Serialized dramas

[dougo]

The New York Times says that there's a glut of serialized dramas on TV (link from a comment on urbaniak's journal). I have to agree—I'm watching 12(!) of them currently: Studio 60, Heroes, What About Brian, The Unit, Lost, Jericho, The Nine, Survivor (yes, I think this counts), Six Degrees, Battlestar Galactica, Kidnapped, and Vanished. I was also watching Smith, but that got cancelled after 3 episodes. I used to watch 24, but I got tired of it in the middle of season 3 (but I've heard it's gotten better since then), and I would like to watch Prison Break but I missed the beginning of the series and haven't gotten around to catching up. These are all good shows (and Smith was not even the weakest), but the problem is that people don't have time to watch all of them, don't want to come in in the middle of the story, and don't want to commit to a show that might get cancelled without finishing the story. It's an embarrassment of riches, in some ways, but the way broadcast television works is just kind of a broken model for this sort of thing. I'm somewhat surprised that there hasn't been a series released direct to DVD (or download) yet, but it's not clear that that model is economically viable either. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out, though I'm not optimistic.

Comments

[mshonle.livejournal.com]

I was thinking just this week that we might be in a golden age of television. Movies today kindof suck, and TV has gotten much better. Right now, it's profitable to do good shows like House and Battlestar. But if more and more people just download shows like me, they'll need to go for a different model. The end result might be more mini-series: things that are only meant to be 13 episodes or so and never anything more. The quality would probably be great, but I'd miss having something that could span the years.