Don't forget season story arcs: Wiseguy, Buffy: The Vampire slayer, Prison Break, etc.
http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/features/just-what-is-a-television-season-anyway.php
This past week,
AMC announced that it will split
Mad Men’s seventh and final season into two 7-episode increments to air in 2014 and 2015, similarly to the way that
Breaking Bad
has been careening to its much anticipated yet seemingly breathless
finale. On the one hand, this represents a business move that exists
anywhere between shrewd and shameless, but one that is unlikely to anger
fans who would be happy to follow Don and Roger well into the disco
era, even if they’re ultimately only getting one extra episode as a
result of the wait.
But the decision has convincingly been perceived as an
act of desperation
on behalf of a network whose two brand-making critical darlings of
original programming will soon see their end, with no surefire successor
to take their place (perhaps
Low Winter Sun should create a crossover story with
The Killing). But what I find most striking about this decision is the fact that, perhaps more so than any recent quality cable show
, Mad Men has done of great deal of work to identify itself through – and, in the process, help to define – what a
television season means in the age of binge-viewing. By separating each season by discrete gaps in the historical procession of time,
Mad Men
has overtly defined each of its seasons as characterized through
changes in its characters’ associations, lives, relationships,
locations, business affiliations, etc. So, will each “part” of
Mad Men’s final season take place in a separate year?
More importantly, does this mean that, in the supposed
golden age
of cable drama, we’re returning to a notion of the “season” as an
antiquated, purely contractual term, rather than an important
organizational principle for our experience of a long-term story?
While scripted American television programming has always been
divided into seasons (1950s sitcoms, for instance, had in excess of
thirty episodes per season between summer breaks), because television
was almost never been packaged and distributed for everyday commercial
use for the majority of its existence, the notion of a television
“season” was largely a trade term used to describe a show’s longevity,
the order of episodes, and to denote the terms for greenlighting and
contracts. Seasons, in other words, have rarely been conceptual tools
for an audience’s experience of a long-running program.
While television programs became commercially available during the
1980s on VHS (usually in “best-of” packaged forms, but also as
full-seasons for the rare devotees), it’s hard to say exactly when a
television’s season became a regular evaluative term used in popular
vernacular. My money would be somewhere between
Happy Days, whose final seasons inspired the term “jump the shark”;
Miami Vice, a show whose story arcs were fastidiously tracked by fans; and, of course,
Twin Peaks,
whose short life-span and deflating mid-second-season-reveal inevitably
created first v. second season verbal fisticuffs amongst its
unprecedented cult following.
- See more at: http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/features/just-what-is-a-television-season-anyway.php#comments
This past week,
AMC announced that it will split
Mad Men’s seventh and final season into two 7-episode increments to air in 2014 and 2015, similarly to the way that
Breaking Bad
has been careening to its much anticipated yet seemingly breathless
finale. On the one hand, this represents a business move that exists
anywhere between shrewd and shameless, but one that is unlikely to anger
fans who would be happy to follow Don and Roger well into the disco
era, even if they’re ultimately only getting one extra episode as a
result of the wait.
But the decision has convincingly been perceived as an
act of desperation
on behalf of a network whose two brand-making critical darlings of
original programming will soon see their end, with no surefire successor
to take their place (perhaps
Low Winter Sun should create a crossover story with
The Killing). But what I find most striking about this decision is the fact that, perhaps more so than any recent quality cable show
, Mad Men has done of great deal of work to identify itself through – and, in the process, help to define – what a
television season means in the age of binge-viewing. By separating each season by discrete gaps in the historical procession of time,
Mad Men
has overtly defined each of its seasons as characterized through
changes in its characters’ associations, lives, relationships,
locations, business affiliations, etc. So, will each “part” of
Mad Men’s final season take place in a separate year?
More importantly, does this mean that, in the supposed
golden age
of cable drama, we’re returning to a notion of the “season” as an
antiquated, purely contractual term, rather than an important
organizational principle for our experience of a long-term story?
While scripted American television programming has always been
divided into seasons (1950s sitcoms, for instance, had in excess of
thirty episodes per season between summer breaks), because television
was almost never been packaged and distributed for everyday commercial
use for the majority of its existence, the notion of a television
“season” was largely a trade term used to describe a show’s longevity,
the order of episodes, and to denote the terms for greenlighting and
contracts. Seasons, in other words, have rarely been conceptual tools
for an audience’s experience of a long-running program.
