Around the dial

I think we'll open the scoring this week at the A.V. Club, where Kayleigh Dray makes a plea to return to the 20+ episode season. (And standalone episodes!) This was, of course, the norm in the classic TV era, and there are sensible reasons why it would be a good idea today.

At bare•bones e-zine, the Hitchcock Project turns to the first of two Richard Fielder teleplays for the hour-long edition, the first being "Night of the Owl," based on a novel by Andrew Garve, with Brian Keith, Claudia Cravey, and Patricia Breslin. A novel fits in very well to the hour-long format, as you'll see from Jack's review.

A few weeks ago, Hal started a deeper look at the 1965-66 ratings for F Troop, and now he's back with part two, looking at the 1966-67 season. Did the move to 8:00 p.m. ET on Thursday night have an effect on the show's ratings? Is it true that F Troop had better ratings than I Dream of Jeannie, Star Trek, The Wild Wild West, and The Monkees, among others? Tune in and find out.

At Cult TV Blog, John's latest series focuses on the idea that The Prisoner's Number 6 (Patrick McGoohan) was actually a plant, not a prisoner. This week, we see him apply this theory to the episode "The Chimes of Big Ben," one of the series' more puzzling episodes. Does the theory still hold up? 

We don't often talk about "seasons" when it comes to a Saturday morning cartoon; most of them just kept running the same episodes over and over. But Star Trek: The Animated Series wasn't your average Saturday fare, and this week's The View from the Junkyard looks at the second season opener, "The Pirates of Orion."

I was watching an episode of Rawhide on MeTV the other day; it's not a series I usually watch, but I had nothing better to do at the time, and the print was so clear, it was hard to believe that the series is now celebrating its 65th anniversary. Terence looks back at the show's history this week at A Shroud of Thoughts.

Good news from Martin Grams: the second volume of The Lone Ranger: The Radio Years is due for publication this year. Volume one, written with Terry Salomonson and covering the early years (1933-37), came out a few years ago; volume two covers the years 1938-42. Stay tuned for more details.

At The Lucky Strike Papers, Andrew has a story that isn't TV related, but it bears reading nonetheless. A woman named Maureen Flavin Sweeney died December 17th last, aged 100. You've probably never heard of her, but the role she played in D-Day is extraordinary. Read it to find out another of those footnotes that make history so interesting.

Finally, Glynis Johns died last week, also at the age of 100. At Classic Film and TV Corner, Maddy has a look back at her remarkable career in the theater, movies, and television. Quite a career; quite a lady. TV  

Around the dial

Let's start things off this week at bare-bones e-zine, where Jack's Hitchcock Project moves to the first of two scripts by Lou Rambeau: "Hangover," from December, 1962, starring Tony Randall and Jayne Mansfield. While I'm offended that it features an alcoholic whose first name is Hadley, it sounds like a terrific, sinister episode.

At Realweegiemidget, Gill goes all the way back to 1981 and the glory days of prime time soaps, with the first episode of Falcon Crest, "In His Father's House," with Jane Wyman, Robert Foxworth, Susan Sullivan, and Lorenzo Lamas heading a cast that never, in the show's nine seasons, would lack for big names.

We've discussed the ABC Movie of the Week many times here; it remains a popular topic among classic TV fans, and at Classic Film & TV Café, Rick looks at one of the more unusual entries in the series: Goodnight, My Love, Peter Hyams' neo-noir starring Richard Boone and Michael Dunn, with Barbara Bain as the femme fatale and Victor Buono as Sidney Greenstreet. Talk about great casting!

At Comfort TV, David makes me envious with his look back at close encounters with classic TV stars. It's an impressive list—I'm going to make you go over there and read it, because I don't want to pick and choose names—and I wish I could relate some experiences like that. I've seen many over the years, but the only one I've ever talked with was Gary Lockwood, who was very conversational.

John continues his series on 1980s TV at Cult TV Blog with a review of The Chinese Detective, and if you know anything about British TV and still don't remember this, it's because it's virtually impossible to find. Read what John has to say about this British-Chinese detective (David Yip) who has to battle both crime and racism on the mean streets of London's east end.

Here's the kind of story I enjoy: at the Washington Post, Benjamin Dreyer writes on HBO's reimagined Perry Mason, and the difficulty the series sometimes has with making sure the dialogue is period-authentic. I wrote about a similar article several years ago regarding Mad Men; it's another way we see the eternal challenges of viewing the past through the prism of the present.

