It’s been a week since this piece was first published online, and needless to say, the response has been overwhelming. All I ever wanted to do was start a conversation about the nature of the television episode in the current media landscape, and after hundreds of comments, tweets, and full essay responses, it’s safe to say, “Mission accomplished” in that regard. It was never meant to be the authoritative take on the topic. Not only would that have been a fool’s errand in terms of scope, but it would also be naïve and intellectually dishonest to think there wouldn’t be other ways to approach the topic. So all criticism, made in good faith, was appreciated and extremely helpful.

With all that in mind, I thought I’d come at the topic again, in terms of clearing up some lingering items that arose as people responded to the piece. I look at this as just another piece of the larger conversation that I tried to ignite last week, and once again look forward to hearing your thoughts as the conversation expands. I’m going to group these into general headers as way to frame my further thoughts.

Perception/reality about “The Sopranos”

Probably the biggest thing I could have done better in the original essay was to explain how the television landscape post-“Sopranos” is more a function of how people perceive what that show did rather than what it actually accomplished. That’s not to take anything away from that show in the slightest. But as many people immediately pointed out, there were plenty of self-contained episodes during that show’s run. It wasn’t a seven-season program chopped into pieces that only made sense when assembled at the end as a whole.

However, “The Sopranos” is used as a cultural shorthand for the type of “novelistic” television that stands as the de facto “best” form of the medium. I used “The Sopranos” as my starting point because it did help usher in the current epoch of television. That’s obviously not to say that long-form narrative didn’t exist on the small screen before that. But “The Sopranos” used the freedom afforded it on cable to take existing models and add an extra twist that made it seem revolutionary.

As such, perception turns into reality through the prism of both time and accumulated claim/derision. Once show I didn’t talk about explicitly in that piece, “Lost,” is one that somehow has accrued a ridiculous amount of negative perception since it went off the air. And yet, I’d hold that up as an excellent example of a show that knew how to tell an episode-length story. The fact that so many people were disappointed in the answers (or lack thereof) by the end of its run doesn’t take away from what it could accomplish on a weekly basis. However, because it’s now perceived as having dropped the ball at the end, all that weekly work has been washed away like sand on the Island’s beach. And that, quite frankly, is a load of bullshit.

The Poniewozik Principle

OK, that title is all about my love of alliteration, rather than some all-encompassing way to look at television through the eyes of Time Magazine’s television critic. He brought up “Lost” in his response to my article, and had this to say about my worry about the loss of the episode as the central pillar of televised entertainment: “But that’s not an argument against serial stories; it’s an argument against bad serial stories, ones that fail to recognize that they’re supposed to allow for surprises and unexpected detours.”

That was a weird thing to read. Not because I disagree with it. Far from it. I just thought that I had made that exact argument in my own initial essay, either explicitly or at the very least implicitly. Clearly, I failed in this regard, because I never for a second wanted anyone to think I wasn’t to reduce the scope of what television could produce. I merely tried to show how looking at the big picture had clouded the smaller one, yielding bite-sized chunks of weekly episodes that turned into mere “installments.” Episodes are fully-formed unto themselves. Installments only work in the context of the greater whole. What I should have done was take the final step and state outright that episodes too should serve the greater whole as well, on top of simply providing pleasure in and of itself. That’s something that I tried to convey by showing how programs such as “Justified” and “Parks and Recreation” serve both masters simultaneously. But I obviously could have done a better job of stating that in a way that didn’t require James’ clarification. I’m grateful that he made it. I’m just annoyed that I necessitated such a clarification in the first place.

Following procedure(s)

One interesting thing that came out of the various responses to the article were writers of certain shows such as “NCIS: LA” who pointed to my article as validation of their own work. It certainly wasn’t my intent to do so, although I’m hardly upset by such an interpretation. (The piece also got a lot of play for comic book writers, who found a lot of common ground in trying to balance the need for story against the commercial needs for never-ending content. Again, totally didn’t see it coming, and totally gratified that it sparked interested outside the particular part of pop culture I was analyzing. Anywaaaaays, I’m digressing.)

The point of the article wasn’t to put “serialization” above, below, or even side the more stand-along, “procedural” programming that tends to, you know, ACTUALLY BE POPULAR WITH PEOPLE. But clearly there are different forces at work here, and some of them go well beyond what it means to produce a show and what it means to actually consume a show. Both acts involve a form of self-identification, and that self-identification has contributed somewhat to the large schism that exists when we try and talk about these different forms. To harken back to “Lost” for a minute: to say you were a fan of “Lost” was, for a large chunk of its audience, a way to say something about yourself. It carried a connotation that enabled a sense of superiority, one that made the inevitable backlash against it almost a certainty once it became clear that what some people THOUGHT the show about wasn’t in fact what the show was in fact about.

It’s a shift that forces people to realize that “ownership” of a television show is a fragile thing. It works out so well as what’s onscreen jives with what’s in the head of a viewer. In other words, it’s not really a connection so much as a coincidence. Now, do most people feel this sense of entitled ownership over a show? Probably not. Unfortunately, the ones that do tend to be the ones that flood Twitter, chat rooms, message boards, Tumblrs, and fanfic sites. They are legion, but they are in some ways a drop in the bucket compared to the much larger, but much more passive, legion that watches shows like “NCIS: LA.”