While television programs became commercially available during the
1980s on VHS (usually in “best-of” packaged forms, but also as
full-seasons for the rare devotees), it’s hard to say exactly when a
television’s season became a regular evaluative term used in popular
vernacular. My money would be somewhere between
Happy Days, whose final seasons inspired the term “jump the shark”;
Miami Vice, a show whose story arcs were fastidiously tracked by fans; and, of course,
Twin Peaks,
whose short life-span and deflating mid-second-season-reveal inevitably
created first v. second season verbal fisticuffs amongst its
unprecedented cult following.
- See more at: http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/features/just-what-is-a-television-season-anyway.php#commen
This past week,
AMC announced that it will split
Mad Men’s seventh and final season into two 7-episode increments to air in 2014 and 2015, similarly to the way that
Breaking Bad
has been careening to its much anticipated yet seemingly breathless
finale. On the one hand, this represents a business move that exists
anywhere between shrewd and shameless, but one that is unlikely to anger
fans who would be happy to follow Don and Roger well into the disco
era, even if they’re ultimately only getting one extra episode as a
result of the wait.
But the decision has convincingly been perceived as an
act of desperation
on behalf of a network whose two brand-making critical darlings of
original programming will soon see their end, with no surefire successor
to take their place (perhaps
Low Winter Sun should create a crossover story with
The Killing). But what I find most striking about this decision is the fact that, perhaps more so than any recent quality cable show
, Mad Men has done of great deal of work to identify itself through – and, in the process, help to define – what a
television season means in the age of binge-viewing. By separating each season by discrete gaps in the historical procession of time,
Mad Men
has overtly defined each of its seasons as characterized through
changes in its characters’ associations, lives, relationships,
locations, business affiliations, etc. So, will each “part” of
Mad Men’s final season take place in a separate year?
More importantly, does this mean that, in the supposed
golden age
of cable drama, we’re returning to a notion of the “season” as an
antiquated, purely contractual term, rather than an important
organizational principle for our experience of a long-term story?
While scripted American television programming has always been
divided into seasons (1950s sitcoms, for instance, had in excess of
thirty episodes per season between summer breaks), because television
was almost never been packaged and distributed for everyday commercial
use for the majority of its existence, the notion of a television
“season” was largely a trade term used to describe a show’s longevity,
the order of episodes, and to denote the terms for greenlighting and
contracts. Seasons, in other words, have rarely been conceptual tools
for an audience’s experience of a long-running program.
While television programs became commercially available during the
1980s on VHS (usually in “best-of” packaged forms, but also as
full-seasons for the rare devotees), it’s hard to say exactly when a
television’s season became a regular evaluative term used in popular
vernacular. My money would be somewhere between
Happy Days, whose final seasons inspired the term “jump the shark”;
Miami Vice, a show whose story arcs were fastidiously tracked by fans; and, of course,
Twin Peaks,
whose short life-span and deflating mid-second-season-reveal inevitably
created first v. second season verbal fisticuffs amongst its
unprecedented cult following.
When television shows were introduced on DVD in full-season form in
the late ‘90s and early 2000s (a more workable contrast from rows upon
rows of VHS tapes), the television season thus developed a standard
market value that turned it into a prime category for media consumption.
That combined with DVR, Internet fanbases, and
“complex” (yet
aimless)
TV narratives made for a framework through which viewers began to watch
television programs largely in terms of seasons in place of individual
episodes. The notion that we (assuming “we” are non-industry folk)
widely think of television in terms of seasons is basically old enough
to drive a car right now.
While that doesn’t seem like much in face of a form of media that has
operated commercially for over sixty years, the effect has been
significant: with the advent of the season as a dominant category for
regular television consumption, programs became separated from their
broadcast contexts. “Television” became no longer an ephemeral signal
through space, but a collection of packages owned in physical or digital
form. This is something that Nielsen is
literally just now figuring out.
This is why AMC’s decision to air
Mad Men as a divided final
season is more significant than an example of a network whose future
reputation conspicuously being evaluated. The foregrounding of the
“season” helped define American television viewing in the 21st century.
Engage with a friend in a conversation about
Breaking Bad,
Homeland,
Dexter,
The Walking Dead, or
True Blood,
and the term inevitably comes up as a site of contention, competition,
and correspondence around the water cooler. It’s the way you know what
not to spoil. And let’s not forget, a person’s favorite season of
The Wire
can tell you a lot about them, especially if you’re on a first date.
(Here’s a tip: if you want to make an impression, say the second, partly
because it’s provocative but mainly because it’s the right answer.)
