Like many in the last couple of weeks, I’ve been watching and enjoying Netflix’s latest show, “Stranger Things.” A homage to 1980s sci-fi and horror stories like “E.T.,” “The Goonies,” “It” and “Predator,” among many others, the Duffer Brothers’ show might not have an original thought in its head, but it’s also eminently watchable and deeply satisfying, repackaging its myriad influences into something that feels fresh, pulling it off with real love, and filling it with surprisingly well-executed character beats.
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It also feels like a rarity even among the wealth of great TV of late in that it doesn’t outstay its welcome. Coming in at only eight episodes, most of which are around the 50-minute mark, it seems to have just the right amount of story, leaving you wanting more, rather than feeling that the show had been spinning its wheels for much of the runtime. In the era of binge-watching and so-called peak TV, it feels like worryingly few showrunners have real expertise in how to tell a story on a macro level: So many series have been found wanting in their plotting and pacing.
Heavily serialized TV drama, which is what most people think of when they think about the Second Golden Age Of Television, is something that didn’t really exist before about 20 years ago. Early TV dramas like “Bonanza” were highly episodic, designed to be accessible even if you hadn’t seen a single installment before. The exception were soap operas like “General Hospital,” “As The World Turns” or “Guiding Light.” But these weren’t telling one complete narrative. They were essentially perpetual story generators, aimed at homebound audiences and designed to keep you watching every episode without any risk of conclusion.
The arrival of the miniseries in the 1970s saw more self-contained narratives appear, but they were limited in length, a few hours at best. And serialized elements would eventually start to creep into procedural cop or medical shows — “Hill Street Blues” and “St. Elsewhere” were the pioneers, but these days even a “CSI” or “NCIS” will have recurring storylines.
The march towards the current prominence of serialization began in the early 1990s. “Twin Peaks” might not have been the first show to include an overarching mystery plot, but its short-lived period as a national obsession opened up the possibilities of much more macro-plots, and shows like “Homicide,” “Buffy The Vampire Slayer” and especially “The X-Files” mixed case-of-the-week stories with broader storylines or mythology, and gained cult followings as a result.
And not long before the century turned, “The Sopranos” arrived (building on the legacy of “Homicide” and “Oz”), a show that felt more like cinema than television, and which told, essentially, one story over a number of years, rather than being an open-ended factory of narrative, as most of the others were. And the increasing prevalence of DVRs, and the ability to buy or rent DVD boxsets of shows (VHS boxsets were available, but too bulky to be much good to anyone) in the early ’00s, encouraged shows that were focused on serialization, including “24,” “Lost,” “The West Wing,” “Heroes,” “The Shield” and ‘The Wire,” among others.
These shows became big hits and pop-cultural obsessions (aided by coming of age alongside the internet, where they could be debated ad nauseam), but as David Auerbach’s piece “The Cosmology Of Serialized Television” pointed out, most were still something of a halfway house, what he calls the Expansionary Model. “As long as the show continues, no resolution can ever be final. The show’s story simply enlarges, with new plot elements and characters injected into it,” he wrote.
With networks keen to hang onto a hit, many of these shows might have had a story to tell, but commercial demand meant that it got dragged out. Famously, much of the cast of “Lost” spend half a season in a bamboo dungeon because Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse weren’t sure what else to do with them. Jack Bauer will stop a terrorist plot, but face yet another one around the corner. Buffy will defeat one villain, only to face a more fearsome baddie later on.
The explosion of Netflix and similar streaming services have changed the landscape even further. With people bingeing shows, or at least often watching them in batches of two or three episodes at a time, even comedies are serialized, and shows are often described as “10-/13-hour movies” rather than anything as old-fashioned as a “TV show.”
In general, the business has been disrupted. Movie stars flock to TV looking for their own “True Detective,” but won’t commit to longer runs, meaning the old 22-episode norm is all but dead, in favor of 13, 12, 10 or eight-episode seasons (the influence of UK TV and their brief runs shouldn’t be underestimated: Every comedy creator seems to want to echo the two-seasons-and-done approach of Ricky Gervais‘ “The Office”). And while there’s some element of catch-and-release plotting — Walter White/Dexter/Brody does something bad, nearly gets caught, gets away by the skin of his teeth — they tend to be envisioned as stories with beginnings, middles and ends. If fact, some, like “Mr. Robot” or “Vinyl,” were originally movie scripts.