A recent discussion on Twitter about television shows with “mythologies” raised the question of the origin and meaning of this term. I thought I’d take a shot.
The term “mythology” seems to have sprung up in the mid Nineties and is only used in reference to television shows. We generally don’t speak of movies or books having a “mythology,” even if they’re part of a continuing series.
Serialized Stories
As I’ve already said, TV shows used to do only self-contained stories that wrapped up everything in a single episode. It was in 1981 that Hill Street Blues became the first American prime-time drama to tell stories that continued over time, over a series of episodes or a number of seasons.
I think it was The X-Files (1993 – 2002) and Babylon 5 (1994 – 1998) that first started the idea of a show having a “mythology.” This lead to episodes being separated into “stand-alone” or “mythology.”
A Bigger Idea
On a related note, I think mythology has to be separated from serialized narrative. Just having a story that carries from one episode to the next is not enough. I discuss the difference at length in this post, but to put it succinctly, you can regard it as a wide spectrum, with something resembling a novel at one end and a soap opera at the other.
The mythology of a TV show has to be a big idea, one that we’ll think of as a self-contained concept when the series is complete.
Fantasy and Science Fiction
This usually means that shows with a mythology fall in to the fantasy and science fiction genre. We don’t think of The Wire as having a mythology, even though it was definitely about big ideas (an attempt to examine a major city and show “how institutions have an effect on individuals.” ). ER had things to say about our medical system, but was closer to soap. The Sopranos was novelistic, but wouldn’t be described as being mythological.
I think Battlestar Galactica and Lost are better examples.
The Characteristics of Myths
I think I can back up my argument by trying to briefly describe the characteristics of myths, outside of the television environment.
Myths differ from legends, in that they’re not concerned with factual events (we have science and history to grapple with those things). They try to describe that which can’t be known or named, such as the nature of God or the origin of life. They rely on symbols and metaphors. Often, they communicate ethical laws and moral codes.
Of course, some TV shows’ idea of “mythology” is quite small. For example, the 1974 series Kolchak: The Night Stalker consisted of stand-alone episodes. The 2005 remake, called Night Stalker, had a mythology, with the lead character trying to solve the mystery of who murdered his wife. Series creator Frank Spotnitz later explained that his intention was to explore “the nature of evil.”
In this interview, Spotnitz describes mythologies in more detail, based on Night Stalker and his experience working on The X-Files.
ABC actually required that I tell them what the mythology was. I had to write a top secret, five-page document, before they would order the series. It explained what was in the pilot, where the series was going to go, and what the last episode would be.
[The X-Files] had the benefit and the curse of being the first to devise the mythology series. As it was happening, we didn’t realize what we were doing until we were well into it that we were in fact creating this mythology that wove in and out of the series. I remember hearing the word “mythology” and thought what a pretentious word that was to apply to a TV series, but now it’s sort of accepted.
What Makes It Myth?
I’ve kind of backed myself into a corner here. Is a TV mythology just a big story told over a number of episodes? Does it have to say something about the nature of life, as traditional myths do?
We’re also veering close to the difference between genre fiction and literature. I like to think that any great work of art, even television, tries to say something about the human condition.
But it seem like the proper definition of “mythology” in television terms refers to the over-arching story that each episode is part of, isolated to fantasy and science fiction.
I will close by quoting from Alan Moore’s introduction to the collected graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns, published in 1987.
Beyond the imagery, themes, and essential romance of Dark Knight, Miller has also managed to shape The Batman into a true legend by introducing that element without which all true legends are incomplete and yet which for some reason hardly seems to exist in the world depicted in the average comic book, and that element is time.
All of our best and oldest legends recognize that time passes and that people grow old and die. The legend of Robin Hood would not be complete without the final blind arrow shot to determine the site of his grave. The Norse Legends would lose much of their power were it not for the knowledge of an eventual Ragnarek, as would the story of Davy Crockett without the existence of an Alamo. In comic books, however, given the commercial fact that a given character will still have to sell to a given audience in ten years’ time, these elements are missing. The characters remain in the perpetual limbo of their mid-to-late twenties, and the presence of death in their world is at best a temporary and reversible phenomenon.
This goes to the heart of stories. They have a beginning, middle and an end. I think where this applies to TV series, is that there’s a difference when the idea of a story – a myth – applies to the series as whole, not just individual episodes.
UPDATE: Here’s an interesting post on the difference between science fiction and fantasy. Tod Kelly argues that fantasy works are mythic in nature: “…their stories are a way of tweaking and putting new spin on classic archetypes.”
FOOTNOTE: It’s fairly typical for a TV series to have what’s called a “bible.” A Pitch Bible is written to sell the series to the studio or network. A Production Bible is a reference work for writers and the production staff to refer to; it establishes the canon of the series.
The show bible will outline the concept of the series, describe the characters, the setting, episodes, and so on. Another possible way of describing mythology of a television could be when the show bible resembles an actual religious bible, in the way that it tells stories for a purpose.
For example, Joseph Campbell, one of the great experts on the power and use of myths, described the mythic power of religion this way:
…the imagery that has to be used in order to tell what can’t be told, symbolic imagery, is then understood or interpreted not symbolically but factually, empirically. It’s a natural thing, but that’s the whole problem with Western religion. All of the symbols are interpreted as if they were historical references. They’re not. And if they are, then so what?