What does Rod Serling mean to you? That's the question that Paul's asking at Shadow & Substance, with a story on efforts to erect a statue of Rod Serling in his hometown of Binghamton, NY—and how you can help. I submit it for your approval.

I've poked fun at television's attempts in the late 1960s and early '70s to be "with it"; sometimes, as in a series like Judd for the Defense, tackling current issues worked, but more often, the attempts were wince-inducing. Terence looks at the 1970-71 season at A Shroud of Thoughts, and finds that "relevant" TV didn't particularly translate to "successful" TV.

Finally, at TVParty, Cary O'Dell writes about those shows that went just one season too many. For some it will be a painful reminder of a favorite show that went, in Cary's words, "off the rails," while other examples will just confirm what you knew all along. In any case, it proves the old adage that you should always leave them wanting more; I hope we don't outstay our welcome here! TV  

The long and the short of it

A while back, I was reading a thread—I think it was on Twitter—that asked a simple question: Would you start watching a show knowing that it was had already been cancelled? I was particularly interested in someone who replied that, sure, if there was a final episode that provided a resolution, they'd watch, but if the series ended without a resolution, they wouldn't even start. (Coronet Blue would, I suppose, be the preeminent example of the kind of show they're talking about, although that didn't prevent it from becoming a cult classic.)

What interests me the most about this conversation is that it highlights how much television watching has changed over the decades. Many people today never knew, or don't remember, the days when most television series consisted of self-contained episodes, with stories that began and ended within the episode. If the story was really big, it might rate a two-parter, or in rare cases even a three-parter, but that was about it. No, today's television viewers are used to a series that is essentially one very long episode with a story that begins with the first episode and ends with the last episode, at which time the question which has been with us since the beginning comes to a resolution. Of course, real life often isn't quite that neat; there are many, many things over the course of a lifetime that are never resolved or are so inconsequential (a meal is cooked and consumed, the dishes are cleaned and put away) that they would never work as a series-long story arc. Our modern-day desire for "closure" can result in a great deal of frustration, because that's not the way life is.

Although it wasn't the first series to have a final episode, when it comes to wrapping up the storyline, most people think of The Fugitive, and Dr. Richard Kimble's elusive search for the one-armed man who had killed his wife, while he in turn is being hunted by Lieutenant Gerard, the man who wants to return him to death row. You'd think that perhaps the ending to this saga had been written at the very outset, but it hadn't; in fact, Quinn Martin had to be talked into providing an end for the series. He feared that doing so would damage the show's prospects in syndication—who would want to watch it when they already knew how it would end? This is precisely the opposite way of thinking from that which we saw in that Twitter thread, but times change.

(By the way, one of the things that made The Fugitive's final episode unique was that it came not at the end of the first-run cycle of episodes, in May or June, but in August, after the rerun season had concluded. The final episode of The Fugitive was, in fact, the final episode, and it was an extraordinary way to end the series. And it happened because Quinn Martin needed to be convinced to do it, which meant a conventional airing date of May/June wasn’t possible, and the network decided to go with the next best thing. Still, you have to admit that even if it was accidental, it was a stroke of genius, a felix culpa.)

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In replacing episodic television with increased serialization, it's sometimes said that the new way of looking at things is more realistic, allowing for an opportunity to explore the story in more depth, more detail. Now, I'll grant that the traditional episodic form of a series such as, let's say, Perry Mason, can leave something to be desired; an attorney who specializes in trial law can hardly be expected to try 30+ cases a year. We didn't really think about that, though; we relied on being entertained for one hour each week by Perry and his latest case and didn't try to fit it all into some larger puzzle. (Hopefully, Peacock's new hit Poker Face can help revive, at least in some cases, the idea of contained episodic television.)

A series like this didn't need a final episode, because there was no overarching theme that required resolution. It was just a series of snapshots of a very successful attorney's life, and if you were willing to overlook the flaws inherent in the construction of said series, it was a template that could be applied to the lives of most of us; life was simpler back then. As I said, real life isn't nearly as neat as television can make it out to be. In that way, Coronet Blue was probably more realistic than we'd like to admit; Michael Alden didn't have any guarantee that he'd ever figure out what "Coronet Blue" meant, any more than Dr. Kimble was guaranteed he'd find the one-armed man. By being more realistic, television can also be less realistic, and if you can figure that out, then you're way ahead of the game. Life also isn't always lived on an epic scale; I'm nearly 63 and I'm still waiting to figure out what my storyline is. 

