How Television and Storytelling are Changing

It used to be that characters never changed in television shows.  To tell the truth, nothing really ever changed in old shows, except for the fact that the cast got older and therefore maybe had one or two new problems to deal with because of it, but never anything significant.  The way a show used to be written was that the main character(s) would be presented with a problem, and, by the end of the show, they had solved it and they were pretty much right back where they were at the beginning of the episode.

In fact, it is a widely known fact amongst TV writers that this is exactly how the producers and executives wanted it.  Formulas such as this allowed them to play episodes out of order if they so chose--the studio people could grab any episode they wanted off the shelf without thought and just play it, utterly unconcerned with whether or not they were playing them out of order, because, well, it didn't matter.

But those days of willy-nilly episode play are over.  Now, rather than episodic story play, we have a wider, overarching storyline and we get "installments" each week of a certain saga.  Take your pick of just about any major TV show out there: The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, Lost, 24, Revenge, Hell on Wheels, Breaking Bad, Mad Men...the list goes on and on.

All of these shows have one thing in common: you practically cannot just jump in the middle of them and know what's going on.  If you miss one episode, you're bound to be lost.  This is in stark contrast to, say, Knight Rider or The Incredible Hulk.  Sure, Bruce Banner would wander into a new town each week and meet new people and have a new adventure, but by the end of each episode he was back on the road again, with his thumb hitching a ride, just like always, and if you missed that episode, well, never fear, it had absolutely no bearing on next week's episode.

The new trend in television has given us lots of positive changes, a new "Golden Age" of storytelling in television programming, yielding a higher quality of writing than once was expected.  However, there are a few cons to these pros. 


An Expected Ending
This new template of TV storytelling presents us with something we never had in TV shows before the late 90's: a conclusion.  As George R.R. Martin put it, "We're getting more shows that feature an actual continuity, and such shows beg for a solution, or resolution to some ongoing conflict."

This brings with it a problem: expectation.  In short, there is absolutely no way that the writers of Battlestar Galactica could have resolved all that they had set up.  In order to keep an audience, the writers were forced to infuse every moment of that show with drama, and it couldn't be done for one hour every week for several seasons just by fighting Cylons.  The writers had to give the characters other things to do to keep up the momentum, and this included complicated relationships between friends, family, and lovers.  This also included a whole ordeal about a complicated (and, by the end, convoluted) prophecy involving an Opera House that in the end really had nothing to do with much of anything at all.

Lost suffered the same problem.  Though I'm sure there are some people who enjoyed the ending of that series, every single person I know, from casual fans to die hards, were supremely disappointed in Lost's resolution.  Too many questions had been raised over several seasons, and for every question they answered, three or four more were asked by the end of each episode.  There was no conceivable way to resolve that story...except maybe one way.

The only way to possibly resolve such stories is to make sure you have an ending in mind before you start writing the stories.  As a writer, and as someone who has met numerous writers in my life, I can tell you that it's easy to conjure up mysteries and questions that create drama, but it's far more difficult to create satisfying answers to those mysteries.

This is why the Doctor Who series does well--since they've been on the air for 50 years and are a staple of BBC television, they have the advantage of knowing they're not going to be cancelled, and so can "map" their series way ahead of time, come up with a solution to what the Doctor is dealing with, and "retro-write" the previous scripts to conform to the ending they came up with, so that everything is order before they begin shooting.  This way, everything fits and makes sense when the season/series finale arrives.


Evolving Characters
A positive change that came with this new kind of storytelling is that characters finally change.  In The Walking Dead, we saw several characters go from good to bad, and from bad to good.  We saw the old man Hershel evolve, going from believing that the undead were just sick people who needed to be cared for to believing, as Rick and the others do, that they're already dead and are just waiting to be finished off.  In Breaking Bad, we've seen both Walter and his wife start down the slow, slippery slope of criminal life.

In Magnum, P.I., Tom Selleck's eponymous character never made these changes.  He wasn't allowed to.  The gods of television didn't permit that to happen back then, because the thought was, "If the audience started tuning in because they liked Magnum's character, why in the world would we change him?" 

This might have made a certain kind of sense back then, but audience appetites have changed significantly in recent decades.  The kinds of books we like have a saga-like flow, and from Harry Potter to the Lord of the Rings, audiences have shown that they greatly prefer it when they are allowed to have an investment in a variety of characters, to see them change, die unexpectedly, and finally, hopefully, find some resolution.

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