The future is probably in miniseries.

Speaking personally, I’ve found the BSG miniseries the best three hours of television I’ve ever watched – bar none – but the succeeding seasons were weak, due to suits looking for stand alone episodes (a great many of which were dire).

It’s great to see them getting back to a miniseries (“Razor”, coming this November) to kick off the last season – should play once again to the post-apocalyptic storyline, too often relegated in late seasons 2 and 3.

I only recall it vaguelly, but I understand the critic’s response to [i]Serenity[/i] was quite favorable, especially for a sci-fi film. (And doubly so for one that started on TV).

Commercially, I believe they broke even on the big screen and made money once it hit DVDs.

Joss DID do a comic series for Firefly, that bridged the series and the film, and I suspect his real problem is he wants to do Firefly on TV (where he has 16 or so hours a season to play with) rather than on the big screen (where he has 2), but can’t.

See also Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comic, which was meant to last 75 installments and, while not totally plotted out from the beginning, was intentionally concluded in a way that doesn’t often happen in mainstream comics or TV. There’s just too much money to be made from drawing out a series indefinitely.

I’ve read that Joss Whedon was so disappointed by the critical and commercial failure of Serenity that no more Firefly stories will be forthcoming. I don’t understand why he doesn’t turn to comics, as he already has done with Buffy Season Eight.

I guess my point is that it’s all about the money, but as audiences get more sophisticated, there’s more money to be found in better storytelling; see Everything Bad Is Good For You.

The same cannot be said of Firefly; which was aborted mid-arc by the suits without proper consideration, only to been given new life as Serenity – which gave us the Edwin Drood conclusion we wanted in a whirlwind of a film.

Heroes, which brilliantly follows the american comic model of multi-arc story-telling, is a current favorite (and rightly so).

Episodic story telling by arcs, only works if the arc are well planed at the outset or given the space to develop. Like the serial (I’m thinking Dickens) it runs the risk of never quite telling the story it should have (Dickens did okay, and BSG hasn’t jumped the shark yet), or of being messed around (B5), or cancelled (Firefly), on a whim by backers. But when it works it captures the audience like no other medium.

Oh yes, Invasion – it was dreadful.

Interesting thread. Thanks for all the good comments. I was going to weigh in again, but Abigail pretty much said my piece already, and better than I probably would have.

That said, it is becoming harder to watch FX or SF network shows with all the promo material popping up at the bottom of the screen, often during climatic scenes.

Otherwise, I agree with the LOST critics and pretty much all of #35.

well, actually it’d be the median viewer (who in the matters of taste is still pretty low below sophisticates like me and you) not the lowest common denominator. But otherwise I think you’re right about everything else.

The problem isn’t with the medium, but with the economic system governing it. Up until a few years ago, television series sought to appeal to the widest possible audience, and therefore to the lowest common denominator. The notion that a series might take a while to grow an audience, or that it might survive with a small but loyal following, was almost unheard of. Even nowadays, with HBO and cable channels seeking to appeal to more sophisticated tastes, the breadth of an audience still matters – witness the (respectively, deserved and undeserved) early deaths of Carnivale and Deadwood. There’s no indie or fringe scene in television, which is one of the reasons that innovation within the medium comes almost exclusively from the outside – on the aesthetic front, from cinema, and on the narrative front, from novels and comics.

The economic issues aside, however, there are still serious issues plaguing the attempt to create true novelistic television. Entries in this field either hide an underlying formula beneath of veneer of novelistic storytelling (Alias, Lost, Battlestar Galactica) or have nothing to offer but a well-structured story (Babylon 5). In some of the recent entries in the sub-genre like Daybreak or the upcoming Journeyman, I’ve noticed an emphasis on story to the exclusion of all other elements, most particularly characters. This puts me in mind of a show like Farscape, which started out formulaic and, at the end of four seasons, was practically inscrutable to the casual viewer. The series was cancelled after the fourth season finale – which ends with the two leads apparently being killed by an unknown assailant – had been filmed, and for several years this stood as the story’s ending. The characters, and the story up until that point, were so strong, however, that fans didn’t really care. They kept plugging the show, buying the DVDs, and recruiting new fans – which is one of the reasons that a wrap-up miniseries was eventually commissioned.

