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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
How to tell a big story on TV.
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 [...]