Longtime readers of this blog (I used to joke there were two of you, but I think both of them stopped reading a long time ago), may recall I got a little obsessed during the latter part of the run of Lost with the challenges of sequential narrative, which is also sometimes referred to as serialized storytelling.
Towards the tail end of this year’s TV season, I read a fair amount of commentary on Twitter about the balance between shows with standalone episodes and those that heavily leaned on a serialized approach.
It struck me that there was some confusion about terms, so I thought I’d take a little time to lay out how I see the distinctions.
When I think back on the TV of my youth, drawn from the Sixties and Seventies, it was entirely made up of programming that never asked you to know what happened previously in order to watch an episode for the first time. The networks believed that TV must appeal to the widest possible audience (at a time when TV depended on mass audiences for profit), which meant that a show’s producers should never alienate people with things like complexity.
But the result of this was TV shows that would show extraordinary things happening to characters and then by the next episode, it was as if they’d all been struck by amnesia. Even if major changes took place (On I Love Lucy, the characters moved to Hollywood and spent a season living in Connecticut), nobody ever talked about those changes. On Bonanza, it became a joke that if a woman ever entered the Cartwrights’ lives, she was sure to die a tragic death. But those women were never mourned beyond the length of that episode.
But from the beginning of television, there were also soap operas, where dramatic change happened all the time and it would be acknowledged for a time. Weddings, babies, kidnappings – the stories were in constant motion. But the events would only last for a while, and then they would be forgotten. And all that drama would never add up to anything.
So, when TV writers today talk about standalone versus serialized, I always think of the third category of soap opera. Shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, Battlestar Galactica, and Lost were telling a large story, made up of seasons and episodes, functioning like chapters in a novel. I think shows like Grey’s Anatomy or ER are in the soap category, since they’re likely to just keep reeling out story until they decide to stop producing the show.
On the other hand, I think shows like FX’s Terriers and Justified, seem to be telling a larger narrative, over the course of seasons. That’s why I’m a little wary of complaints of an absence of standalone episodes, since I regard that as complaining that a chapter in a novel doesn’t stand on its own. I recognize that this isn’t a perfect metaphor, since TV is always produced one episode at a time, grouped by seasons. No novelist has to grind out 12 to 24 chapters of a novel on schedules, and then take a forced break.
But we live in an age when people are increasing consuming TV shows all-at-once, whether on DVD or Hulu or VOD. People are more likely to consume shows in chunks or even all at once.
Actually, the better comparison is probably comic books. When I started reading in the mid Seventies, they also tended to be standalone. Maybe, you might see a story spread out over three issues, but the characters never looked back when things concluded.
(I should mention that one notable exception was Steve Gerber’s Howard the Duck, a brilliant satirical work.)
But by the Eighties, we started to see graphic novels, in which a larger narrative was told in a limited series of issues (Obvious examples, include Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta and Watchmen). Then came even longer works like Neil Gaiman’s Sandman (75 issues over seven years) and Garth Ennis’ Preacher (75 issues over five years).
But in addition to that, there were standard issue comic books, whether the superhero books of DC and Marvel or the fantasy of DC’s Vertigo line, in which a particular writer would take on a book for a period of time. He or she might choose to tell a longer story that might take a few years, which could further broken down into smaller arcs or standalone issues (At this point, I believe I’m thinking of Hellblazer as a classic example).
(I should also point out Grant Morrison’s astonishing runs on Animal Man and Doom Patrol, which are longstanding characters that Morrison treated in a unique isolated fashion.)
Comic books, coming out once a month, are a classic example of a serialized narrative, harking back to Charles Dickens publishing his novels on chapter at a time in Monthly Magazine.
With these sorts of comics (and not all comic books are written in this fashion), it can be pretty standard for a long self-contained story to take a hundred separate issues to tell. That overall story might be broken into smaller narratives, which might take a dozen issues to tell. In between, the comic might feature a standalone story that might be an interlude or otherwise not connected to the larger narrative.
More recent examples include Lucifer, written by Mike Carey, and Y: The Last Man, from Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra.
At the same time, there are other types of comic books. The stories might be told in a single issue, or they might stretch out over a few. Things happen, but does anything ever really change? Villains are fought, girlfriends come and go, sidekicks might strike off on their own. The issues come out very month, year after year. The thing gets published as long as it sells. Maybe it gets cancelled one day; maybe it runs for more than 70 years.
When any sequential narrative, which I think of as a story told in units, whether issues of a comic book or episodes of a TV series, doesn’t look back, when details don’t accumulate and add up to something, when it all proceeds along until the creators get tired, then I tend to think of that as soap opera.
And I tend to prefer serialization to soap.