Covenant of the Arc
Sorry it's been so long since my last post- just been very under the weather for a few days
Lost is taking a break for a few weeks. I couldn't stay awake through the pilot for Daybreak (think Quentin Tarantino's Groundhog Day), but I can understand why the producers wanted a hiatus for Lost: The story arcs play out much better than when they keep looping back for reruns in the non-Sweeps months.
Arcs are a relatively new trend in prime-time TV. Time was that any given episode (except for the rare two-parters) were stand-alones, self-contained stories with no more relation to other episodes of the series than the characters and setting. This fit the old TV model, where the ultimate goal of every producer was syndication: The show is rerun for perpetuity and the royalties keep rolling in. This didn't apply to the soaps, which kept producing new episodes every weekday- in fact, their strength was in their long-running storylines for an audience which kept tuning in every day.
Being sold to various stations in various markets, one couldn't assume that they would be played in the original order (or orders- depending on how extensive the post-production was many shows were aired in a different order than what they were filmed in). Then again many stations did show the episodes in order, so it couldn't have been that difficult. Nevertheless, the prevailing wisdom was to make the episodes stand-alones, rather than trailing storylines from one week to the next. Maybe they didn't want to risk having the audience thinking about the story threads when we were supposed to be fascinated by the mystery of a husband asking for a second cup of coffee.
Like any rule there were always some exceptions, such as a lead (irreplaceable) actress getting pregnant. These small mini-arcs never seemed to hurt a show's profitability in syndication. If anything they helped to identify even more with our fictional neighbors on the other side of the tube. The longer storylines gave the characters more dimension than they would have had in the usual shorter stories.
Also, the TV hour has been steadily contracting. Back in the 60s we could get over 50 minutes of show per hour; now it's down around 45 minutes- including credits. There were only so many plots that could play out in such a limited time, and we had seen them all numerous times, in the eternal reruns of syndication...
And so slowly, tentatively the producers began running sub-plots stretching from week to week- though the main plot still tended to be resolved in one episode. Every year Buffy the Vampire Slayer would face a different Big Bad, with the season building to a climactic battle against it. Even the stand-alone episodes often had some link to the season's Big Bad.
Of course if the week-to-week storylines become too complex and intertwined there is a danger that new viewers may tune out before they can catch up with What Has Come Before. I've heard several people complain that they couldn't get into Babylon 5 because so much of what was happening in a given episode had been set up over the course of several previous chapters.
These days a fair balance seems to work best for most shows. We're not totally lost if we tune in in the middle of the season, there's always the helpful "Previously on..." clips to catch us up on the important story threads. It makes for better stories, deeper characters and even makes suspension of disbelief easier when every problem or crisis can't be solved in one hour.
Lost is taking a break for a few weeks. I couldn't stay awake through the pilot for Daybreak (think Quentin Tarantino's Groundhog Day), but I can understand why the producers wanted a hiatus for Lost: The story arcs play out much better than when they keep looping back for reruns in the non-Sweeps months.
Arcs are a relatively new trend in prime-time TV. Time was that any given episode (except for the rare two-parters) were stand-alones, self-contained stories with no more relation to other episodes of the series than the characters and setting. This fit the old TV model, where the ultimate goal of every producer was syndication: The show is rerun for perpetuity and the royalties keep rolling in. This didn't apply to the soaps, which kept producing new episodes every weekday- in fact, their strength was in their long-running storylines for an audience which kept tuning in every day.
Being sold to various stations in various markets, one couldn't assume that they would be played in the original order (or orders- depending on how extensive the post-production was many shows were aired in a different order than what they were filmed in). Then again many stations did show the episodes in order, so it couldn't have been that difficult. Nevertheless, the prevailing wisdom was to make the episodes stand-alones, rather than trailing storylines from one week to the next. Maybe they didn't want to risk having the audience thinking about the story threads when we were supposed to be fascinated by the mystery of a husband asking for a second cup of coffee.
Like any rule there were always some exceptions, such as a lead (irreplaceable) actress getting pregnant. These small mini-arcs never seemed to hurt a show's profitability in syndication. If anything they helped to identify even more with our fictional neighbors on the other side of the tube. The longer storylines gave the characters more dimension than they would have had in the usual shorter stories.
Also, the TV hour has been steadily contracting. Back in the 60s we could get over 50 minutes of show per hour; now it's down around 45 minutes- including credits. There were only so many plots that could play out in such a limited time, and we had seen them all numerous times, in the eternal reruns of syndication...
And so slowly, tentatively the producers began running sub-plots stretching from week to week- though the main plot still tended to be resolved in one episode. Every year Buffy the Vampire Slayer would face a different Big Bad, with the season building to a climactic battle against it. Even the stand-alone episodes often had some link to the season's Big Bad.
Of course if the week-to-week storylines become too complex and intertwined there is a danger that new viewers may tune out before they can catch up with What Has Come Before. I've heard several people complain that they couldn't get into Babylon 5 because so much of what was happening in a given episode had been set up over the course of several previous chapters.
These days a fair balance seems to work best for most shows. We're not totally lost if we tune in in the middle of the season, there's always the helpful "Previously on..." clips to catch us up on the important story threads. It makes for better stories, deeper characters and even makes suspension of disbelief easier when every problem or crisis can't be solved in one hour.
Lost Fanatic
Day Break TV
Passionate Apathy
On Buffy for example, we usually wouldn't need a clip showing us that Spike was a vampire; that was usually made clear in the episode itself.