\n\n\n\n\n\nThought prompted by having watched way too much television at work this week:\u00a0
what we need are variable length\u00a0television episodes. The entire\u00a0problem with Law and Order is that, if they\u2019ve found the bad guy and we\u2019re only at minute 20, he\u2019s not the bad guy. Even if it\u2019s four minutes from the ending there\u2019s 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.\u00a0
Movies have this problem too. No, the protagonist isn\u2019t going to die, we\u2019re only 45 minutes in. No, their grand plan to crush the villain isn\u2019t going to work, we\u2019ve still got another hour that they\u2019re going to have to fill somehow. Okay, this grand plan is\u00a0going to work, because we\u2019re 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\u2019re only halfway though the page count.\u00a0\u00a0I knew Harry Potter wasn\u2019t dead because I could feel seventy more pages in my hand.\u00a0
And that\u2019s print, so we can\u2019t fix it, but now that lots of people read on ebooks I\u2019m astonished there\u2019s 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? \u00a0I 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.\u00a0
Not sure this is solvable for movies* or books, but I think variable length tv is on it\u2019s 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\u2019re more willing to vary episode lengths within a show too, and it\u2019s 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.\u00a0
Anyway I\u2019m 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\u2019s 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\u2019s only been 90 minutes!
(and can\u2019t you just turn off page count on your e-reader?)
Don\u2019t think variable length will help much because no matter what the length is you\u2019ll still be able to go \u201chey, there\u2019s still 15 minutes/25%/wevs left\u201d. You could do it if viewers watched blind to the length which I suppose could technically work on Netflix where you\u2019re not tied to the \u201c4 regularly spaced cliffhangers that keep people bound for 3 minutes worth of ads\u201d model, but I don\u2019t know how many people are going to be like \u201cAh, a new episode\u2019s out! I know what I\u2019m doing for the next 2 hours and/or 30 minutes and will be satisfied either way, and don\u2019t mind that without a scrollbar to tell me I can only skip around through VHS-style FF/REW controls.\u201d
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 \u201cah 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\u2019re only at 87\u201d.
I think if anything the way to deal with this is to wield the audience\u2019s genre/medium-savviness against it. Joss Whedon\u2019s always been good at that but what was really a master class in the technique was the first two seasons of Veronica Mars. You\u2019d be like \u201cwell, obviously that guy can\u2019t be the perp behind the case-of-the-week because he\u2019s clearly in the middle of a multi-episode character arc that would fuck up/a member of the main cast\u201d and then an act or two later you\u2019d be like \u201cwelp\u201d.
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