One of the other trademarks of the new television (if we can call it that) is the shorter number of episodes in a season. Back in the day, the average television season for a series could consist of anywhere between 28 and 39 episodes; today, somewhere between ten and 12 is more likely. Thanks to the miracles of modern technology, viewers can binge-watch an entire season over a weekend, and can catch up on a long-running series over a few weeks. This makes sense on a couple of levels; if your series is going to tell a unified story that has a beginning, a middle, and an end, you've got to make it digestible for the viewer. Watching the whole season in two or three days makes the story more cohesive, easier to remember and follow, without the writers having to spend time recapping the story or using clumsy techniques to remind us of what's going on.

It's also said that writing and production quality can be higher when resources don't have to be stretched as far as they did over the course of a long season, and it's probably easier to get big-name stars to commit to longer arcs that it used to be (although one of the pleasures of the classic era was in seeing a big-name star appearing in a one-off guest spot, and in the age of the self-contained episode that was usually good enough). In the pre-VCR era, the reruns gave you the chance to catch up on what you might have missed during the regular season, which made the 52-week season practical in more ways than one—it kept the show foremost in the mind of the viewers, keeping them poised for the show’s return during the always exciting Premiere Week in September.

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But let's go back to The Fugitive for a minute. There were 120 one-hour episodes of The Fugitive 4(an average of 30 per season), and but through the course of those 118 stories that led up to the final two-parter, a tremendous amount of suspense built up. Yes, we knew that our hero would escape the clutches of Lieutenant Gerard, or whatever ham-fisted local policeman happened to have Kimble in his sites, but that didn’t prevent the viewer from experiencing the sense that Kimble was on a type of epic journey, an Odyssey if you will, crisscrossing the country in search of a goal so elusive that it was only the occasional glimpse of the one-armed man that convinced Kimble it wasn’t all just a dream. The Harrison Ford big-screen version of The Fugitive was swell and all, terrific on its own terms, but it all happened just too fast; it lacked that sense of ordeal that Kimble had suffered. If The Fugitive were made today, I wonder; could this sense of time and journey, could the epic nature of it all, have been done in just 30 or 40 episodes?

Maybe it could—The Prisoner ran for just 17 episodes, after all, and yet created one of the most bizarre worlds television has ever seen, one that left viewers and actors alike utterly exhausted when it was done. Had the series lasted longer than it did, I’m not sure anyone could have stood it. For it to have come back for a second season would have been ridiculous. There’s a key difference, though, one that might help answer the question, at least in part. Number 6 (or John Drake, if you prefer) was never someone we actually were supposed to know; it was the enigmatic quality of the show that made it work in the first place. The Fugitive, on the other hand, succeeded precisely because of our ability to know and trust Kimble, to believe that he was innocent of his wife’s murder, and to put our rooting interest in his escape from authority. Therefore, while brevity was an asset to The Prisoner, familiarity was essential to The Fugitive.

So there are the requirements for today's successful television series: it needs to tell a serialized story with a beginning and end, and it will probably run for about a dozen episodes. In that respect, modern television most closely resembles the old miniseries, a genre that was hugely popular but, at its peak, ruled for a relatively short period of time. The original concept of the miniseries was to tell a story in an epic amount of detail, far more than could be handled in a traditional movie (even a three-hour or two-part movie), but a story that nonetheless fell short of filling the space necessary to occupy a multiseason series. Rich Man, Poor Man was a huge success at 12 episodes of varying lengths (the sequel was somewhat less successful, possibly because it was written entirely for television); Roots, at eight consecutive nights, was a success beyond all expectation and triggered an avalanche of miniseries, from Shogun to Holocaust to The Winds of War and the incredibly ambitious War and Remembrance. What these all had in common was that they had literary sources, were of limited duration, and told stories that had finite endings.

Today's modern series, with the beginning, middle, and end, have copied the MO of the miniseries, but with the advantage that they’ve not limited to one six- or eight-week season, but can keep coming back for years and years. The drawback to this, as anyone who’s read the original source material for shows such as, say, Game of Thrones, is that the book generally runs out of material before the series runs out of time (or, in the case of GOT, isn't even written yet). 

