TV might be as popular as it's ever been, but to me it seems as qualitatively stale as it's ever been. TV shows used to be really interesting because you never knew if you were going to get something fantastic, something weird or something just completely awful. It was a total minefield of quality in the best, most interesting way possible. However, these days show runners have gotten a lot more careful with what they greenlight. They want assurance that a show will make its money back, so that has led to most shows these days feeling kind of samey, with dark stories and plots that seem to go on forever. Eventually, the TV industry's pretty little house of cards (haha) will come tumbling down. However, I believe there's a way to fend off the inevitable, a fix for the modern TV format to keep going past its shelf-life. In order to figure that out, though, we need to trace the television drama back to its roots and see how we got from there to here. Readers are advised to buckle up, because this is going to take a couple of segments to sort through.
British Radio: Yes, the roots of modern American television were planted in British audio dramas. In 1923, for example, the BBC broadcast a dramatization of "A Christmas Carol," which quickly became a holiday favorite in the coming years. Post-war Britain continued the radio serial tradition by broadcasting an adaptation of "The Warden" over a span of six episodes in 1951 and "Pride and Prejudice" similarly divided in 1952. This tradition of dividing a contained story into multiple parts is the earliest example of what we now recognize as a miniseries.
TV-New Boss, Same As The Old: The introduction of television wasn't so much a revelation as it was a shift. Oh, the technology was spectacular, to be sure, but in terms of how narrative TV was structured there wasn't a lot of difference between it and the radio serials they would soon replace. Take a look at a show like "The Twilight Zone." Every episode is a self-contained, high-concept story barely running over a half an hour with commercials. Now, imagine the visuals taken away, but the exact same plot is coming out of the radio every week. Ultimately, it doesn't sound that out of place. Plenty of show runners must've realized this because one of the first things they did was take radio shows and transfer them to TV. That's not to say that the transfer to the screen didn't come with advantages; by simply adding a camera to what would otherwise be a normal radio show, huge steps were taken in the fields of visual storytelling and slapstick comedy. However, the principle behind the episodic storytelling still remained the same.
For a long time, this episodic narrative approach would be the the default for TV shows. Even programs like "Cheers" that held continuity still stuck to problem of the week episodes. There were shows that would start a storyline in one episode and finish it in another, but rarely was there a show that told one long story. There was the occasional miniseries such as the 12-part adaptation of "Rich Man, Poor Man" in 1976, but ultimately the once-a-week stories would hold sway.
AMC/HBO: While early attempts in the medium's history had been made to create a long-running, continuity driven show, the industry at the time wasn't stable enough to guarantee success. Back then, there was no way to be sure that you would get another season, making it risky to spend copious amounts of time and money on a story you didn't know if you'd be able to finish. However, as near as can be speculated, that all changed with the premiere of "The Sopranos," HBO's hit 1999 gangster melodrama. The story of Tony Soprano and his dysfunctional family was a huge hit and prompted the network to green light several other long-term programs. While not every show was as big as HBO's breakout smash (the ludicrously expensive "Rome" lasted two seasons and the cult Western "Deadwood" was done after three), the massive success of the cops and robbers procedural "The Wire" proved that multi-season stories could be profitable in a television format.
This spurred several other networks to follow in their footsteps. ABC gave J.J. Abrams the go ahead to make "Lost" in 2004, Showtime premiered the serial killer dark comedy "Dexter" in 2006 and FX launched its modern Western "Justified" in 2010. Despite the success of these programs, however, the mainstream popularity of serialized television would remain insecure until the beginning of the 2010s.
In 2011, HBO premiered its fantasy political drama "Game of Thrones." The show runners likely expected it to be popular due to its levels of snuff violence and pornographic nudity, but it likely wouldn't have achieved cultural precedence without the groundwork laid by a certain show that had been slowly growing in popularity.
AMC's crime drama "Breaking Bad" didn't start as the national phenomenon it eventually became. Its premiere in 2008 was only moderately followed, but word of mouth quickly attracted more viewers for the subsequent seasons. By 2011, it was entering its fourth season and was in the late stage of its evolution into omnipresent pop-culture property. The two shows aired at roughly the same time attracting roughly the same kind audience and so they skyrocketed in the next few years.
The joint popularity of these two shows inadvertently gave the TV industry a new formula for successful television: violent, sexually-charged stories spanning several seasons centering around morally-gray anti-heroes. Everybody was suddenly trying to create their own "Breaking Bad" or "Game of Thrones." FX had "The Americans," Fox had "Empire," Starz has "American Gods" and Netflix's entire original output for the past six years has been one extended attempt to repeat that success. Even the History Channel tried their hand at it with "Vikings." And now, HBO and AMC have been seen trying to make their own lightning strike twice with shows like "Westworld" and "The Walking Dead." Suddenly, the default format for "serious" television was completely changed and fundamentally immovable.
However, they weren't the only shows that cemented the intense, dark tone that now dominates our TV dramas. Nor were they the only ones that completely changed the standard format. Unfortunately, we'll have to talk about that next time because this is already taking too long. See you next week.
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