vincent — said organization later turning out to be run by Catherine’s biological father.
Or look at the two different TV versions of The Flash. In the 1990 series, Barry Allen became the Flash to capture the criminal who killed his big brother, but he did so in the pilot and then he just went on fighting criminals who usually had no particular connection to him, aside from a few cases like the one where he went after his father’s nemesis or the one where the bad guys cloned him. But in the current series, the big bads of the first two seasons have both been fellow speedsters who were specifically targeting the Flash, and the whole situation with the event that created so many metahumans was part of a larger vendetta directed against the Flash specifically. It’s all ultimately centered on him, and other people’s problems are just side effects.
For that matter, look at Doctor Who under Steven Moffat’s showrunnership. It used to be that Doctor Who was a show about the Doctor wandering about the universe in order to explore it. Now, it’s become a show about the universe reacting to the Doctor, as various groups of people try to kill him or counteract him because of what he’s done in the past or what they fear he’ll do in the future.
This is what I mean. I’m not saying the characters themselves are selfish. I’m saying that the stories built around them have become primarily about the characters dealing with their own personal problems. They rarely get involved in story arcs that don’t center on them in some way. And that makes the storytelling feel self-centered even if the characters aren’t.
The thing is, you’re talking about characters having arcs, and that’s fine. That’s something TNG had as the characters grew and changed and had relationships. But I’m talking about plot. It used to be that characters could undergo development and growth alongside and as a consequence of the events in the episodic plots. These days, the plots themselves have become driven primarily by the main characters.
@32, I see your point and agree with you. A good writers room should be able to manage both constantly evolving character arcs while also writing new situations for said characters. The kind of situations you describe seem pretty lazy. It originally sounded like you were advocating going back to 60s episodic TV were each week was completely different and had no bearing on weeks to come. I prefer it when episodes build on each other and each one has ramifications on the next. It feels more real to me that way.
@33/Jason: “It originally sounded like you were advocating going back to 60s episodic TV were each week was completely different and had no bearing on weeks to come. I prefer it when episodes build on each other and each one has ramifications on the next. It feels more real to me that way.”
Yes, but as I said, there’s a difference between plot and characterization. Look at TNG — the plots driving the episodes were independent and self-contained, but their events did often have lasting ramifications for the characters, and the characters and their relationships grew and changed over the course of the series. I don’t know how you could possibly have misheard me so completely, because I’ve been saying throughout that what I want is that kind of balance between the purely episodic approach of the ’60s and the purely serial approach of today. I prefer something like we had in the TNG/DS9 era where the stories were episodic but still had consequences and aftereffects, where the characters grew and changed in response to their experiences but the experiences weren’t driven solely by their own personal problems.
For future reference, if you ever think I’m advocating an extreme position, then you’ve probably misunderstood me. I usually believe that the best path is the middle path, a healthy balance between opposite extremes. As my 11th-grade English teacher liked to say, “Moderation in everything, including moderation.”
@34, duly noted. After your clarification, your position is pretty close to my own. Your English teacher was a wise person :)
What’s interesting, and annoying in some cases, is how serialized storytelling is making something of a comeback in movies. Star Wars brought back the serial novelty ‘a long time ago,’ but Marvel and DC and others are now aggressively churning out episodes every single year. It’s kind of cool on one hand, but there’s also the downside of stretching storylines beyond the aggravation point. When once a single movie would work, now it’s stretched into several movies. And that’s nice for television. Not so nice for the cinema—how much is that candy bar again?
@36/Arthur: Actually I like how Marvel has been handling the series approach. They’ve made each movie its own complete story, but they have ramifications and aftereffects, and the characters grow and evolve from film to film, and it’s like TV writing on a bigger scale — which is good, because there’s more room for character growth and evolution over multiple films than there is in a single one.
The problem is that some studios have learned the wrong lessons from Marvel’s example. Instead of making the individual films strong and creating a world and characters that warrant further exploration, they’re just starting with the assumption that they’ll have multiple films and therefore diluting the story, making movies that are more about setting up the next movie than anything else. Granted, Age of Ultron was guilty of this a bit, but not nearly as much as some. Batman v Superman was a total mess, in part because it was driven more by the studio’s desire to rush a shared universe into existence and set up a Justice League series than by the needs of the film itself.
This is another problem with serialization. Too often, it can be an excuse to put less care into the individual installments because they aren’t considered as important as the whole. Or it can be an excuse not to bother with giving any story a satisfactory resolution and instead just tread water indefinitely with twist after twist. But those aren’t endemic failings of serialization itself, just ways it can be done poorly. Episodic storytelling has its shortcomings too. Neither approach is intrinsically good or bad; both have inherent strengths and pitfalls. Which is why seeking a balance between them, drawing on the strengths of both, is a good idea.
@31/Jason_UmmaMacabre: “In the original Trek, most of the cast were cyphers.”
I see that quite differently. One of the things I like about the original Trek is that the three main characters are full-fledged, believable (and likeable) persons. I also think that’s one of the reasons why people still watch it after fifty years.
“They […] didn’t have lasting character arcs.”
That’s true (if you don’t count the films), but I think that makes them more, not less, believable. As mentioned above, from what I’ve seen in real life, it takes decades rather than years for people to change, unless they are still very young. To put it bluntly, character arcs are unrealistic.