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You could call this the long and the short of the new television: longer storytelling, stretched over an entire series; and shorter seasons, designed to be compatible with the new storytelling.

What we’re missing, I think, is a commitment to our favorite show as viewers, and a concurrent commitment by those shows to us. There was something comforting to being provided with a guaranteed hour of entertainment at the same time every week all year long, save an interruption or two for specials or something unexpected. Yes, as I said at the outset, not all of them were winners, but a lot of them were pretty good, and most of them were at least entertaining. At the end, they usually gave you what they wanted, which was all we usually asked from our shows. The summer season, when some of the series went off the air to give prospective new series a tryout, was what brought shows like The Prisoner to American television in the first place.

Sometimes I think too many television shows today try to operate on too grand a scale, as if every episode was the second act of Tosca, where the diva gets to sing the show-stopping aria before plunging the dagger into the chest of the villain, thus setting the stage for the grand finale. That kind of emotion is unsustainable over a protracted season, one reason for the truncated seasons. But not every series needs to be Tosca; sometimes it's enough to simply provide, as my friend David Hofstede calls it, Comfort TV. We burn through a season a weekend and look for more, we catch up on a decade's worth in a month, we text and talk and our attention spans grow ever shorter, and then we wonder why our comfort turns to indigestion. TV  

The long and the short of it

More, as we know, is not always better; in the immortal words of Captain Kirk, “Too much of anything, Uhura, even love, isn’t necessarily a good thing.” And so it’s understandable how, as Ben Lindbergh pointed out in this recent article at The Ringer, there are some definite positives in the continued shrinking of the average television season. That season, which once ran as long as 39 episodes for some series, now averages about 12 or 13, and that’s just an average, mind you; it can be even shorter for some. Given this culture’s proclivity for binging nowadays, that means that, whereas most dramatic series of the ‘70s used to combine new and repeat episodes to fill out an entire 52-week calendar run, today’s short-run series can be wrapped up over a weekend, leaving avid viewers with 51 weeks (at least) to wait before the story picks up again.

In 1967, when Quinn Martin decided to bring to a conclusion Dr. Richard Kimble’s four-year chase after the one-armed man, The Fugitive chose a unique way in which to wrap up the series.* The final episode came not at the end of the first-run cycle of episodes, in May or June, but in August, after the rerun season had concluded. The final episode of The Fugitive would, in fact, be the final episode. It was an extraordinary way to end the series, and one which viewers would never stand for today. Or maybe they would – when you consider the hype that series like Mad Men and The Sopranos were able to create over the final half-season, imagine what an enterprising network could to do promote a one-off (or, in the case of The Fugitive’s final two-parter, a two-off) finale.

*It’s possible that, given the relative lateness with which the decision to end the series was made, a conventional airing date of May/June just wasn’t possible, and the network decided to go with the next best thing.

There are, to be sure, a few clunkers in the 120 episodes that comprise the original run of The Fugitive (an average of 30 per season), but through the course of those 118 stories that led up to the final two-parter, a tremendous amount of suspense built up. Yes, we knew that our hero would escape the clutches of Lieutenant Gerard, or whatever ham-fisted local policeman happened to have Kimble in his sites, but that didn’t prevent the viewer from experiencing the sense that Kimble was on a type of epic journey, an Odyssey if you will, crisscrossing the country in search of a goal so elusive that it was only the occasional glimpse of the one-armed man that convinced Kimble it wasn’t all just a dream. The Harrison Ford big-screen version of The Fugitive was swell and all, but it all happened just too fast; it lacked that sense of ordeal that Kimble had suffered. I wonder – could this sense of time and journey, could the epic nature of it all, have been done in just 30 or 40 episodes?

Maybe it could – The Prisoner ran just 17, and yet created one of the most bizarre worlds television has ever seen, one that left viewers and actors alike utterly exhausted when it was done. Had the series lasted longer than it did, I’m not sure anyone could have stood it. For it to have come back for a second season would have been ridiculous. There’s a key difference, though, one that might help answer the question, at least in part. Number 6 (or John Drake, if you prefer) was never someone we actually were supposed to know; it was the enigmatic quality of the show that made it work in the first place. The Fugitive, on the other hand, succeeded precisely because of our ability to know and trust Kimble, to believe that he was innocent of his wife’s murder, and to put our rooting interest in his escape from authority. Therefore, while brevity was an asset to The Prisoner, familiarity was essential to The Fugitive.

