Shows like Heroes may give rise to new type of series – Guest Clack

Today’s guest clacker is Paul William Tenny, a frequent commenter here who runs a website called The Media Pundit, covering movies, TV, and other entertainment subjects.

I’m no television historian, but as a keen observer of emerging trends, the thing that piques my interest these days isn’t web-to-television series like Sanctuary or Quarterlife, or the resurgence in popularity (though not in numbers of shows on the air) of sitcoms; it’s the “one-off” series concept.

For any given idea, you’ve got a number of mediums that lend themselves to a certain method of storytelling. Some stories are best told in short form and end up as movies. Good book adaptations have too much happening, so you double down and end up with a miniseries. Open ended stories make good television series but are prone to exhaustion, especially serial dramas.

Is there a sweet spot?

Three series over the past few years have had varying levels of success in this area, although none of them were really trying to go in this direction.

Star Trek: Enterprise ran from September of 2001 through the spring of 2005. The last gasp of the old guard production staff — Rick Berman and Brannon Braga — took an avant-garde approach to the fourth season by introducing a season-long story arc that was interesting, if not compelling, but not enough to save the show from cancellation a year later. Irregardless of that specific attempt, and whether or not you think it was a creative success or failure, it’s a great example of how you can take a franchise that has been episodic for nearly three decades and forge it into a single story that takes an entire season to run its course via the one-off series concept.

On a smaller scale, a typical hour-long drama script might have a teaser — the lead-in that gives you a setup for the episode — and five acts. Each act has a purpose which I won’t go into here, but generally, you introduce the people and the problem, up the stakes, reach the climax, and then give the resolution. The one-off concept is remarkably similar in structure, just on a much larger scale. Rather than spending a single ten-minute act to introduce the obstacles and establish the goals, you can spend an entire episode much the way you might do with a series pilot.

The benefits should be immediately obvious. Stories that are too complex to tell in a single season can become epic in scale, allowing writers to concentrate on telling the story with natural pacing on a macro scale that the script structure itself often precludes.

A limit on how long the “big arc” lasts, on the other hand, can prevent exhaustion — the feeling that the resolution is never going to come, and the abuse of storytelling devices and methods like relying too heavily on cliffhangers, character turns, mystery replacing mystery, and other cheats. A sense of unlimited opportunity too often gives rise to bloated casts and overly ambitious goals resulting in half a season gone by and no real progress having been made.

Two other series come to mind that did everything right in the first season but were gasping for straws by the second, making you wonder if a single season was all they had and all they should have tried for. When I heard the synopsis for Prison Break, I was doubtful that it could be sustained over the long haul and dismissed it almost out of hand as a failure at the conception level. Pleasantly surprised would have really understated my reaction to the first season, and by the time the finale had aired, I felt like I had just witnessed one of the single best first seasons for any show that I’d seen in recent memory. That said, my initial criticism also turned out to be accurate. A series based around a prison escape can’t keep the characters in prison for the whole series, so once they’ve escaped, what else is there left to do?

Heroes is another good example, though struggling now, of a show that hit it out of the park with a nearly complete and stand-alone first season. This show is particularly well suited to the one-off method, and to a degree, has taken that approach by telling different stories in “volumes.” While I admire that approach and think there’s potential for great success, in this instance, having a good plan doesn’t always guarantee success. In the end, you’ve still got to produce something that people want to see.

What I’d like to see is a network with the guts to put a series on the air with the intention of only producing one season and then moving on. Given what it costs to produce a show, especially for the studio who depends on syndication and DVD revenue to cover production costs, I’m not even sure it’s economically feasible.

But it’s still worth it to try.

Clacked by Keith McDuffee
on Dec 10, 2008 @ 11:00 EST5EDT