Apart from that, I also like the TNG/DS9 approach best – have people remember former events, bring back guest characters every now and then, but retain self-contained stories.
@38 JanaJansen, That’s what I meant by “most” of them. The three main characters had guest stars centered around them, past experiences were referenced, and family came into play. But the rest of them were largely set dressing that occasionally got some back story when the script called for it. I don’t think that characters need to drastically change over the course of a season because you’re right, that is not realistic. I just want character beats to last more than an episode and become a part of that character when it is introduced, not a plot device that gets forgotten next week.
Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE the original Trek. Without that, we wouldn’t have the rest. But for my money, I prefer the B5 and later DS9 method. Season long arcs that each episode touches on, but is not the center focus of every episode. Barring that, I’ll take the TNG approach of no long arc, but consistent character development.
Jason, I think you and I enjoy the same kind of storytelling.
@39/Jason: Then we agree about all the important stuff. The rest is a matter of personal taste.
“That’s the way things were done” is a bit overstated.
Hill Street Blues had been doing arc-based, multi-episode storytelling since 1981, and was hugely influential. By ’87, when TNG premiered, any drama that could be considered mildly ambitious was using the technique — Thirtysomething, LA Law, St. Elsewhere, to name a few other genre shows that came before or concurrent to TNG. Even forward-thinking sitcoms like Cheers, while still doing single-episode stories, had abandoned the traditional “reset button” and allowed characters and relationships to grow and change.
It’s pretty clear from what I know about the history of TNG that its early creative team was pretty old-school and insular, more tied to Roddenberry’s ’60s orbit than any then-current writing and production teams.
So, it’s not that it would have been impossible or even surprising if TNG had become the first SF show to use story arcs. It’s that the particular creative team involved simply didn’t think that way (yet – I had always viewed The Best of Both Worlds and the ongoing, if sporadic, Borg storyline in general was a nod in that direction, which was even more established by 1990, so it’s interesting to read here that even that level of continuity met resistance within the production).
Even by 1993, the “continuing story” aspect of DS9 was used as a big selling point in its introduction, yet the episodes themselves were mostly completely self-contained with a few ongoing storylines touched on now and then, while Babylon 5 went full-serial right away and made all of Trek seem static by comparison.
ST:Discovery (and so much for the three-letter acronyms, there) is supposed to not just have continuity but be a season-long story arc so the tide has finally turned; it will be interesting to see just how big they are thinking (given that this will be the flagship for a new pay service I imagine they have Marvel-ous dreams of a fully-fleshed out, interlocking universe).
@42/sardinicus: Yes, there were more serialized shows at the time, but there were also plenty of episodic-with-continuity shows like TNG, where the episodes were standalone but there were recurring character arcs that developed intermittently, like the whole Worf/Klingon politics saga, the Borg arc over the years, Wesley Crusher’s maturation and career advancement, Ensign Ro’s growth as a character, Troi’s eventual pursuit of command training and her relationship with Worf, etc. It’s a mistake to treat episodic and serial storytelling as mutually exclusive categories. They aren’t. Most shows have a mix of both elements. TNG was closer to the episodic side of the spectrum, yes, but much less so than TOS had been.
“Babylon 5 went full-serial right away”
This is a misuse of the term “serial.” A serial structure means that every installment is just a piece of a longer story (or of several parallel storylines), ending in a cliffhanger with the storylines unresolved and picking up in the following installment. In other words, it’s the format of something like a soap opera, classic Doctor Who, or a modern binge-oriented Netflix series. What Babylon 5 had was an episodic structure with strong continuity. Yes, it had a larger overarching story, but any given episode focused on a single sub-story that began and ended within that episode and then went away for a while until a later episode — although there might also be a subplot or two that were more serialized, carrying through several consecutive episodes.
For instance, in season 2, there was an episode about the arrival of an old Earth sleeper ship, followed by an episode about Talia Winters and her Martian resistance history, followed by an episode about Londo’s three wives (with a Talia subplot unconnected to the previous episode), followed by an episode about Bester chasing rogue telepaths, followed by an episode about the visit of the Centauri emperor, etc. Most of these were pieces in the larger saga and had consequences later on, but they were featured separately, each plot in its own one-and-done episode. That’s an episodic format by definition. A full serial format would mean that several of those subplots would be taking place simultaneously and would be spread out over several episodes.
People tend to misuse “serialization” as synonymous with “continuity,” but they’re distinct (if overlapping) concepts. A show can have strong continuity without being serialized, as with B5. And a show can be serialized, yet have lousy continuity — for instance, in the Adventures of Superman radio serial in the ’40s, there was a massive, months-long storyline involving kryptonite which began with Clark Kent telling Lois Lane and Perry White about kryptonite and the danger it posed to Superman — whereupon they promptly betrayed his confidence, published the whole thing in the Daily Planet, and tipped the villains off so they could steal the kryptonite — and then, just a couple of months later in the same continuous storyline, had an episode where Clark was unable to convince Lois and Perry that Superman was in danger from kryptonite because they couldn’t believe that anything could possibly hurt Superman! So serialization and continuity are two different things. Serialization is about whether a given story arc is told in multiple consecutive segments rather than in a single discrete installment. Serialization gives the appearance of continuity, but an episodic story can have just as much continuity as a serialized one, if not more.
