The fastest way to get me to completely lose interest in a TV show is when the showrunners call it a "10-hour movie". It gives off the impression that said showrunners don't know how to make a TV show, or that they're embarrassed to be working on one. I've kept it no secret that I'm dissatisfied with the direction television has been heading in over the years, and I finally wanted to talk about why.
The television medium is, in its nature, episodic. The brilliance of the format is that, even if the episodes come together to form a larger narrative, people can watch anything from one episode to an entire season back-to-back and still get some sort of satisfying experience. Whether it's in a strictly episodic procedural like Law And Order or a more continuity-driven epic like Breaking Bad, each episode needs to stand on its own with some sort of narrative or thematic throughline. Characters have to have a goal that is resolved by the end of the episode (whether or not they succeed in said goal may vary), and the episode itself should end in some sort of climactic moment that was built up to from the very start. There's this misconception that serialized TV is always inherently better, and while I seriously disagree (literally just watch The X-Files, the standalones are vastly superior), even if you prefer serialized television, there's no excuse for episodes to not tell their own entertaining stories. Viewers should be fulfilled after watching any episode of a TV show, and writers can be able to do this even if their show is fully episodic, fully serialized, or somewhere in between.
For example, The Sopranos is often regarded as one of, if not the first "prestige TV" show. People frequently compare it to a movie, and all of its episodes have a strong sense of continuity connecting them. However, there's not a single Sopranos episode that can't also stand on its own. There were experimental yet contained episodes like Pine Barrens and University, but even the grander and more plot-heavy episodes like Whoever Did This and Long Term Parking mostly focus on a single story, such as the burning point of a series-long rivalry in the former and a character's fight to survive in the latter. On the other hand, you get shows like the MCU shows where most of the episodes tend to blur together and watching weekly ends up leaving you unsatisfied. Kenobi was especially bad, the whole show felt like an overlong amorphous blob of a story since most of its episodes couldn't stand on its own (aside from the second one) and instead ended up seeping into the episodes that came before and after it. The poor structure also tends to negatively impact these show's final episodes, since they end up just feeling like generic third acts since the story is built more like a movie than a TV show.
Speaking of Star Wars, the show that really spurred this rant for me was Andor, an otherwise fantastic show with a structure so bad that I can't bring myself to enjoy it as much as I want to. The showrunner Tony Gilroy is a great screenwriter, he's good at what he does, but he's exclusively written for movies and it shows. Gilroy's plan to transfer his experience to Andor was to split the show into three-episode-long arcs, roughly the length of a standard movie. This isn't the only show to split itself into story arcs like this, hell it's not even the only Star Wars show to do so either, but having Andor be four 3-hour-long movies rather than a single 12-hour-long movie doesn't change the fact that its episodes still don't feel like individualized narratives. Of course, this is further exacerbated by the fact that Disney insists on airing each episode one at a time, making for a very unsatisfying weekly viewing experience.
It's especially frustrating because it's gotten to the point where I'm praising shows for being episodic. I shouldn't have to praise TV shows for being TV shows, but that's how bad things have gotten. I could highlight so many older shows as examples of how to tell a serialized story with individualized episodes. There's The X-Files and how it separates the Monster Of The Week and Myth Arc episodes. There's shows like Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Farscape which slowly build up their plot over the course of a season. There's shows like Avatar The Last Airbender and Person Of Interest, which get progressively more serialized in every successive season, once you get to know the show's world and characters. And there's shows like Babylon 5 and Deep Space Nine, which are mostly episodic but have plot-heavy episodes and short arcs every once in a while that whack the story in a new direction. But I think I want to highlight the two most recent shows I've watched since they came out somewhat recently.
Lycoris Recoil is an anime that aired in 2022, and I adored its structure. Anime tends to also have an issue with episodes blending together, especially if they're based off a serialized manga, but Lycoris Recoil being entirely original meant the series was made for the TV format, and every episode could stand on its own. Storylines ranged from "Chisato and Takina go shopping" to "Chisato and Takina stop an assassin", and yet every episode also slowly built up a more serialized story in the background. One of my personal favorite examples was an episode that started off innocent, with a storyline about the cast trying to save their cafe, only to end on one of the cruelest cliffhangers of the whole show. The episode built up to that cliffhanger organically, and the lighthearted money storyline made sure that the entire episode was memorable and not just the ending. And even the final few episodes all still had their own singular tales, like how the penultimate episode focused around the DA soldiers trying to get out of a tough situation. I would finish an episode of Lycoris Recoil and be satisfied with what I watched, but the serialized story would leave me excited to see what happens next. This is how a TV show should ideally be laid out.
But then there's The Leftovers, an utter masterclass of blending together serialized and episodic story-telling. Each season had its own overarching plot, but each episode still tells its own story. From Season 2 onward, pretty much half of each season is composed of mostly standalone and experimental character studies, yet they rank as some of the best in the whole show. More than most shows, each episode of The Leftovers doesn't just feel like a "tv episode", it feels like a film in its own right. I could watch any episode of this show, even the ones with cliffhangers, and be left feeling fulfilled. Sometimes, an episode was so intense that I flat-out needed to take a break from bingeing it. It's rare to see a show nowadays that doesn't encourage you binge it like a snack, The Leftovers encourages you to take and process every single episode on its own merits rather than race through the entire season to get your fulfillment.
Overall, television being episodic isn't a flaw with the medium, it's part of what makes it special. Whether or not a show is serialized or episodic, each individual episode needs to have something to make it stand out. If not, all of the show's episodes are going to blend together, and watching it weekly won't feel like a fulfilling or satisfying experience. You can have a show with a long, interconnected story, that's not the issue. The issue is in showrunners treating television like an entirely different medium. TV shows aren't movies, they're TV shows. Treat them as such.
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