Must-Fix TV

I wrote an earlier blog that talked about how I don’t really watch movies anymore. Well this one is about how I don’t watch TV anymore either. Like the movie thing, it’s not a complete and intentional fast that I’m on. It just kind of happened that there are very few TV shows out there that can jazz me up enough to actually take the time to sit down and commit myself to them every week. I don’t own and have never desired to own a TiVo, the first and most obvious reason being that I don’t watch enough TV to really warrant one. If there’s something I’m not going to be able to watch when it’s on, I’ve got a VCR that I still know how to program. People say that if you own a TiVo you end up watching more TV because you can watch it on your own schedule. Thing is, it really doesn’t bother me that I don’t watch TV. Like with movies, I have a hard time committing myself to sit down and watch for an hour or two at a time… much less several times per week. There’s not much on that I want to see that badly anyway. I wrote off Reality TV and game shows WAY back when they first started picking up steam around the millennium, so I’ve never felt any urge whatsoever to see who got voted off the island, what Simon said to somebody when they sang their song, or what some fat person wept about on the treadmill this week. I could give a damn about any sports, so that’s not keeping me glued to my set. And as far as Primetime TV, there are just very few shows that attract and then keep my interest.

I’m not saying it’s because TV has gotten worse in the last few years. If you don’t factor in reality TV, I’m sure most of the programming is just as good, if not better than it was several years ago when I was watching a lot of TV. And it’s not like I was ever committed to the highest quality programming anyway. During the 1999-2000 TV season, the only show I didn’t miss a single episode of was Dawson’s Creek… But you can just shut up because it was the Pacey/Joey season and the sexual tension was just freakin cool. The only show I watch these days with anything approaching that kind of loyalty is LOST. I’ve been with this one since the beginning and have been very dedicated to it. But I know this one is a ticking time bomb. It has until maybe the end of this season before J.J. Abrams, the creator, gets bored with it and moves onto other projects, letting it languish and suck, the way he did with Alias. But right now, none of that matters. LOST is on hiatus until mid-February. So I don’t know what I’m going to watch between now and then.

I’m sure there are plenty of great shows on, but none of them make me want to commit myself to an hour or more every week. All the commercials just seem the same to me. Besides the various cookie-cutter Law & Order and CSI incarnations, even the shows that I hear everybody raving about appear to be nothing more than business as usual. They come up with some kind of catchy idea that will hook people and then they try to build an entire series around that idea. Unfortunately most show runners aren’t creative enough to look beyond the first season or two so once you get into the third, fourth and beyond, it becomes obvious they’re pulling ideas out of their ass, just reaching for new and different twists that will keep people watching. The most obvious example of this was last year’s Prison Break. From what I heard the original idea for this story was for it to run as a mini-series, but they went and turned it into a full-blown series. Even someone who doesn’t watch a lot of TV such as myself was able to see the inherent flaw in that formula. Eventually there was going to have to be the actual prison break that you’ve been building up. And then what? Either the idea goes and goes until the audience gets sick of it, or else you deliver on the build up and then the whole original premise of your show changes.

I have been burned by so many TV shows that do that in one form or another, jumping the shark as they call it, that I have finally gotten to the point where I don’t feel like investing myself in something until I know they’ve made it to at least their second season and the consensus is that they are still awesome. With the advent of TV shows on DVD that’s pretty easy to do these days. It means I’m coming up two years later than everyone else, but that doesn’t bother me. Until a show comes along that really makes me go, “Now that is something I just HAVE to see,” I don’t see myself changing those TV habits anytime soon.

With that being said, this isn’t just a complaint blog. I actually have a solution, or at least a suggestion to the network executives. I’m sure this is an idea that has been thrown around before. I vaguely remember reading something somewhat similar to it in Entertainment Weekly several years ago when I still subscribed… which was probably sometime during that Pacey/Joey season to give you an idea. In the article they suggested shortening TV shows to only two or three seasons. Basically get a solid three seasons rather than a mediocre seven to ten. At the time I couldn’t imagine that working. I knew enough about TV to know that production companies don’t really make their money back on a show until they have enough episodes to go into syndication. It’s in syndication that the residuals really start to roll in. But you need at least three seasons and really at least four to have a shot at syndication. So under that way of business, the two to three season arc just wouldn’t work. But these days, with TV shows making so much money on DVD, I’m sure there’s just as much money to be made there as there is in syndication – the evidence of that being how Season One of a show will come out on DVD before Season Two even starts up on TV. So now I’m thinking that that two or three season thing might not be such a bad idea. In fact, it could allow us to do some new and cool things with TV that we haven’t before.