“ST:Discovery (and so much for the three-letter acronyms, there)”
This is the third consecutive Trek series with a one-word subtitle, following Voyager and Enterprise. Each of those had a 3-letter abbreviation (though not an acronym, obviously), VGR and ENT consecutively (though some use VOY for the former), and Discovery is no different; its abbreviation is DSC.
@43/CLB
Point taken about “serial” vs. “continuity”. And yes, there have been soap-operas forever. But the mix of long / short / single-episode arcs that you point out was used effectively in B5 was straight out of the Hill Street / St. Elsewhere / LA Law playbook. There is a book by media professor Thomas Schatz where he describes this as a “semi-serial” approach — where the key thing is not that the stories continue across episodes but that they allow the relationships and circumstances of the characters to change as a result — other than natural aging and Riker growing a beard, I don’t think you can argue that much of that happened in TNG.
Sure, many shows from Matlock to Airwolf were doing only stand-alone episodes well into the ’90s (as does the odd procedural today, though it’s harder and harder to find one), and most any long-running show had recurring guest characters and changing scenarios (even I Love Lucy changed when Little Ricky was born) but there was a real sense that the more serious/more forward-looking/more better dramatic shows were using arcs by the time TNG premiered. My point was that saying “there was no such thing as a show without some form of reset button in 1987, that was just how it was done”, which a lot of commenters immediately went to, is not really true.
@44/sardinicus: Yes, I’d buy “semi-serial” for B5. But “full serial” is an overstatement.
And TNG did have characters’ relationships and circumstances change over time. Wesley went from civilian to acting ensign to cadet to Traveler recruit. Tasha died and Worf took her job. Data felt a connection to Tasha after the events of “The Naked Now,” as we saw in “Skin of Evil” and “The Measure of a Man.” Data learned of his origins, then met his creator, then developed a dream program, then eventually got the emotion chip (though the later movies frustratingly walked that development backward). Picard gradually became more comfortable with children after “Disaster” and “The Inner Light,” and the devastating impact of his assimilation by the Borg informed “Family,” “I, Borg,” and First Contact. And so on. As I said, they didn’t advance as much as they do in modern shows, but there was far more continuity in TNG than there was in TOS.
“My point was that saying “there was no such thing as a show without some form of reset button in 1987, that was just how it was done”, which a lot of commenters immediately went to, is not really true.”
I don’t think anybody was saying that — just that it’s wrong to paint it as a binary choice between pure episodic storytelling and pure serial storytelling. Most fictional series use a mix of both. They should be seen like colors on a palette or ingredients in a recipe rather than mutually exclusive extremes.
Certainly there were times that TNG pushed the reset button when it shouldn’t have. Picard should’ve been more profoundly and permanently changed by “The Inner Light.” His relationship with Nella Darren would’ve worked better as a subplot spread across several episodes. And so on. DS9 was guilty of this, too — O’Brien should’ve been changed more by “Hard Time,” and all the death-countering technologies in the first season (quick-cloning, consciousness transfer, cure-all nanites) should not have been so completely forgotten. But it’s not a choice between pure reset and pure serialization. Both shows had a mix of both elements, as do most shows. Only the ratio differs.
The back-and-forth over which show gets credit for being the first to embrace strong continuity, or to do it well, seems to be obscuring an interesting discussion of how the nature of storytelling in TV drama has changed, generally for the better, in the past few decades. Up until the early 1980s TV dramas were almost exclusively episodic, but by the late 1990s / early 2000s some type of strong continuity and arc-based storylines were expected among “critically acclaimed” shows. (Here I’m excluding soaps, sitcoms, and variety shows which really haven’t changed much from their radio percursors.)
TNG is perhaps one of the most high-profile examples of a show that participated in that transition, especially since the transition is visible within the run of the show itself as the (ahem) next generation of showrunners and writers wrested control from Roddenberry. The emergence of stronger continuity roughly coincides with the show’s hitting its stride somewhere during the late 2nd or early 3rd season, and is probably a significant contribution to the show’s success. TNG would likely not have benefited from going much further from the traditional episodic approach because fundamentally the show was not telling a story: rather, the ship/crew/universe constituted a framework for telling stories. The growth of each character and the ever expanding list of past events provided a continually evolving set of elements from which those new stories could be built.
While DS9 and VGR moved further along towards telling longer story arcs, as did other shows in the late 90s and early aughts, what still sets B5 apart isn’t so much its use of strong continuity but rather that its having a definite, single, and time-limited story, planned out before the first episode was filmed, meant that each episode was written with both backward and forward continuity in mind. That aspect resulted in a different feel of even the early episodes, since it allowed for so much more foreshadowing and Chekhov’s-gun placements than would have been possible for a show only concerned with maintaining backward continuity.
BSG provides an excellent example of how important it is to match the episodic-vs.-serialized style to the show (and business model) and stick with it. The 1978 original started out with a great concept, but once it exceeded the production constraints of its time and drifted towards more conventional episodic sci-fi, it faltered. Similarly, when the 2003 reboot had a clear path for the story—the miniseries, seasons 1 & 2, and the home stretch of season 4—it felt tight and compelling; when it temporarily ran out of ideas during stretches of seasons 3 & 4 and resorted to dead-reckoning continuity, it felt more like a soap opera.
