Scott: It's my sincerest hope that the miss-a-week-it-doesn't-matter shows will eventually become more the exception than the rule, though we're still far from that ideal. I haven't watched a minute of any of those CBS procedurals—Without A Trace, Cold Case, CSI, etc.—but their dominant ratings are undeniable, so they won't be going away any time soon. Now that shows can be watched in so many different ways (on the Internet, on DVRs, on DVD), the playing field has been leveled substantially for serials, because even if you decided to do something else with a given evening, it's possible to catch up with an episode (or every episode) and not lose the thread. For me, the "something to watch" philosophy is annoyingly passive. I've come to expect more from the shows I follow. I'm more forgiving of comedies that don't advance from week to week than dramas, because it's frustrating to see characters who are left unaffected by the things that have happened to them. Shouldn't sifting through dozens upon dozens of grisly crime scenes every week eventually have an impact on the lives of the CSI investigators?
A prime example for me is House. I respect House. I think it's an entertaining show, and I don't begrudge those who tune in every week, because I can never tear myself away from an episode once I've started watching it. And yet I stopped watching it after season one, because little ever changed: Every week, it was SSDD—Same Shit, Different Disease. Which is a shame, because the House character, so brilliantly played by Hugh Laurie, would probably have a lot to offer if we were ever given the opportunity to witness him evolve over time. I haven't seen the Lost episode you mention, but as a general rule, I'm wary of "placeholder" episodes in serialized shows, even as I acknowledge that they're probably necessary over the long haul. This year's season of Battlestar Galactica is a good case in point: The first four episodes, set on the besieged colony of New Caprica, were as good as any in that show's stellar history—tense, purposeful, and politically audacious in their references to the Iraq occupation. Then once things returned to normal and everyone was back on the ship, the momentum quickly slipped away. Having watched a couple of "placeholder" episodes—including a real stinker involving a pilot we've never seen miraculously reappearing and then disappearing forevermore—I currently have the final eight episodes languishing on my DVR, and haven't worked up the interest to watch them. That's the danger of serialized shows: Like sharks, they have to keep moving or they die. The trouble is, if the writers don't know when they're going to reach their final destination, such wheel-spinning is unavoidable.
All that said, the novel-on-film ideal isn't really all that rare any more, and we're watching it happen with The Wire, The Shield, and The Sopranos—all shows that keep building on seasons past and working off an accumulated history. I just blew through the fifth season of The Shield over the weekend, and the entire arc of that season is staked on an event that happened in the very first episode of the first season, when a cop killed another cop who was trying to infiltrate his crew and expose them for corruption. And we don't have the bandwidth to get into The Wire, which has evolved into the greatest novel-on-film ever produced, and regularly plants minor details in one episode that will pay off several episodes or even seasons down the line. The Wire will wrap up its run after the fifth season next year, and it definitely feels like it was intended to last precisely that long. Most shows don't have the luxury of planning far in advance exactly when they're going to get cancelled.
To bring this back to the main thread, I think 12-episode seasons are just about right, because it's too much of a challenge for a show to maintain quality control over twice as many episodes. It can be exhausting for viewers, too: 24 would lose its real-time gimmick if it were cut in half—though at least poor Kiefer could get a little sleep—but 24 hours of nonstop action and twists sounds a lot more appealing than it turns out to be. I applaud my current favorite Friday Night Lights for stretching out quite comfortably across a full season, but even that fine show has to plug in melodramatic subplots (a bipolar girlfriend! the MILF next door and her precocious imp of a son!) that I'm guessing would be dropped if it had only 12 episodes to fill. While I can sympathize with the major networks' need to fill out a much larger and more commercial schedule than its cable counterparts, I think there's room for experimentation with serialized shows with a finite endpoint. Consider them "maxi-series": Instead of a four-hour miniseries over two nights, how about trying a six- or 12-hour maxiseries over a series of weeks with no breaks between them where you forget about everything that happened? I'm guessing that networks could attract big-name talent this way, too, because they wouldn't have to commit to the purgatory of a long run on television. Had they been forced to commit to more than one glorious season apiece on The Shield, do you think Glenn Close or Forest Whitaker would have signed on? Probably not.
At the beginning of this Crosstalk, you cited a number of recent films—Wild Hogs, Norbit, Ghost Rider, and 300—that opened to blockbuster numbers during a part of the movie year generally reserved for less promising box-office fare. I think you're right to observe that the industry is changing, and there's no reason that can't happen with network television, which all but shuts down during the summer months. I wonder whether there's still much logic to everyone releasing their shows at once. Granted, there's something exciting about spending a few weeks separating wheat from chaff, but I wonder if a modest, critically acclaimed show like Friday Night Lights would have received a better shake had it come out after the storm, when there's less competition for press and promo space. Again, I'm sure TV executives have their reasons, but the medium is more viewer-controlled now than ever, and it's worth rethinking how viewers might like to receive their programming.
Here's a challenge for you, Noel: Pretend you've just been hired as a programmer at a major network. How would you do things differently? I know you get excited about the start of a new TV season (please, please share with us your TV Guide-aided planning ritual), but has its time passed?
Noel: Wow, I'm in charge! I feel like the Barefoot Executive.
You raise an interesting point about Friday Night Lights, though I'm not sure I agree with you about the timing of its première. Not everyone reads magazines—or websites, ahem—so a large part of the TV audience finds out about new shows by watching TV. That's why NBC can justify spending millions of dollars an episode to keep something like Friends on an extra year, because it brought eyes to the set, where those eyes were exposed to promos for new NBC shows. (Not that it helped much back then, when the network's programming was at a low ebb.) Given that, I think the networks could do a better job with staggering returning shows and new ones—maybe by unveiling each one a month apart or so, to make them more of an event.
Also, I'm with you in thinking that it's time for the networks to stop building around "the new fall season." As it is, we already end up with a slew of midseason replacements, and as series like American Idol and 24 have proven, it's possible to keep an audience's attention even if a show is only airing four months out of the year. Why not stay on that course? Let the seasons follow the seasons: fall, winter, spring, and maybe even summer, with 12- to 15-episode runs in each. Maybe the nets could run a new set of shows each season, or maybe some shows could run two seasons a year.
Of course, that's pie-in-the-sky talk, and doesn't take into account special events like the Oscars or the Olympics, which pre-empt shows. Nor does it consider the new shows that get cancelled early, leaving holes in the schedule. (In my version of TV reality, all series would get to run at least 12 episodes.) But it would be an interesting experiment, and make the premières of new shows feel special again, like they did when I was a kid, and—as you've embarrassingly remembered on my behalf—I'd ritually pore over the Fall Preview issue of TV Guide, ballpoint pen in hand.
At the least, I'd like to see networks start treating serialized dramas and cult shows a little differently than they do the Datelines and CSIs, which draw viewers no matter when they air. A lot of the success of The Closer on basic cable is due to the fact that TNT has aired several Closer marathons, catching people just looking for something to watch on a Saturday afternoon, and bringing them up to speed in a single day. Other TV critics and bloggers have made this suggestion, but it would be great if networks devoted Fridays and Saturdays to running mini-marathons of their serialized shows, giving audiences a chance to immerse themselves a little, like they do with TV-on-DVD. These are expensive assets, and it's a shame how carelessly they get thrown away. Because who knows? The characters in today's quick-to-the-ashcan serial could be the people that America can't wait to tune in for every week—or at least 12 to 15 weeks out of the year.
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