Thought prompted by having watched way too much television at work this week: what we need are variable length television...
Thought prompted by having watched way too much television at work this week:
what we need are variable length television episodes. The entire problem with Law and Order is that, if they’ve found the bad guy and we’re only at minute 20, he’s not the bad guy. Even if it’s four minutes from the ending there’s probably still a twist coming, so someone is going to pull out a gun and/or jump out a window. You know everything you need to know about how an episode is going to play out just by looking at the clock.
Movies have this problem too. No, the protagonist isn’t going to die, we’re only 45 minutes in. No, their grand plan to crush the villain isn’t going to work, we’ve still got another hour that they’re going to have to fill somehow. Okay, this grand plan is going to work, because we’re down to eight minutes.
Reading a detective story or law story is pretty much the exact same problem - setup, obvious misdirection, apparent resolution that we know is a lie because we’re only halfway though the page count. I knew Harry Potter wasn’t dead because I could feel seventy more pages in my hand.
And that’s print, so we can’t fix it, but now that lots of people read on ebooks I’m astonished there’s not an app that lets authors set false endings and false lengths to their stories. And has no one recut Law and Order to be a thousand times less predictable just by virtue of not always lasting exactly 43 minutes plus commercial breaks? I would pay a lot of money for a Netflix-of-lies full of television episodes and movies of varying length and thus, for once, genuinely unpredictable.
Not sure this is solvable for movies* or books, but I think variable length tv is on it’s way in. British tv has always had, compared to the US more variation in episodes per series (often because of actor availability) and more variation show length between series, including season of the same show. They’re more willing to vary episode lengths within a show too, and it’s quite good for suspense like that trick where the extra long series finale resolves a bunch of plot threats unexpectedly quickly, leaving the viewer unbalanced, that works much better with an 85-minute episode or whatever than with a US style two part finale.
Anyway I’m fairly sure the reason British tv is so much more variable is that a) the schedules are more flexible b) miniseries are way more popular so people are okay with a Luther series of three 80 minute episodes or whatever it was. Netflix is even more extreme in terms of point a, and webisodes and minisodes are ramping up b, so the potential is there for good things on this front!.
*Well, it’s already somewhat solved for movies as a whole because standard running times have expanded so much: when I first started watching Hitchcock and Hammer Horror movies I would always get blind sided by the ending - it’s only been 90 minutes!
(and can’t you just turn off page count on your e-reader?)
Don’t think variable length will help much because no matter what the length is you’ll still be able to go “hey, there’s still 15 minutes/25%/wevs left”. You could do it if viewers watched blind to the length which I suppose could technically work on Netflix where you’re not tied to the “4 regularly spaced cliffhangers that keep people bound for 3 minutes worth of ads” model, but I don’t know how many people are going to be like “Ah, a new episode’s out! I know what I’m doing for the next 2 hours and/or 30 minutes and will be satisfied either way, and don’t mind that without a scrollbar to tell me I can only skip around through VHS-style FF/REW controls.”
You can kind of get away with stuff like that in movies - consider the fake happy ending to The Ring - because not that many people will be thinking “ah yes, this is 106 minutes long and my internal timer that I started after the previews and kept up the whole time I was sitting enthralled in a dark room says we’re only at 87”.
I think if anything the way to deal with this is to wield the audience’s genre/medium-savviness against it. Joss Whedon’s always been good at that but what was really a master class in the technique was the first two seasons of Veronica Mars. You’d be like “well, obviously that guy can’t be the perp behind the case-of-the-week because he’s clearly in the middle of a multi-episode character arc that would fuck up/a member of the main cast” and then an act or two later you’d be like “welp”.