It seems to me that TV producers and writers are figuring out the distinctions. Network shows that maintain the conventional format of 22 42-minutes episodes in a season, for as many seasons as the show remains profitable, will tend to stick with light character-focused continuity in the vein of TNG. Non-network shows that want to explore longer, more complex stories are utilizing the semi-serial format while increasingly varying the lengths of seasons and episodes to better align with narrative (rather than commercial) requirements. I suspect we won’t see efforts like B5 again until producers are more comfortable committing to shows projected to have as many episodes as necessary—and no more—and where the length of each episode and ‘season’ is exactly as long or short as it needs to be.
@46/Ian – This is a good analysis and one I agree with.
I will admit, given the context, your reference to Chekhov’s guns took me about three readings to parse correctly. . .
Funny, I always thought of Voyager as having less of a reset button than TNG. And since serialized dramas were not the norm back then, I found it refreshing. In the first season I recall at least one death of a character that I thought was a regular, and one character became a villain, another got promoted to chief of engineering, etc. Most of the episodes were self-contained stories, yes, but the characters did shift over time.
DS9 started off more like TNG in that respect, but as time went on they began pushing the long story arcs, far beyond what Voyager did. At least, that’s how I remember them.
There may have been earlier examples, but Sherlock Holmes is likely the example of series fiction that everyone knows. There are serial elements, sometimes confusingly handled, such as Watson’s wife, and there’s the whole business of the Reichenbach Falls, but the structure is essentially that of the TV series. And the stories are even admitted to be out of order.
As much as I love the acting, creativity, and optimism of American tv shows, serialization has become a plague. No story is ever wrapped up, there are no conclusions. It is just a never ending grind. Vampire diaries? Teen wolf? The Shield? High brow or low brow, just make a good first season, then run the show until it withers up and dies, usually (but not always) without a good ending.
In this situation, I think we can learn a lot from the way the Japanese set up their shows. A fixed number of episodes, a clear start, middle, and end.
TNG got around it by simply ignoring serialization altogether. Amazingly, it worked out just fine.
@50/Henry: As we’ve discussed, TNG didn’t have to “get around” serialization because the kind of serialization we have today was still rare in American prime-time TV in its day. TNG’s approach was not an exception; it was entirely typical of the way TV shows generally handled continuity in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Some of its contemporaries were more serialized, some less so, but most action-adventure shows from the period were pretty much done just like TNG, episodic stories with occasional sequels or recurring guest stars.
@49: Shakespeare’s Richard II, * Henry *, and Richard III form an eight-play cycle that’s more or less a serialized story where each one is yet self-contained, and they were not written in chronological order. Or going back further, you’ve got the Trojan Cycle plus the Aeneid. And plays by Euripides. And maybe throw in Sophocles too. Heck, pretty much all of the poetry and plays that comprise Greco-Roman mythology are a set of interlocking stories with serialization and mild reboots. That style of storytelling is older than the alphabet. Arguably, the nearly nonexistent continuity that dominated TV from the 40s through the 80s is the anomaly in the history of literature and performing arts.
@50: While I generally agree that more limited-run TV would result in some better storytelling, I think you are overstating things a bit. I do tend to prefer shows with a tighter arc, but there still is a lot to be said for a well-made show which allows any viewer to understand and enjoy an episode picked at random. Having shows covering the range from full episodic to full serialization is a Good Thing. I believe the biggest hurdle towards more limited-run shows isn’t cultural but rather the economics of TV production: to subsidize the production for 1-3 seasons while the audience is built up and then to wrap it up when the audience size and critical attention are at their peak simply cuts against the desires of the executive suite. B5 nearly didn’t finish for this reason. TNG (and the subsequent Trek shows in general) exhibit the signs of this struggle between the writers/actors exploring stories and producers watching the costs/revenues.
@52/Ian: The flaw in your Shakespeare analogy is that those are 8 “serialized” plays out of a body of 38 plays that were otherwise completely self-contained (aside from Falstaff getting his own comedy spinoff pilot, as it were). So it doesn’t work to say that episodic storytelling was “almost nonexistent” when your own example is an instance of standalones outnumbering serial installments by nearly 4 to 1. The two approaches existed alongside each other, and they always have. And it’s foolish and pointless to pit them against each other in some kind of manufactured adversarial relationship. They’re both tools in the kit, and they’re both worth using.
As I mentioned before, today the belief is that serialized shows are smarter than episodic shows, but in the ’50s and ’60s, the belief was the opposite, because anthologies were the classiest shows while serialization was the purview of soap operas and kiddie shows. So it’s important not to mistake a current fashion for an absolute standard of worth. A half-century from now, people will probably look back on our obsession with serials and find it as quaint and limiting as we see the anthology-style storytelling of the past.
@53/CLB:Shakespeare’s histories were intended as a specific example in response to @49 regarding examples of (partially) serialized storytelling that is likely to be well known (to English speakers, at least). My phrasing seems to have muddled it a bit, but I was actually trying to make that same point that you are. Episodic-vs.-serialized should be considered complimentary storytelling techniques, not approaches battling in a zero-sum game, and the fact that TV and movies are finally utilizing both approaches with regularity–as has been the case in Western literature for millennia–is to be celebrated.
What might remain notable to future critics about TV prior to the 80s is the efforts of producers to create series of stories involving the same sets of characters yet intentionally avoiding continuity. In that sense, the soft continuity exemplified by TNG maybe represents more of a return to historical norms than an innovation.