Sure, the logic of splitting up seasons is something of a result of
the de-centering of television away from television. As exemplified by
Netflix, a TV season is now hardly more than
a designated block of time. And nearly a decade ago, HBO first popularized this practice by splitting up the final seasons of
Sex and the City and
The Sopranos,
respectively. This process blatantly pushes DVD sales, assists in
negotiating with streaming venues, and builds a show’s audience if it’s
popular enough to warrant the split. It also probably creates the most
long-term benefit for networks from cast and production contracts and
shooting schedules. And it’s the exact type of thinking that’s informed
nearly every recent final entry in a beserkly-successful franchise
adaptation of a long-running book series, from
Harry Potter to
Twilight to
The Hunger Games. But as television already operates in a
serial format, and seasons are no longer bound to the calendar year, perhaps such divisions are more natural.
Yet at the same time, this splitting of seasons threatens to return
the notion of the notion of the “TV season” to its largely contractual
definition and away from its use as an accessible, shared point of
reference for engagement with and evaluation of the show.
The ritual value of television has been so thoroughly structured
through correspondence centered on the season that networks’ attempts to
capitalize on final seasons potentially threaten the coherence that
enabled the modern phenomenon of obsessive TV viewing in the first
place. “Seasons” are the units by which we’ve tracked the evolution of
Walter White from Mr. Kotter to Scarface.
And
Mad Men, whose seasonal division has explicitly organized
the show’s content and its ambitious timeline, has in a more
demonstrable fashion been both an essential product of this overall
process and an important perpetuator of it. If Season 7, Part 1 takes
place in 1969 and Season 7, Part 2 takes place in 1970, then these two
airings will be, in effect, “separate seasons” in terms of the ways we
will experience them, talk about them, and consume them as an audience,
even if they’re the “same season” in AMC’s contractual and trade terms.
Will this disjointed approach to the season drastically alter the way
we talk about TV? We’ll adapt, no doubt, but it’s worth noting that
perhaps networks are the last to realize that the “season” has become a
term that’s no longer exclusive to television’s production side.
- See more at: http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/features/just-what-is-a-television-season-anyway.php#comments
This past week,
AMC announced that it will split
Mad Men’s seventh and final season into two 7-episode increments to air in 2014 and 2015, similarly to the way that
Breaking Bad
has been careening to its much anticipated yet seemingly breathless
finale. On the one hand, this represents a business move that exists
anywhere between shrewd and shameless, but one that is unlikely to anger
fans who would be happy to follow Don and Roger well into the disco
era, even if they’re ultimately only getting one extra episode as a
result of the wait.
But the decision has convincingly been perceived as an
act of desperation
on behalf of a network whose two brand-making critical darlings of
original programming will soon see their end, with no surefire successor
to take their place (perhaps
Low Winter Sun should create a crossover story with
The Killing). But what I find most striking about this decision is the fact that, perhaps more so than any recent quality cable show
, Mad Men has done of great deal of work to identify itself through – and, in the process, help to define – what a
television season means in the age of binge-viewing. By separating each season by discrete gaps in the historical procession of time,
Mad Men
has overtly defined each of its seasons as characterized through
changes in its characters’ associations, lives, relationships,
locations, business affiliations, etc. So, will each “part” of
Mad Men’s final season take place in a separate year?
More importantly, does this mean that, in the supposed
golden age
of cable drama, we’re returning to a notion of the “season” as an
antiquated, purely contractual term, rather than an important
organizational principle for our experience of a long-term story?
While scripted American television programming has always been
divided into seasons (1950s sitcoms, for instance, had in excess of
thirty episodes per season between summer breaks), because television
was almost never been packaged and distributed for everyday commercial
use for the majority of its existence, the notion of a television
“season” was largely a trade term used to describe a show’s longevity,
the order of episodes, and to denote the terms for greenlighting and
contracts. Seasons, in other words, have rarely been conceptual tools
for an audience’s experience of a long-running program.
While television programs became commercially available during the
1980s on VHS (usually in “best-of” packaged forms, but also as
full-seasons for the rare devotees), it’s hard to say exactly when a
television’s season became a regular evaluative term used in popular
vernacular. My money would be somewhere between
Happy Days, whose final seasons inspired the term “jump the shark”;
Miami Vice, a show whose story arcs were fastidiously tracked by fans; and, of course,
Twin Peaks,
whose short life-span and deflating mid-second-season-reveal inevitably
created first v. second season verbal fisticuffs amongst its
unprecedented cult following.
When television shows were introduced on DVD in full-season form in
the late ‘90s and early 2000s (a more workable contrast from rows upon
rows of VHS tapes), the television season thus developed a standard
market value that turned it into a prime category for media consumption.
That combined with DVR, Internet fanbases, and
“complex” (yet
aimless)
TV narratives made for a framework through which viewers began to watch
television programs largely in terms of seasons in place of individual
episodes. The notion that we (assuming “we” are non-industry folk)
widely think of television in terms of seasons is basically old enough
to drive a car right now.