On one level, it makes little sense that shows with a more passionate fanbase have a smaller audience. I look over at The A.V. Club’s last “Community” review and see over 5,000 comments. And yet, that’s the lowest-rated comedy on the air. Surely, there should be some extrapolation between internet fervor and actual viewership. And yet, the opposite is more often true: the more passionate a fanbase is, the more narrow it is, and self-selection is often more exclusionary than inclusionary. To be in the viewing minority means that you’re somehow better than the brainless masses that consume shows that are popular but passionless.

And I’m sick to death of that binary.

What’s good to write about isn’t necessarily what’s good

This is something that’s been expressed by others, so I won’t pretend to be original here. But it bears repeating nonetheless: it’s more interesting to write about and read about a show like “Glee” than “Law & Order: SVU”. But that isn’t a function of quality so much as a function of the world of weekly reviews. The rise of those reviews means that we’re in an age where we had more analysis on a flop like “Lone Star” in the two weeks it was on air than ever wound have been produced about two seasons of “Cheers” in its heyday.

But that’s both good and bad. We now see inordinate amount of coverage over shows that enable such intense, overflowing discourse. But we also see how those shows get perceived as being more important, and therefore somehow “better,” than those that don’t. What we’re really seeing is the perfection of an echo chamber that determines by collective fiat what shows get to be considered worthy of discussion. In some cases, the echo chamber highlights shows that are indeed quality programs. Other times, it produces The Emperor’s New Season Pass, with many left unsure what all the fuss is or was about.

That’s why I think it’s dangerous to assign a canon of shows one HAS to talk about in order to be considered valid as a critic or a viewer. (This Atlantic response to my piece is semi-ridiculous, but makes a point I’ve argued for a long time: we need to spend more energy on a more diverse selection of shows.) It’s perfectly possible to not give a shit about “Mad Men”, just as it’s perfectly fine to fawn over “Spartacus.” I happen to like both shows, but I’m also prepared to defend my positions on those shows just as readily as I can defend why shows such as “Luck” and “Smash” leave me cold. In your mind, you probably just got mad that I compared those two shows. But that’s the point: we’ve created these levels of excellence that are on a fundamental level completely bullshit. That’s not to say that there aren’t varying levels of quality. Its just to say that coming up with one that will make everyone happy is stupid and the sooner we stop trying to do so the better we’ll be as a collective entity.

All of this is a way to state this: we’ve elevated shows that don’t bother to advance its story on a micro level over those that do. Why? Because we as an online industry cover the former more than we do the latter, which over time has given prestige to one form of storytelling over another. Again: the best shows do both simultaneously. But slagging off shows that tell a complete story in an hour’s time as taking the “easy” way out isn’t doing anyone any favors. If you want your favorite low-rated program to survive, you should be wishing it incorporated more storytelling techniques from those shows you mock. A random person who checks out an episode of your beloved show might stick around if, by the end, he/she felt like she’d been on a journey with a beginning, middle, and an end. Maybe they won’t get as much out of that episode as you, but they’ll get SOMETHING out of it. And that’s a lot more than they are currently getting.

Form to the format

One final note: A lot of ensuing discussion centered around the ways in which consumption altered the ways in which the episode/installment issue reared its head. Indeed, in the probably not so distance future, all of my huffing and puffing will be for naught. When what we currently call a television series gets released in self-contained chunks via an asynchronous distribution system, the rules by which episodes can and should be designed go away. Thinking about “Game of Thrones” as a ten-hour movie doesn’t matter much when you have the DVD set in your hands, or have every episode on iTunes. But it does matter during its initial run. And so long as television shows are distributed primarily on a weekly basis at a certain time of week on a certain night, the ultimate way in which they are consumed down the line ultimately doesn’t matter. The initial way in which they are deployed determine the rules governing the narrative flow.

It just seems crazy that we’re celebrating shows that actively resist casual viewership. The fact that I love the shows that resist means this shouldn’t be a problem for me. But as someone that wants people to love the same things I do, it’s an enormous problem, if not the biggest problem, facing the medium right now. We have to get past arguing that shows need to be “dumbed down” in order to be popular. That’s a ridiculous argument that eschews quality for technique. And while there’s an enormous artistic license that should be afforded anyone producing any form of art, there are still structural concerns that need to be addressed in order to be considered by more than a select few. This isn’t about appealing to everyone. But it is about making appealing via episodes that invite you to stick around after you’ve seen them. It’s about respecting the audience’s time while they sample your show. It’s about delivering in the present while still promising hints of greatness in the future.

I love television for its ability to tell complex stories over a vast number of years. But we’ve gotten so fixed on what it can do that we’ve lost sight of what it should do. In trying to recapture the importance of the episode, I’ve done what I can to increase the vitality of the medium as a whole. Because while television is still healthy after “The Sopranos,” it’s in many ways a pale shadow of what it could be. The successes should not be ignored. But neither should the failures, many of whom failed pursuing a perceived criteria of greatness that’s ultimately hollow. A great season of television is built upon, not in spite of, the individual episode. And while you can always find an exception to that rule, it’s usually an exception that actually proves that rule. Television can be exceptional without being the exception. And the sooner showrunners realize this, the better the medium as a whole will be.