@54/Ian: I don’t think lack of continuity in stories about ongoing characters is anywhere near unique to pre-’80s television. You see much the same thing in a lot of Golden/Silver Age comic books, in radio series, in pulp magazines, in long-running children’s book series like the Hardy Boys — anything where there’s no guarantee that your audience will see or hear every installment or where you expect a young audience to age out and be replaced, so that it makes sense to prioritize the parts above the whole.
@55/CLB: Totally agree; comic books are probably an even better illustration (heh) than TV of how serialization followed by reboots resulting in multiple disparate timelines can work well. I think it is notable that the pressures towards episodic discontinuity for comic books, youth-focused pulp books, early radio, and early television all arose from the same source: during the early years of each of those media, the business model of getting these stories produced at all depended upon the ability to obtain a sizable audience of paying customers well into the future. (Contrast that with plays, poetry, and prose whose storytelling conventions were established centuries before the modern concepts of commercialization and mass marketing even existed.) It seems to me that as the production costs in each medium came down (or at least became more predictable) over time, and the understanding of what would or would not find an audience became better understood, the writers and performers were given more freedom to use–or ignore–continuity as seemed appropriate to the story they wanted to tell; this trend is bringing the range of TV storytelling options back in line with that of other media with longer histories. TNG showcases that evolution, as Roddenberry & Paramount initially wanted the minimal continuity of TOS to help ensure broad appeal but allowed more continuity once the show was more established.
@56/Ian: In fact, I read not long ago that the reason Stan Lee introduced continuity to Marvel Comics’ storytelling was to save time and work. He developed the “Marvel method” of writing a story outline, letting the artist flesh it out panel-by-panel, and then adding dialogue to the pages. By doing multi-part stories, he only needed to do one outline for several issues’ worth of story, and that made it easier to meet deadlines. So it was a purely practical consideration, not an artistic one, that led to the emergence of serialized storytelling in comics.
And I still do not understand your basis for the claim that serialization was somehow normal in plays going back centuries. Sure, there were some plays that connected to each other, but there were plenty of others that were standalone, and referring to the connections as serialization is a great overstatement in many cases. For instance, Sophocles’s Theban plays form a rough trilogy, but they were written out of order and as separate projects quite a few years apart, and they aren’t quite consistent with each other.
As I said, don’t mistake current fashion for a universal norm. I think you’re trying to fudge the details of past works to force them into a model of storytelling that you find familiar and desirable. Any theory that affirms our own biases and preferences as the natural order of things should be viewed with the utmost skepticism. People often look back at the past, see things that look similar to what we have today, and assume that people back then thought of those things the same way we do now. But one thing I learned as a history major was how mistaken that way of thinking is. Our terminology and definitions are products of our culture. People in the past didn’t have the same views of things, didn’t fit things into the same models, so even if something looks a certain way to us, they may have seen it completely differently.
@57/CLB: My claim is not that serialization or multiword continuity was the historic norm, rather that authors historically have had the option to use those storytelling techniques. Stories involving multiple works have long existed, regardless of how they were assembled or how tightly they mesh. The early decades of TV did deliberately avoid multi-episode continuity, regardless of the underlying motivations. This gap between TV and other media was an anomaly that has closed in the last couple decades, as TV writers are now more free to use the same serialization/continuity options that poets, playwrights, and novelists have had at their disposal for centuries.
I suspect the dominance of standalone works in literature, and episodic structure in TV, is partly because doing serialization well is hard. Not every story worth telling has enough complexity to fill out multiple books or episodes, and trying with the wrong story (or wrong writer) usually results in a meandering mess or a fallback to cheap melodrama. Make a mistake in the middle of a critical, long-running character or story arc and you’ve quite possibly ruined the story; write a clunker in a more episodic show, and you likely will have the opportunity to retcon it into insignificance. My hope is that the model that TNG/DS9/VGR/ENT followed—strong character continuity & development with a mix of standalone episodes and multi-episode arcs—becomes the default mode for TV as I think it provides, um, the best of both worlds for both the writers and viewers alike in exploring storytelling options.
@58/Ian: Yes, there were stories with multiple works, but that doesn’t mean they were the same as modern serials, so it’s misleading to suggest an equivalence. And it’s not true that all early television avoided serialization, not by a long shot. Of course there were plenty of daytime soap operas. Some sitcoms had a degree of semi-serialization; for instance, The Beverly Hillbillies would often do arcs of two or more consecutive episodes involving the same guest characters or overall situations. There were the Irwin Allen shows and others that created the appearance of serialization by showing the start of the next episode as a cliffhanger ending, even though the episodes were not written or shot in the order they were finally cut together and broadcast. There was the ’66 Batman with its two-part, cliffhanger-based adventures and recurring villains; in the third season, it dropped the two-parter format but began using cliffhanger teasers much like the Irwin Allen shows had. Those shows were emulating the theatrical adventure serials of the ’30s-’50s, the same serials that inspired Star Wars and Indiana Jones. A lot of early shows were made by people who’d grown up with serialized storytelling in movies and radio and who wanted to emulate that approach.