While that doesn’t seem like much in face of a form of media that has
operated commercially for over sixty years, the effect has been
significant: with the advent of the season as a dominant category for
regular television consumption, programs became separated from their
broadcast contexts. “Television” became no longer an ephemeral signal
through space, but a collection of packages owned in physical or digital
form. This is something that Nielsen is
literally just now figuring out.
This is why AMC’s decision to air
Mad Men as a divided final
season is more significant than an example of a network whose future
reputation conspicuously being evaluated. The foregrounding of the
“season” helped define American television viewing in the 21st century.
Engage with a friend in a conversation about
Breaking Bad,
Homeland,
Dexter,
The Walking Dead, or
True Blood,
and the term inevitably comes up as a site of contention, competition,
and correspondence around the water cooler. It’s the way you know what
not to spoil. And let’s not forget, a person’s favorite season of
The Wire
can tell you a lot about them, especially if you’re on a first date.
(Here’s a tip: if you want to make an impression, say the second, partly
because it’s provocative but mainly because it’s the right answer.)
Sure, the logic of splitting up seasons is something of a result of
the de-centering of television away from television. As exemplified by
Netflix, a TV season is now hardly more than
a designated block of time. And nearly a decade ago, HBO first popularized this practice by splitting up the final seasons of
Sex and the City and
The Sopranos,
respectively. This process blatantly pushes DVD sales, assists in
negotiating with streaming venues, and builds a show’s audience if it’s
popular enough to warrant the split. It also probably creates the most
long-term benefit for networks from cast and production contracts and
shooting schedules. And it’s the exact type of thinking that’s informed
nearly every recent final entry in a beserkly-successful franchise
adaptation of a long-running book series, from
Harry Potter to
Twilight to
The Hunger Games. But as television already operates in a
serial format, and seasons are no longer bound to the calendar year, perhaps such divisions are more natural.
Yet at the same time, this splitting of seasons threatens to return
the notion of the notion of the “TV season” to its largely contractual
definition and away from its use as an accessible, shared point of
reference for engagement with and evaluation of the show.
The ritual value of television has been so thoroughly structured
through correspondence centered on the season that networks’ attempts to
capitalize on final seasons potentially threaten the coherence that
enabled the modern phenomenon of obsessive TV viewing in the first
place. “Seasons” are the units by which we’ve tracked the evolution of
Walter White from Mr. Kotter to Scarface.
And
Mad Men, whose seasonal division has explicitly organized
the show’s content and its ambitious timeline, has in a more
demonstrable fashion been both an essential product of this overall
process and an important perpetuator of it. If Season 7, Part 1 takes
place in 1969 and Season 7, Part 2 takes place in 1970, then these two
airings will be, in effect, “separate seasons” in terms of the ways we
will experience them, talk about them, and consume them as an audience,
even if they’re the “same season” in AMC’s contractual and trade terms.
Will this disjointed approach to the season drastically alter the way
we talk about TV? We’ll adapt, no doubt, but it’s worth noting that
perhaps networks are the last to realize that the “season” has become a
term that’s no longer exclusive to television’s production side.
- See more at: http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/features/just-what-is-a-television-season-anyway.php#comments
This past week,
AMC announced that it will split
Mad Men’s seventh and final season into two 7-episode increments to air in 2014 and 2015, similarly to the way that
Breaking Bad
has been careening to its much anticipated yet seemingly breathless
finale. On the one hand, this represents a business move that exists
anywhere between shrewd and shameless, but one that is unlikely to anger
fans who would be happy to follow Don and Roger well into the disco
era, even if they’re ultimately only getting one extra episode as a
result of the wait.
But the decision has convincingly been perceived as an
act of desperation
on behalf of a network whose two brand-making critical darlings of
original programming will soon see their end, with no surefire successor
to take their place (perhaps
Low Winter Sun should create a crossover story with
The Killing). But what I find most striking about this decision is the fact that, perhaps more so than any recent quality cable show
, Mad Men has done of great deal of work to identify itself through – and, in the process, help to define – what a
television season means in the age of binge-viewing. By separating each season by discrete gaps in the historical procession of time,
Mad Men
has overtly defined each of its seasons as characterized through
changes in its characters’ associations, lives, relationships,
locations, business affiliations, etc. So, will each “part” of
Mad Men’s final season take place in a separate year?
More importantly, does this mean that, in the supposed
golden age
of cable drama, we’re returning to a notion of the “season” as an
antiquated, purely contractual term, rather than an important
organizational principle for our experience of a long-term story?
