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 [...]
“Are end dates actually good for TV shows?”
EW‘s Darren Franich asks the big question, “Are end dates actually good for TV shows?” Since I have been obsessed with sequential narrative, like that seen in TV series, I have a keen interest in this question. I think Franich is wrong, at least for the reasons he states. His argument against setting a scheduled [...]
The Juggling of Characters and Storylines
I’ve been writing about sequential narrative for some time, since I’m fascinated by the difficulties of telling stories that slowly unspool over time. The Onion A.V. Club has a new interview with the great character actor Stephen Tobolowsky, in which he talks about some of his experiences of working in television. He perfectly describes the [...]
Telling Stories and Selling Soap
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 [...]
LOST: One Year Later
It was one year ago this week that the series finale of Lost aired. This was a big deal. Lost was a show that was epic in scale, that used a huge cast to tell a huge story spread out over six years. Some people think we’ll never see that kind of show again, due [...]
LOST: More or Less Than Meets the Eye (Part 2)
In my previous post, I made this claim about Lost: Things have often proved to be much simpler than they first appeared to be. I’d like to explain what I meant by that. In the second hour of the pilot of Lost, Sawyer shoots a polar bear. The plane crash survivors are on what appears [...]
LOST: More or Less Than Meets the Eye
It’s been four days, so I’m going to have to finally give my reaction to the Lost finale. It’s been tough to know what I think. When I was watching the 2-hour episode, I was very emotionally satisfied, but I wasn’t expecting answers of any particular sort. At some point, I remember thinking, “They’re not [...]
Get What You Like, Like What You Get
There has been a lot of rabid discussion of Lost as the TV series winds down. There are tons of articles and blog posts, but this one piece by James Poniewozik is probably a perfect distillation of the discussion. (Maybe you also want to read this long interview with Cuse and Lindelof .) There’s a [...]
The Pacing of a Sequential Narrative
In just a few hours, the final season of Lost will begin. This is a great thing, marking a remarkable achievement in storytelling on television. In a couple of previous posts, I have mused about the challenges of telling a huge, sprawling story. And doing sequential narrative on television is even more challenging. (See How [...]
Watching Life on Mars
I 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 story over a sprawling landscape (e.g., the Harry Potter books, any number of comic books, etc.) Old school television is self-contained. Each week, a story is [...]