Sometimes you found serialization in unexpected places. The original Battlestar Galactica had a surprisingly serialized story arc running through its single season, foreshadowing more modern SF storytelling, although it was undermined by network pressure to insert more standalone episodes. There was continuity from one storyline to the next, characters would go through changes, major stories would actually alter the status quo, etc. Granted, some of that was due to network-mandated midseason retooling, but some of it was a deliberate choice to have a story arc, and this was in 1978-9. Heck, the abysmal followup Galactica 1980 was even more serialized, with tight continuity and episodes leading directly into each other and even a loose story arc that was resolved in the penultimate episode.
So you’re just plain wrong here. There has never been a time when serialization has been completely missing. There was plenty of both episodic and serial storytelling in early TV just as there has always been everywhere. It’s just that in early TV, episodic storytelling was considered more sophisticated and intelligent than the serial stuff, as well as having certain practical advantages. It was merely a shift in fashion and priorities, not some fundamental aberration.
And yes, doing serialization well is hard, but so is doing episodic storytelling well. As I’ve been saying, there’s no intrinsic difference in quality between the two approaches. It’s not easy to be concise, to tell a really strong self-contained, compact story that stands entirely on its own as a fulfilling and memorable work. Too often, today, writers use serialization as an excuse to avoid doing strong single episodes. As I’ve been saying all along, neither approach is superior to the other. Any format can be done well or badly.
Christopher, Just curious, what are your thoughts on the Arrow/Flash/Supergirl method of storytelling? I really like how they handle their ongoing stories. Continuity, season long story, but still stand alone episodes.
@60/Jason: Actually I wish the Berlanti shows were a little less serialized. Yes, they have villain-of-the-week stories, but often subordinated to the ongoing plot and character arcs. As I said above, basically everything that’s happened on The Flash so far has revolved around other speedsters trying to kill the Flash, and the crimes of the week are essentially just side effects of those vendettas. And there is a bit too much reliance on cliffhangers. As it happens, I just started a Supergirl binge rewatch yesterday, and I suspect it’s going to be hard to find good places to stop for the day, because everything segues right into the next episode. And I’m not a big fan of cliffhanger season finales. A bit of foreshadowing of a new story to come is fine, but I like a finale to have a sense of closure to it. I think last season’s Agents of SHIELD finale was weakened by the “six months later” tag setting up the next season’s arcs. It would’ve been better just to let us absorb the powerful resolution we’d just seen than to immediately force us to start thinking about something months in the future.
The other problem I have with heavy serialization is chronological. Highly serialized shows tend to go right from the end of one episode to the start of the next, and sometimes a given episode only covers a day or two. So if you really sat down and worked out their timing, a lot of these shows’ seasonal arcs would probably come out spanning only a month or two while purporting to span nine months to a year. Also, realistically, people need downtime. Going straight from one crisis to another to another would be too exhausting, too traumatizing.
@61/CLB: The serialization you describe in those shows, with few breakpoints and continuity lockout, does seem like a good way to lose an audience. TV shows seem to keep falling into that trap, although I suppose the nature of the business is that the writers and producers may not realize they’ve crossed that line until they’ve already done so.
Your comment made me realize that your definition of serialization, specifically the frequent presence of episodes that make no sense without having seen one or more previous episodes, seems much narrower than the concept I was trying to describe in our contretemps above. You claim that B5 isn’t serialized because most of its episodes can stand on their own, and also that the works of Shakespeare or Euripides aren’t serialized because they weren’t written with the original intention of form a coherent narrative. Yet in each case the works describe a broader story when consumed in a particular order, and the elements within the individual pieces required to achieve the connections were written intentionality. TNG has that nature too, at least with respect to character development. Maybe serialization isn’t the proper term (anyone have a better one?), but in terms of storytelling it ends up in the same place.
So that makes me curious. Is your apparent bias towards the episodic style of storytelling primarily a personal preference for stories that can be enjoyed in smaller, self-contained chunks? Or do you believe more specifically that the structure of TV production makes the episodic style most likely to do right by both the story and the audience?
One thing that bugs me about “reset button” shows is that it feels like lazy writing. Like the writers get together to plan the season and say “here’s how the season starts, and here’s how it ends, but everything stays the same in between.” They do this so they can farm out filler episodes to individual writers, and all sorts of crazy things can happen as long as things go back to the status quo at the end of the episode.
This really started to bug me in “Smallville” and “Merlin,” where if anyone finds out the Big Secret you know they will lose their memory or someone will travel back in time before the end of the episode, because the writer is not allowed to make any actual changes to the status quo. Oh, and the hero always has to save the Big Villain from the villain of the week, so that they can keep the actor, even though it’s completely unbelievable that none of these many justifiable murder attempts would succeed.
It also tends to make things inconsistent. Like how in one episode Clark is rendered incapacitated by a piece of Kryptonite five feet away, but in another one he can crawl away from a piece that’s right next to him, or even use his heat vision to blast it away. You also get what feels like competing writers and directors who have completely different visions of a certain character.
And then you have terrific guest stars whose characters are never seen again. Other shows, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, nearly always bring these characters back, or at least mention them again, a sign that the writers were actually talking to each other.
TNG is relatively good when it comes to these problems. It doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not.
@63/rfresa: I’ve always thought that it’s serialisation that leads to lazy writing. If the writers don’t have an idea or a plot that can stand on its own, it doesn’t matter because they can simply advance their story arcs a little bit.
As others have already said, both can be done well or badly.
