What's really interesting about serial storytelling right now, is that the individual episode/issue is no longer a complete story that returns to status quo. Very few television shows can get away with not having an on-going storyline that spans a full season. I think this trend started with JMS's Babylon 5, but even sitcoms (the swirling vortex of commodified art) have been forced over to the model due to audience expectation.
This means that, although they do usually try to go on forever, each season is its own 'unit' of storytelling. You can sit down and watch Season 4 of Buffy and enjoy a complete story. There are even planned shows that are only supposed to last a set number of seasons, shows like Babylon 5 or The Sheild. The exception that prooves the rules is The X-Files, which was supposed to only go for five years, but Fox and Chris Carter didn't have the artistic integrity to stop when they should have.
In effect, seasons of television shows have turned into what comics (mainstream ones, at least) have been doing for years. They have individual story arcs that rely on a previous knowledge of characters, concept, and premise, but are self-contained. Even more interesting, and pushing this model further and further, is the (erroneously named) Trade Paperback, which collects 3, 4, or 6 issues in a single volume, and tends to sell so well that artists have already started writing storylines that are for more self-contained so that said volumes read as a single story. Several series, League of Extraordinary Gentlement, Powers, The Ultimates, have started labeling their books with volume numbers that denote those individual story arcs.
The whole business is still, well, a business. It's extremely commodified, but then it always has been, hasn't it? The upshot, though, is that we're moving to an older form of storytelling that matches, for example, the Victorian periodical (If I wanted to be really hyperbolic, I could even go back to the medieval Troubador or the many poets who comprise Homer, but that's a bit much).
I don't know if this is 'good' or 'bad,' but I do think that it creates an atmosphere of extreme intimacy between audience and art, and often a false sense of intimacy with the artist(s), too (several friends of mine refer to their favourite writers by first name: Joss, Neil, Alan, Joe). This is an intimacy that can be exploited for the purposes of making money, but it can also be exploited for the purposes of making the audience pay more attention to a story that is a bit more complicated than 22 or 44 minutes of television can provide, or for that matter a single issue.
Posted by orion at June 24, 2005 12:22 PM | TrackBack