While scripted American television programming has always been
divided into seasons (1950s sitcoms, for instance, had in excess of
thirty episodes per season between summer breaks), because television
was almost never been packaged and distributed for everyday commercial
use for the majority of its existence, the notion of a television
“season” was largely a trade term used to describe a show’s longevity,
the order of episodes, and to denote the terms for greenlighting and
contracts. Seasons, in other words, have rarely been conceptual tools
for an audience’s experience of a long-running program.
While television programs became commercially available during the
1980s on VHS (usually in “best-of” packaged forms, but also as
full-seasons for the rare devotees), it’s hard to say exactly when a
television’s season became a regular evaluative term used in popular
vernacular. My money would be somewhere between
Happy Days, whose final seasons inspired the term “jump the shark”;
Miami Vice, a show whose story arcs were fastidiously tracked by fans; and, of course,
Twin Peaks,
whose short life-span and deflating mid-second-season-reveal inevitably
created first v. second season verbal fisticuffs amongst its
unprecedented cult following.
When television shows were introduced on DVD in full-season form in
the late ‘90s and early 2000s (a more workable contrast from rows upon
rows of VHS tapes), the television season thus developed a standard
market value that turned it into a prime category for media consumption.
That combined with DVR, Internet fanbases, and
“complex” (yet
aimless)
TV narratives made for a framework through which viewers began to watch
television programs largely in terms of seasons in place of individual
episodes. The notion that we (assuming “we” are non-industry folk)
widely think of television in terms of seasons is basically old enough
to drive a car right now.
While that doesn’t seem like much in face of a form of media that has
operated commercially for over sixty years, the effect has been
significant: with the advent of the season as a dominant category for
regular television consumption, programs became separated from their
broadcast contexts. “Television” became no longer an ephemeral signal
through space, but a collection of packages owned in physical or digital
form. This is something that Nielsen is
literally just now figuring out.
This is why AMC’s decision to air
Mad Men as a divided final
season is more significant than an example of a network whose future
reputation conspicuously being evaluated. The foregrounding of the
“season” helped define American television viewing in the 21st century.
Engage with a friend in a conversation about
Breaking Bad,
Homeland,
Dexter,
The Walking Dead, or
True Blood,
and the term inevitably comes up as a site of contention, competition,
and correspondence around the water cooler. It’s the way you know what
not to spoil. And let’s not forget, a person’s favorite season of
The Wire
can tell you a lot about them, especially if you’re on a first date.
(Here’s a tip: if you want to make an impression, say the second, partly
because it’s provocative but mainly because it’s the right answer.)
Sure, the logic of splitting up seasons is something of a result of
the de-centering of television away from television. As exemplified by
Netflix, a TV season is now hardly more than
a designated block of time. And nearly a decade ago, HBO first popularized this practice by splitting up the final seasons of
Sex and the City and
The Sopranos,
respectively. This process blatantly pushes DVD sales, assists in
negotiating with streaming venues, and builds a show’s audience if it’s
popular enough to warrant the split. It also probably creates the most
long-term benefit for networks from cast and production contracts and
shooting schedules. And it’s the exact type of thinking that’s informed
nearly every recent final entry in a beserkly-successful franchise
adaptation of a long-running book series, from
Harry Potter to
Twilight to
The Hunger Games. But as television already operates in a
serial format, and seasons are no longer bound to the calendar year, perhaps such divisions are more natural.
Yet at the same time, this splitting of seasons threatens to return
the notion of the notion of the “TV season” to its largely contractual
definition and away from its use as an accessible, shared point of
reference for engagement with and evaluation of the show.
The ritual value of television has been so thoroughly structured
through correspondence centered on the season that networks’ attempts to
capitalize on final seasons potentially threaten the coherence that
enabled the modern phenomenon of obsessive TV viewing in the first
place. “Seasons” are the units by which we’ve tracked the evolution of
Walter White from Mr. Kotter to Scarface.
And
Mad Men, whose seasonal division has explicitly organized
the show’s content and its ambitious timeline, has in a more
demonstrable fashion been both an essential product of this overall
process and an important perpetuator of it. If Season 7, Part 1 takes
place in 1969 and Season 7, Part 2 takes place in 1970, then these two
airings will be, in effect, “separate seasons” in terms of the ways we
will experience them, talk about them, and consume them as an audience,
even if they’re the “same season” in AMC’s contractual and trade terms.
Will this disjointed approach to the season drastically alter the way
we talk about TV? We’ll adapt, no doubt, but it’s worth noting that
perhaps networks are the last to realize that the “season” has become a
term that’s no longer exclusive to television’s production side.
- See more at: http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/features/just-what-is-a-television-season-anyway.php#comments