Here’s what I would like to see. Here’s what would get me excited about TV again. As I said before, the problem with most TV is the creators only plan for the first season or two and have no idea for what’s going to happen if the show succeeds longer than that. So to fix that problem, what I would like to see is a few new series that have been planned out, episode for episode from beginning to end. Basically, the creators have a story in mind that they want to tell, one giant arc that will be told over the course of 48 to 72 episodes. Even if the scripts themselves aren’t written, I’d like to know that the creators at least know what’s going to happen in each episode. Or at the very least, I’d like to know that they know how the show is going to at least end.

That’s one of my worries with LOST. If only based on the fact that I saw him do it with Alias, I don’t really think J.J. Abrams knows where he’s going with this show. I worry that all these little mysteries and all these little plot twists that have the TiVo and web geeks working overtime trying to keep their sites updated simply aren’t going to manifest themselves by the end of the series. I’m worried that Abrams is going to end up being another Chris Carter. I wasn’t a devoted X-Files fan, but I heard from several of them about how disappointed they were that Carter, the creator, never delivered on any of his promises to answer questions. These people had dedicated themselves to however many seasons X-Files ran for, trying their damnedest to keep up on all the conspiracies and the phenomena and trying to piece it all together, knowing the ultimate storyline was in the hands of somebody they trusted and thought capable and equally loyal as a storyteller. And in the end, Carter simply left those people hanging with nothing to show for ten years worth of loyalty. And it’s exactly that kind of bad storytelling that makes me hesitant to devote myself to any one show.

But how cool would it be to know a show has been constructed and orchestrated from beginning to end ahead of time? To know that plot points have been meticulously planned out so as not to fall flat or lead nowhere? To know that every episode is contributing to a larger more complex story arc, and isn’t merely being thrown in as “filler”? To know that main characters can and will be killed off because there is no need to worry about keeping them employed for eight or more years? With a show like that you would truly believe that anything can happen. And what’s more, you would know that it’s not happening simply because it was something the creators pulled out of their asses for sweeps.

Now that would be a show I would watch. Of course, a show like that would take a really special and gifted storyteller to pull it off, simply because that kind of storytelling has never been done before. Who even knows how to plot out and plan a continuous story arc that would unfold over the course of 72-hours-worth of programming? Well I have some ideas on that to help get the ball rolling. For the first series that follows this storytelling format, don’t rely on a bunch of TV writers to come up with the overall idea. Go to the people who are used to telling stories in long formats: novelists.

You know how they’re always saying the movie ruined the book. Well in most cases it’s not entirely the filmmakers’ faults. If you have a four-hundred-page book, it ain’t all gonna fit inside a two-hour movie. Judicious cuts have to be made simply for the sake of time. Well what if you didn’t have to worry about time? What if you could take all the time you wanted to tell the entire story contained in a book without leaving anything out? What if you could adapt the book to unfold over the course of an entire TV series? There’d be no set number of episodes. You simply tell the story until it was finished. And when the story was complete, the show would be done.

The idea came to me this summer while I was reading the Stephen King book, IT for the third time and I realized this story would be so kickass on the screen. Unfortunately it’s a thousand-page book that even a lame four-hour 1990 mini-series couldn’t do justice to. But if somebody had the time and patience to tell this story over the course of say 72 episodes… that would be absolutely amazing. And actually that book, you probably could get four or five seasons out of. I’m not quite sure how that would work since half of the story is told over the course of a summer while these kids are eleven-years-old and the actors would end up aging a little too much, but hey, these are just preliminary thoughts.

I really think an idea like this could revitalize the TV industry. It could actually get people genuinely excited about TV again, and not just the low-level excitement they get every new season. No doubt it would cause some major revamping of the studio and network system as we know it which is why I think the first move would have to be made by one of the cable movie networks: HBO, Showtime, FX. In the last few years, these have been the places with the real cutting edge programming anyway, so they’d be the perfect jumping off point. And really, if we’re going to start the experiment with IT, they would need a network like that where language, gory violence and sex aren’t an issue. I guarantee you cable companies, if you did this, I would pay the extra money for HBO again.

I don’t expect that any TV executives are going to read this. But maybe a young whippersnapper who is just breaking into the business will read it and sit on it until he gets to the top. I know change doesn’t happen overnight, but maybe by the time I’m a bit older and more worn out by life and actually look forward to my hours spent in front of the TV, things will have changed and I’ll actually be sitting down to programming that makes me excited to just keep sitting there.