It’s the same thing with guest characters. People don’t always come back in real life. Sometimes it feels contrived when the main characters meet the same people again and again. And sometimes it doesn’t.
@62/Ian: “You claim that B5 isn’t serialized because most of its episodes can stand on their own, and also that the works of Shakespeare or Euripides aren’t serialized because they weren’t written with the original intention of form a coherent narrative.”
No, I am not saying that in the least, because my whole point is to reject the false notion that there’s some black-and-white binary choice between serial and episodic storytelling. They are both ingredients in the mix, and the majority of series use aspects of both to a greater or lesser extent. For decades, I’ve been seeing people trying to dumb the conversation down to “episodic vs. serial” as if they were irreconcilable opposites, and I’m so damn sick of it because it’s so completely detached from reality, because most shows have elements of both. It’s like trying to reduce a discussion about cake baking to an argument over flour vs. eggs. They’re both ingredients in the mix.
What I objected to about B5, as I have already explained clearly and in detail, was the assertion that it was “fully serialized.” It was not. It was a balance of episodic and serial aspects. It was episodic on the granular level but with serial elements on a larger scale.
And what I’m saying about earlier plays is not that they “weren’t serialized,” because what I’m specifically objecting to is the impulse to reduce everything to simplistic, one-note labels. What I’m saying is that, while there are similarities to modern practices, there are also differences that need to be acknowledged. Trying to reduce it to a yes-or-no question is dumbing it down and preventing a real understanding. You can’t understand the world unless you look beyond the simplistic labels and recognize the nuances.
“Is your apparent bias towards the episodic style of storytelling primarily a personal preference for stories that can be enjoyed in smaller, self-contained chunks?”
Again: My whole point is to reject the nonsensical idea that there’s some kind of binary choice here. I’ve said over and over again that the best approach is a balance of both episodic and serial elements.
@63/rfresa: “One thing that bugs me about “reset button” shows is that it feels like lazy writing.”
In modern TV, it often is, yes. But that’s because we have reruns and DVRs and home video and internet streaming and show wikis and all sorts of ways to experience a series as a whole and be aware of its larger continuity. But in the ’50s and ’60s, they didn’t have those things. There was no guarantee that you’d get to see every episode of a show, and if you missed one, you might never see it at all. So it was logical to focus on making each episode fully self-contained and not dependent on the events of past episodes. It wasn’t that TV writers back then were any lazier or less capable than TV writers today. They were just as talented, but they were working in a different climate and needed to have different priorities. True, that doesn’t apply to more recent shows like Smallville and Merlin, but there can still be valid reasons for an episodic approach. (Although Smallville suffered from being dragged out far longer than it was ever intended to go, so it did fall into a rut for a while there.)
As I’ve said, serialization can be lazy writing too. With episodic storytelling, with every plot resolved by the end of the episode, the way you lure viewers back for more is by making the characters and the storytelling compelling enough that people want to see more. Just having cliffhangers and leaving things unfinished to lure people back can be an easier substitute for that, and so some writers use serialization as an excuse to avoid making the storytelling and characterization as strong as they can be. Or they use it as an excuse to avoid giving any story a satisfying ending and just keep dragging things out endlessly instead.
Neither episodic nor serial storytelling is intrinsically better than the other, as I’ve been saying all along. They’re both just tools in the kit, and they both have their strengths and weaknesses. That’s why it’s good to have a balance between the two.
The article is from 2016 but I just found it. In my opinion a mix of both stand alone episodes and a serialized story is the best. I’m usually tired of most modern serialized shows after a couple of seasons because after that point the stories become too convulsed and it’s obvious the writers have no idea what the end goal is and they just make things as they go along.
The ideal imo is what The X-Files did (and other series). They had individual cases and an overall arc, the 2 and 3 parters added to the overall arc but they also dealt with different aspects of the alien mystery. We had episodes about the black oil, episodes about abductions, episodes about the consequences of the abductions, about side projects like cloning, the tests etc. These episodes told a complete story and at the same time contributed to the whole story and gave the audience clues about the alien conspiracy. At the same time the characters grew and what they went through in an episode mattered for the rest of the series and came back later (Scully’s abduction, her cancer as a result to the abduction, her not being able to have children, the murder of her sister, Mulder’s sister’s abduction, his father’s involvement to the alien conspiracy, his partner’s sickness and how he deals it etc) but with stand alone episodes that varied from comedy to horror to procedural investigation we got a breath of fresh air from the characters’ drama and it added more layers to the series. Plus we got some masterpieces TV episodes.
Troi gives birth to an energy life form who’s used her dna to create a human body for never explained reasons. Her son dies at the end of the episode.
Data makes himself a daughter and fights to keep custody of her. She dies at the end of the episode.
See the pattern?
And in “The Defector,” the guy dies at the end of that one. It is frustrating when they create unique and interesting characters that could have been more fully explored in a multi episode arc, but because of the reset button they have to die or go away and return everything back to normal.
Not all episodes worked like this. The Klingon arc with Worf had an ongoing story and re-occuring characters but that was the exception and not the norm. I think the greater sophistication of audiences and expectations of continuity cause the episodic nature of TNG to come across as very dated. But it was par for the course when it was made.
@68/Tim: Sometimes they brought back a character and I wish they hadn’t, for example when they killed K’Ehleyr in “Reunion”, or reinterpreted “Booby Trap” in “Galaxy’s Child”.