I was very excited about the inherent possibilities of novelistic television a few years ago, but since then I’ve grown less enthusiastic – at best, I think novelistic shows don’t have the built-in longevity of formula series. Look at Veronica Mars, which delivered a pitch-perfect noir mystery novel in its first season and then struggled to repeat the accomplishment in its second and third before being cancelled. The future is probably in miniseries.

You can download the whole thing on iTunes or if you want it for free and don’t mind taking the time, you can get it on BitTorrent.

I downloaded Doctor Who Season 3 and Torchwood because I don’t have BBC America and am sick to death of the way Sci-Fi hacks into the middle of a scene for a commercial break, all to advertise ed PILLS or their latest snake/spider/Lou Diamond Phillips movie.

As for Rome… Russell: Yes, Ciarán Hinds is fantastic. They couldn’t have cast a better Caesar. Some of the other cast are good, too—even excellent. But the cast is the beginning and ending of what’s good about this show. I’ll keep it short, but my complaints are, essentially:

1) The most dynamic, drama-filled period in Roman history and you did what?! with it? Almost nothing. Why not write out a five-season series on the Civil War and pitch that? With an appropriate budget? Yes, I loved the sex and the violence and the intrigues… but compared to what was possible with this show—hell, was actual, Milius, et. al., just totally dropped the ball.

2) This is ROME, and you give me a set that looks like it’s built in, by, and housed at a local community college? Have you never heard of CGI? Isn’t there some still-standing old MGM set on a hill in Italy somewhere? How many times do I need to see the same three, and only three, plebians walking through deserted streets to hear the Herald?

3) A quick specific: Do you know the real story of Cleopatra’s presentation to Caesar? WAY better, more fantastic and dramatic and sexy, than the way she’s presented in the series. Why not just use that?

4) In general, they just didn’t give this series a big enough budget or enough narrative space to do it right. They cherry-picked some salacious scenes and wicked intrigues from the history, then crammed them into an overstuffed suitcase and mailed it parcel post to the world.

Well, that definitely made me drool but I don’t think you’d need 3 to 4 hours for each episode. 1.5 would probably do. Even though the books are awesome there is a lot of filler in them. Actually there’s also a lot of filler in the novels themselves and you could probably skip one or two without missing much of the overall story. Once you get to The Wine Dark Sea or so it does become quite repetitive. There’s only so many ways you can describe a battle at sea and O’Brian’s done them all well. Also, by that point we all know Aubrey gets himself into – mostly financial – trouble when he stays on land for too long. The Maturin as spy theme from a couple of these can be simply moved intertemporally to a different episode. So something like 20 1.5 hr episodes over two seasons could work great.
I vaguely remember however from watching the commentary on the M&C DVD that there’s some issue over the movie rights to these novels and even getting permission to make M&C was tricky.

Also, more shows should do what Dan Simon did with the Wire; commit to a given number of seasons/episodes a priori. 5 seasons of 12 (about) episodes is plenty of time to tell a great story and the hanging ending will stop you from doing goofy Lost-type stuff. This also highlights the different incentives at work for novelists and show makers. If you’re a novelist your publisher will try to shorten your book to make it more accessible to a wider audience (also to cut out self serving crap that don’t need to be in there). But if you’re a show writer/director they’ll want you to stretch the damn thing out as long as possible to maximize the dollars. On the other hand the same incentive is there to produce a “series” of novels – you know, the “Volume IIIIXCCG in the Quest for Dragon’s Balls Series”, which is why most Fantasy and SciFi sucks so bad. Well, one of the reasons why it sucks so bad.

But I’ve never read any. Does it matter where one begins (i.e. are they in order?). If not, where should one begin?

Absolutely begin at the beginning. I think you can make a case that the series is just one long novel, cut into volumes. (As those who have read them will recall, the novels don’t wrap up at the end; they just…stop.)