These are just two examples, the long and the short of it you might say, but they do raise interesting points about the relative merits of long vs. short television seasons. There’s another aspect to this which Lindbergh mentioned only in passing in his fine article, which I think bears a paragraph or two, and that’s the miniseries. The original concept of the miniseries was to tell a story in an epic amount of detail, far more than could be handled in a traditional movie (even a three-hour or two-part movie), but a story that nonetheless fell short of filling the space necessary to occupy a multiseason series. Rich Man, Poor Man was a huge success at 12 episodes of varying lengths (the sequel was somewhat less successful, possibly because it was written entirely for television); Roots, at eight consecutive nights, was Roots was a success beyond all expectation and triggered an avalanche of miniseries, from Shogun to Holocaust to The Winds of War and the incredibly ambitious War and Remembrance. What these all had in common was that they had literary sources, were of limited duration, and told stories that had finite endings.

Speaking of which: television's approach to storytelling has changed dramatically over the past decade or two. Whereas the classic structure of a season involved a series of self-contained episodes, with the odd two-part storyline but otherwise with no particular order from episode to episode or (barring cast changes) even season to season, this gradually evolved to encompass story arcs that covered multiple episodes (Wiseguy and Crime Story were two of the first series I can remember to successfully utilize this technique, although I'm sure there are other examples), cliffhanger endings that left viewers guessing as to how the next season would begin (effective especially if certain cast members were up for contract renewals), and eventually serialized storylines more reminiscent of soap operas than anything else. With these new constructs providing less and less flexibility in terms of the shape a series takes, it's easy to see why a shorter season might look more attractive.

Today's modern series all seem caught up in providing a finite ending as well, suggesting the existence of one final episode that promises to tie all loose ends together. In other words, they’ve copped the MO of the miniseries, but with the advantage that they’ve not limited to one six or eight week season, but can keep coming back for years and years. The drawback to this, as anyone who’s read the original source material for shows such as, say, The Man in the High Castle, Orange is the New Black, and House of Cards is that the book generally runs out of material before the series runs out of time. House of Cards, for example, is actually the first book of a British trilogy (the other two titles being To Play the King and The Final Cut). When it was made into a TV series (which appeared in the United States on Masterpiece Theatre), it was over three series, each one bearing the name of the book which it adapted. I don’t know what season the U.S. version of House of Cards is in now.

So where have we gotten from this shorter season mania? It is true, as Lindbergh points out, that writing and production quality can be higher when resources don’t have to be stretched as far as they did over the course of a long season. It is also true, in all likelihood, that it is easier to get big-name stars to commit to longer arcs that it used to be, although one of the pleasures of the classic era was in seeing a big-name star appearing in a one-off guest spot, and in the age of the self-contained episode that was usually good enough. In the pre-VCR era the reruns gave you the chance to catch up on what you might have missed during the regular season, which made the 52-week season practical in more ways than one – it kept the show foremost in the mind of the viewers, keeping them poised for the show’s return during the always exciting Premiere Week in September.

What we’re missing is a commitment to our favorite show as viewers, and a concurrent commitment by those shows to us. There was something comforting to being provided with a guaranteed hour of entertainment at the same time every week all year long, save an interruption or two for specials or something unexpected. Yes, as I said at the outset, not all of them were winners, but a lot of them were pretty good, and most of them were at least entertaining. At the end, they usually gave you what they wanted, which was all we usually asked from our shows. The summer season, when some of the series went off the air to give prospective new series a tryout, was what brought shows like The Prisoner to television in the first place

Sometimes I think too many television shows today try to operate on too grand a scale, as if every episode was the second act of Tosca, where the diva gets to sing the show-stopping aria before plunging the dagger into the chest of the villain, thus setting the stage for the grand finale. That kind of emotion is unsustainable over a protracted season, one reason for the truncated seasons. But not every series needs to be Tosca; sometimes it's enough to simply provide, as my friend David Hofstede calls it, Comfort TV. We burn through a season a weekend and look for more, we catch up on a decade's worth in a month, we text and talk and our attention spans grow ever shorter, and then we wonder why our comfort turns to indigestion.