It’s weird that for so long the prestige, “prime time” model of TV was basically character types in disconnected but formulaic...
It’s weird that for so long the prestige, “prime time” model of TV was basically character types in disconnected but formulaic vignette plots and “multi-episode plot arcs driven by changing character dynamics as plotted by a coherent creative team” was the degraded, low-status daytime “soap” form
People date the “Golden Age of TV” to The Sopranos but I think the key was reversing this and that started in the decade prior. By the time it debuted in 1999, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Xena: Warrior Princess already had a real reputation for that (and for playful writing with self- and genre-awareness, which was impressive when you consider they were both based around fight scenes); the X-Files was famous for balancing monster-of-the-week and broader series mythology.
You can see the progression in the Star Trek serieses - TOS was barely consistent from episode to episode; TNG had the Borg arc and recurring Q episodes but also the entirely abandoned Season 1 arc about corruption and betrayal in Starfleet; by DS9 they kicked off the series by plopping the station next to a blob of long-term plot and introducing elements – Sisko as Emissary of the Prophets – that didn’t resolve for seasons.
Maybe further back to the 80s, when this even became possible as shows staffed up their writers’ rooms enough to produce consistent work in-house rather than just taking freelance pitches and polishing them. Miami Vice was a breakthrough not just for the cinematic style and contemporary pop score but that it had elements of overarching plot – the hunt for Calderone, Sonny’s amnesia (how soapy!) – at all
Reblogging at a more reasonable hour because I originally woke up and wrote it down in order to get it out of my head and fall back asleep
Oh, something else important on the way was thirtysomething, clear progenitor to relationship dramedies like This Is Us, that was basically a 1987 My So-Called Life for adults, or at least Boomer yuppies
Also interesting are the false starts - the miniseries boom after 1977’s Roots revealed an audience for multi-episode narratives; the 80s “prime-time soaps” Dallas and Dynasty that didn’t have much episodic drive aside from the overarching plots.
I suppose we should also consider the soapy 90s youth dramas on Fox and the WB - 90210, Melrose Place, Dawson’s Creek. I’d say you really see some of the seeds of modern TV here – the shipping-bait plotting that seeped into action genres through things like Buffy, Smallville, and Supernatural; soliciting pop soundtracks from bands looking for breakthrough opportunities; The OC as a revival of the Dallas/Dynasty style prime time soap
I can’t believe I didn’t comment on this at the time. I agree with the thrust but would choose a slightly different set of things to focus on.
TV is heterogeneous, but the main thing that characterizes the “golden age” that is regarded as starting with the Sopranos is TV being able to beat “higher” narrative art forms (there’s a reason that the terms “novelic” and cinematic” were so often used in the 2000s) at their own game. In order to do this, the prestige show needed a way to handle theme that wasn’t “operative” theme implicit in the setting or drama (i.e. cop shows being about Law and Order) on an ongoing basis. The one neat trick is the development of a structure that allowed episodes to revolve around thematic cores where the threaded plots would weave in and out and characters (always the center of TV) could show the (mostly illusion of) progress necessary to support the “theme story.”
Obviously this is a dodge as the golden age contained lots of shows less focused on theme that nonetheless leaned on movie and book competitive elements like more elevated production, complex structures, metatextual elements, isolated episodes meant to function differently as a specific statement, and star performances. Remember, Supernatural is still on. But we are talking about this we tend to focus on the model of HBO, Lost and the ilk. The Petri dish experiment on this begins (as much as an ongoing process has a beginning) in the early 80s.
Swinging into the 80s, the nighttime soap format was the only serialized drama in existence. It contained threaded plotting but only bold genre based themes which weren’t exactly nuanced. Note: please take into account, as an influence, the idea that comic books at the time were getting pretty sophisticated at nurturing ongoing plot lines (see Claremont’s X-Men and Levtz’s Legion of Super-Heroes). There was also a 70′s TV, new-Hollywood influenced tradition at this time of “gritty” (scare quotes in this post means not really but trying to look like) procedurals. The first contributing recombination of the era was 1981′s Hill Street Blues followed quickly by 1982s St Elsewhere, both of which (HSB moreso) contained the differed plotting structure where elements would be introduced with less screen time, then nurtured into larger stories which could then become the A plot 2 months later. This is essentially the sentinel event for what would happen to TV over the next 20 odd years.
Miami Vice played with cinematic stylization as an addition to this formula, and several semi-serialized shows reverted back to more “standard” styles but at least tried to stay above the status level of nighttime soaps (most significantly LA Law, but you had your Thirtysomethings - tracing out all the recombining lines is beyond the scope, here). They were finding new formats, etc, but the airwaves were still dominated by well made episodic genre fluff (not a slam, Equalizer, sir, and Jessica Fletcher, mam).
There were several things that kicked things into the next developmental phase, the true pre-Golden, including Fox trying more daring counter programming and the opening up of syndicated markets with the increase of product hungry cable stations, but the biggest flashpoint was certainly when a guy who won an Emmy for his story work on Hill Street Blues met the man who is now the greatest living Film director to do a nighttime soap opera about the abject terror at the heart of America.
Twin Peaks is the clear breakpoint. The show was on for only 1.4 seasons, but it hit like an asteroid. Some of its impact was just opening up TV aesthetically and in terms of character type, tone, and subject matter, but the seismic shifts were in long game structure and robust subtext. It made a bunch of working TV writers realize they could do something like this and was a formative experience on the next generation. The X-Files is a significant mediator of this effect, but look at what happened to syndicated genre shows starting in 1993 or so - Babylon 5, Deep Space 9, even the Hercules affiliated shows. And there’s the lasting legacy of Homicide, maybe the first “novelic” approach to a TV procedural.
Buffy was crucial in learning how to Matryoshka-nest ongoing stories for periodic increasing payoff that matched the TV seasonal benchmarks. There was a lot going on rolling into 1999, even on HBO itself (we aren’t focusing on comedy, but as far as threaded stories/episodic thematics, Sex. and the City figured out how to upgrade the Dougie Howser model nicely). The Sopranos getting “credit” for starting the Golden Age is probably part Bloomian “strong misreading” (it simply hit people’s consciousness the hardest in therms of “this new thing is a thing”) and partly timing (the big eruption of good new network programming the rise of basic cable networks spending real money on original programming would start soon).
My timeline is 1981-90 - the classic network twilight years, with experimentation in mainstream channels forming interesting strains, but safe shows still dominant; 1990-9 - the pre-golden age, with explosive proliferation of ideas with a severe Darwinian load; 1999-2010 - the high Golden age dominated by the main networks, HBO, and individual basic cable shows (the Shield, BSG), ends with the last episode of Lost; 2010-2019 - the “prestige” era, dominated by a few big shows, and destruction of the monoculture, ends with the end of Game of Thrones; 2019-present - peak TV, characterized by glut and increased experimentation/niche servicing as a knockoff effect of the rise of streaming services needing content.