Art and commerce so frequently conflict with each other.
For the artist, the object is to create of work of beauty and meaning: A painting, a novel, a song. You create the work; but from the business standpoint, you want to re-create. Do it again. Write the sequel, Drag it out for years. Turn the book into a movie into a TV series into a Broadway musical back into a movie and put out the novelization.
I’d specifically like to focus on how this affects sequential narrative, such as TV shows and comic books — content that tells a continuing story.
TV networks like self-contained episodes. For example, back in the Sixties, the idea was that you could tune in every week and you wouldn’t have to know what happened before. Captain Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise would have an adventure and then those events would never be mentioned again. This is handy for not alienating new viewers but not very friendly to fans who tune in every week.
As time goes by, the television genre matured. So, for example, by the early Eighties, you had a show like Hill Street Blues, where the story continued from week to week. Some stories would be self-contained, but other stories would play out over a number of episodes. There would also be references to actions that had happened in previous episodes.
You see the trade-off. A new viewer might be confused by this type of narrative, but it rewards the repeat viewer. Of course, if you do start watching, you can get hooked, tuning in repeatedly to see how it turns out.
A more mature form still of producing a television program — I don’t mean “mature” in the sense of adult, but rather in terms of creativity — would be to have a giant overarching narrative that is told over a long series of episodes. Think of novels or movies; a television could tell that kind of huge sprawling narrative like some John Dos Passos trilogy.
The Sopranos was one example of this type of storytelling. It had a beginning, middle and end. [Embarrassingly, I only watched the last season of The Wire, but this is clearly also another excellent example of this kind of approach.] As I discussed previously, it was very novelistic in many ways. But here’s the problem: Reality gets in the way.
Suppose I want to tell a story in written form — a book. I think of the characters, the situation. I work out what I want to say. I start writing the work, I edit it, keep creating and cutting and shaping. Finally, I’m done; I’ve told my story; it gets published; people read it.
If I do that same thing in a television program, it’s extremely unlikely I plot out the whole thing in advance. I can’t guarantee how many episodes I’ll get. It’s not practical, for production reasons or financial reasons, to work it all out first. It’s not like I could write 100 episodes of a TV show and we don’t start shooting until I’ve got the whole thing ready.
Instead, the producers start producing the show. Maybe they do have a beginning and an end, and they kind of know what the middle is (not knowing how long that will last). The show goes on the air. How do you pace that first season, not knowing if the show will be renewed? [The show Heroes has been plagued by these pacing issues, often playing things out too slowly, but only realizing that when the audience complains.]
Success comes. The show gets picked up. Now I’m going to get to move my narrative along, but how do I pace the overall story, as it is told in a series of episodes, if I don’t know how many total episodes there will be? If the show’s a big hit, the network pressures me to do another season and then one more, please. On the other hand, the ratings could take a nose dive. Suddenly, I’m lucky if I get a chance to wrap up the story by the end of the season.
Don’t forget that you can’t control for everything. Remember that Nancy Marchand died and suddenly The Sopranos had to find a way to handle the character of Livia Soprano in a way that hadn’t planned.
This is hard work. The producers of Lost have frequently been frequently been criticized for “making it up as they go along.” Do they know what they’re doing? Is there any ultimate meaning, or is it going to be another X-Files, where we commit to the story and then we never do find out what the hell the black oil and the bees and Samantha Muldar all add up to?
I disagree. I think they’ve shown they know exactly what they’re doing and where they’re going. I’m influenced by listening to the show’s podcast, where the producers have explained they don’t introduce a new mystery (e.g., the Hatch) unless they know how that story element is going to be resolved. For example, they introduce the polar bear. It’s confusing. What does it mean? Is it just weirdness for weirdness’ sake? We eventually discover that there is a small adjacent island where the Dharma Initiative has been experimenting on animals and this is clearly the source of the polar bear.
Most fans agree that Lost became much stronger as soon as the producers were able to get the network to agree to a final end-date. This is clearly not always going to be an option for every show.
Okay, so what’s my point? I guess it’s that this stuff is hard. It’s hard enough creatively to do it. If you add in all these financial issues and production complications, it becomes more difficult still.
2 Responses
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The Pop View » Watching Life on Mars Says:
[...] previously wrote about the challenges of drawn-out sequential narrative. A TV series is a classic example, but there are plenty of other examples of authors telling a big [...]
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The Pop View » The Pacing of a Sequential Narrative Says:
[...] huge, sprawling story. And doing sequential narrative on television is even more challenging. (See How to tell a big story on TV. and Watching Life on [...]