Sometimes it really surprises me when I go back and watch older television shows. In my head I always tend to think that television has come a long way since I started watching it, and in some ways it has. CGI, for instance, took a noticeable leap forward in the 90s; just watch Star Trek: The Next Generation through and you can see where it happens. What I’m realizing now though is that the formula itself for most television hasn’t changed all that much. It’s starting to, but it’s only creeping forward a small bit at a time.
I’ve been kicking back and re-watching Sliders, and I’ve come to realize how difficult it is to marathon a show’s run the older it is. With the exception of sitcoms and, say, reality television, shows tend to start out by introducing the premise and then running with the ‘monster of the week’ formula. The shows that get popular enough almost invariably stray away from that security and start weaving in fairly intricate storylines.
Look at Supernatural. That was a show that went from a strict ‘every episode is an unconnected mystery’ to focusing more on an actual plot. You can probably pick a recent show and find the same thing with all of them. It’s just where television has gotten now: you hook the audience early on with episodes you can watch with no prior knowledge, and then go from there.
But man, back in the day? Apparently that idea hadn’t caught on yet. I’m a few episodes shy of the fourth season of Sliders and every single episode save one or two two-parters is a self-contained story. The overall theme that show has of trying to find their way back home rarely comes into play, and when it does it’s often in a quick dialogue exchange and then forgotten again. The bummer about that is if I keep watching (and I will) and find out an actual cohesive story starts to get told through season four and five it doesn’t really matter because I’m sitting right at the cusp of where most people say the show goes downhill.
It’s definitely something to think about. The problem might be the inability to hit a new kind of genre, like what seems to happen in other media formats, like music or video games. Take any genre of television show and chances are it has existed in one form or another since the dawn of the TV. Reality television feels like the newest, but even that has existed since the late 50s, and what most people think of as reality television today has existed since the 70s.
It makes for an odd sort of stagnation. A television show can play it completely safe, never pushing boundaries, and still be a complete success. With television it almost seems like the medium only grows as a whole when some genre show manages to break out into the mainstream, like Lost did.
Let’s be real here: That’s a kind of phenomenon that doesn’t occur often. Ask any average adult who isn’t a fan of science fiction to name their idea of popular science fiction shows, and you’re going to get answers like Lost, The X-Files, The Outer Limits, and The Twilight Zone. Lost is the most recent example of a show breaking out of its genre. The X-Files did it in the 90s, but both The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone were shows originally from the 50s and 60s. When it happens, it’s great. It gets people thinking in ways they never thought before. But even that becomes redundant after a while; The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits have been remade several times over.
I guess the issue is that there’s no real incentive for creativity, and huge penalties for failure. It costs a lot of money to make good television, and that’s really the bottom line. Networks want to make money off of their programs, and playing it safe is the best way to do it. There’s a reason why at any point in time you can find at least half a dozen police procedurals on air.
So let’s pose a real question here. Let’s say that you had the opportunity to make a television show. Let’s say budget isn’t an issue, and by some miracle you’ve been hired to make a fresh, amazing television show that can appeal to a mainstream audience. What would you do? What’s the television show you think should exist?
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