Last night I was dealt a remarkably lousy couple of hands by my favorite reality television programs (Kahlen and Vonzell were both ROBBED), so I was very happy to discover that the new episode of Lost was terrific, a real corker both in the flashbacks and on the island. In discussing it a bit at work today, it occurred to me that it’s unbelievable that a network television show is still raising more questions than it’s answering this deep into the season (next week’s two-hour episode is the season finale). That is very ballsy indeed. Now, you can already see some of the stupider TV critics and writers getting attention-span fatigue and complaining about the lack of “resolution” (ecch, ptooey), but there does seem to be an audience for this type of multi-tiered, complex, teased-out storytelling, which is enormously uplifting. And I think this phenomenon is getting much less rare since the advent of The HBO Original Series. Pre-Sopranos, you could probably count the examples of this type of show throughout the entire history of television on one hand with room left over; the only ones I can think of are Twin Peaks, (and from here on out I’m just telling you what I been told; never watched these series) Homicide, Wiseguy, and maybe Hill Street Blues and, if you credit the “mythology” episodes and ignore the standalone enigma-of-the-week ones, The X-Files.
There are probably several reasons for this relative renaissance, the most obvious one being that The Sopranos was a big hit, and the desire to make David Chase bucks made the suits a little more willing to take a chance on series that don’t have an immediate episode-to-episode payoff. But I wonder if new technologies like TiVo and DVDs aren’t also playing a major role in how narrative fiction is developing on the tube, insofar as they’re making complex series economically feasible in ways they didn’t used to be. Back in 1990, a show like Twin Peaks could make a huge splash, but if it demanded too much week-in week-out attention from its viewership, network pressure to make the show accessible (in Peaks‘s case by revealing whodunit) would quickly kill what was special in the show, if not kill the show outright. Nowadays viewers, and more importantly executives and producers, know that it’s easy enough to “catch up” by hitting a few buttons on your DVR or renting the first season through Netflix. Perhaps we can expect the complexity of televised fiction, even on the benighted networks, to expand accordingly.
I only recently realized that television has the potential to construct the same sort of growing, organic, expansive worlds that the best serialized comics can. Why aren’t there more shows like Love & Rockets (Jaime Hernanez’s Locas, Gilbert Hernandez’s Palomar), or like a really great superhero-title run (Brubaker & Philips’s Sleeper, Bendis & Maleev’s Daredevil, Morrison’s New X-Men, to name but a few)? YMMV on each of those examples (though few people can get away with saying they care for neither Gilbert nor Jaime), but as networks discover that the money is in fact there to be made, the ability of serialized narrative to do long-lasting layered storytelling is a source of strength that TV is only beginning to tap into.
POSTSCRIPT: I’ve been informed that the book Everything Bad Is Good for You by Steven Johnson addresses similar issues; you can find a debate between Johnson and Slate’s TV critic Dana Stevens here. Note that Johnson too picks up on the advantages TiVo and DVDs present to demanding storytelling, though he focuses only on the fact that these enable viewers to avoid the distraction of commercials.