I’ve come to dislike ongoing stories. They tend to lead to sloppy writing. In a one-episode story, you have to know the ending before filming starts. The result are stories that actually make sense.
They could have spent a season or three exploring Troi’s child, why he was here and what was his true nature. Lal could have become a recurring character. Instead Data gets a cat.
@68/Tim: It’s just ego that makes us think the current fashion for serialization is “more sophisticated” than episodic storytelling. As I said in comment #4, back in the ’50s and ’60s it was the anthologies that were seen as having the most sophisticated writing, often by esteemed playwrights like Paddy Chayefsky, Reginald Rose, and Rod Serling, while serialization was seen as the purview of trashy soap operas and kids’ adventure shows. So TV series aspired to a strictly episodic approach because it was seen as more sophisticated, not less. It was also better suited to the way TV worked back then, with unreliable broadcast signals, little syndication, no VCRs, and no home video or season box sets. If you missed an episode, you might never see it, so it was unwise to tell a story in a way that required the audience to see every installment. Thus, the serials that were made tended to be repetitive and formulaic so that you wouldn’t miss much if you skipped the odd episode; and the smart, classy dramas were written to pack as satisfying, rich, and complete a story as possible into each single episode.
There’s no reason at all why a shorter storytelling form can’t be sophisticated. Ask any fan of haiku. If anything, it takes more talent to fit a complete and rewarding story into a shorter format. And serialization allows a lot of cheats, like relying on endless cliffhangers as a way to avoid coming up with a really satisfying ending for anything. It’s more of a challenge to end a story in a way that answers all the outstanding questions but still makes the audience want to come back for more, not because of unfinished business, but just because they liked the story you told and want to see another one.
Long-form storytelling isn’t more sophisticated. It’s just a longer story.
I admire anyone who can tell an engaging story in a shorter form. It’s not easy. As someone once famously wrote, “If I had more time, I would’ve written a shorter letter.”
@70 – hey, I won’t hear a word against Spot :) He did inspire the greatest work of poetry ever :)
Cats are good. Even androids know that.
@71/Christopher: “And serialization allows a lot of cheats, like relying on endless cliffhangers as a way to avoid coming up with a really satisfying ending for anything.”
I have a paradoxical reaction to cliffhangers. They annoy me and make me want to stay away. I’m probably in a minority there.
“Ask any fan of haiku.”
Nice comparison! I usually come up with sonnets when I try to describe the appeal of episodic stories, but haiku are even more concise.
@75/Jana: “I have a paradoxical reaction to cliffhangers. They annoy me and make me want to stay away. I’m probably in a minority there.”
I’ve had a similar reaction in certain contexts. I don’t mind a cliffhanger if I don’t have to wait too long for the resolution, but sometimes it’s just annoying. Twice in the early ’90s — with Timothy Zahn’s Star Wars Thrawn trilogy and with Gentry Lee’s sequel trilogy to Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama — I got frustrated with the way the books didn’t have any satisfactory resolutions but just arbitrarily stopped in the middle and required me to wait a year or more for the continuation. So in both cases I just quit and never bothered to read the third book (although I had other reasons for disliking the Rama sequels). I made the decision back then that if I ever wrote a duology or trilogy with a sizeable gap between the release of its parts, I’d make sure that the story logically broke down into distinct pieces that each had a satisfactory conclusion and weren’t just arbitrary fragments of a singular whole.
I’m also not crazy about the kind of cliffhanger where all the characters’ respective arcs are forced into moments of extreme crisis at the same time just to make the cliffhanger bigger. It feels very artificial. Well, less so today, because all the arcs are usually intertwined with the overall serial plot, but more so back in the ’90s when episodic shows were adopting more serialized elements. Alien Nation was a great show, but I disliked its cliffhanger for the particularly contrived way it forced all the different characters into unrelated crises at the same time. The show was cancelled after that and brought back four years later as a series of TV movies, and because it had been so long, the first TV movie basically decanonized the finale, opening with a new versio of its closing cliffhanger set up in a different, shorter way and ignoring most of the other cliffhanger subplots in the episode. I was actually glad to see the finale overwritten that way, because it was a low point in a brilliant series.
@76 – ChristopherLBennett: I was lucky that I discovered Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy when it had already been published in its entirety. I bought the first book one day and read it that same day; I was outside of the shopping mall before opening the next morning to buy the other two books, and before going to class. I also read each of those two books in less than one day.
@77/MaGnUs: I’ve sometimes wondered if I should revisit the Thrawn trilogy, but I recently read Zahn’s first two Thrawn books in the new, post-Rebels canon continuity and was underwhelmed by them, finding them lacking in depth. Thrawn is a fairly uninteresting protagonist because he’s always ten steps ahead of everyone, is never at any real risk of losing, and shows no vulnerabilities or learning curve. Unbeatable characters make better antagonists than protagonists. And the supporting characters are underdeveloped because the narrative is so in love with Thrawn.
Agreed, Thrawn is much more interesting as an antagonists.
Serialised TV is often used today for quick ratings grabs, it’s mostly lazy writing taking up TV today. The best TV is a mixture of both episodic and serialised. TNG did this well as did DS9.
They should rename the ship “Wile E. Coyote….” it’s based on chasing a wild goose, where every episode end in a cliffhanger…. with all damage magically cure by simply cutting to the next scene.