Most episodic shows tell two stories simultaneously. One deals with fictional characters. The other is the narrative's slow evolution under the pressure of desperate producers and harried writers.
The second story demonstrates that the history of a TV series, like the history of a nation or an art movement, falls into four periods - primitive, classic, baroque and decadent.
In the primitive stage the audience is unconvinced that the show will matter and the people producing it aren't so sure, either. When Flashpoint went on the air last summer, it spent far too much time explaining itself... It's now well into the classic period, confident about what it's doing and how to do it.
To see the baroque sensibility on TV, consider the extensive ornamentation built into House, the most popular U.S. scripted series last season. The parallels with Sherlock Holmes are a clear example...
The decadent era begins when writers lose interest in their themes and try to maintain audiences by concocting steadily more outlandish storylines. One of the attorneys in the law firm of McKenzie, Brackman on the program L.A. Law (1986-1994) was a divorce specialist famous for seducing his clients and all other available females. A scriptwriter had him fall through a ceiling in the office while shagging his secretary. Amusing, but it turned comedy into farce and drained reality from the character - as Happy Days did in 1977 when Fonzie rode water skis over a Seaworld shark, making "jump the shark" a term for a program reduced to terminal silliness. (In 1997 a website, jumptheshark.com, began chronicling self-destructive TV shows.
As a program's fourth or fifth season ends, alert viewers often notice that a frantic quality invades the scripts. Writers are running short on ideas just when they're trying to squeeze another season out of a somewhat worn concept. They reach for increasingly dubious themes and put the main characters in deeper and deeper jeopardy.
As a slightly-outsider, viewer perspective, of course, Fulford misses the full on sturm and drang terror that results from most series that never get out of that primitive phase, and the fact that as a series goes on, it's often one person either way that can forestall or speed up the descent into baroque and decadent.
And it's wonderful to talk in terms of years. But there are series (ones that he might have even mentioned) that are still primitive places fighting for every inch of beach when all looks fine-o on the screen-o. Such is the faerie business we toil in. It's nice to think of the writers either sparking or indulging themselves, but the collaborative nature of TV means that the whole village has a hand in it.
Oh, and not to tell tales out of school, but we all can recall, I believe, one or two series that started straight at the baroque phase and never, ever, ever looked back...
Tomorrow: A guest post! Aren't you lucky!!!
1 comment:
even though he put in quotes, I think the fact that such an early adapter as Robert Fulford uses the phrase "jump the shark" in his article means that that phrase has well, crossed over a tank full of carnivorous ocean dwellers on a motorcycle, or for House fans,"hallucinated a Cuddy tryst".
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