Television

I watch far too many television programmes. currently I’m watching LOST, Smallville, Harper’s Island, Grey’s Anatomy, Scrubs, Dexter and the Simpsons, and that’s just shows that air in the US before they do in the UK. Aside from the fact that this takes up far too much of my time, and the fact that I need to get out more, I’ve noticed something about most of these, the movement from a singular episode format, with a kind of mild overarching storyline, to a format where the main story arc takes precedence. Obviously some shows still manage to stay away from this, The Simpsons being a prime example, however most shows seem to be adopting this, and generally to their detriment.

Take Smallville as an example. Once upon a time, at the genesis of the show, it followed a strict monster-of-the-week format. Clark arrives, something has been transformed by kryptonite(”meteor rocks”) , Clark hits it a bit and emerges victorious. I can see why people disapproved of this format, and indeed, why it would have been unsustainable in the long run (although Buffy seemed to manage well enough for six years), the system they worked out in the later few series where Clark has to stop Lex findingout something for an entire series, whilst things get in his way, I found to be much preferable to the current approach. Nowadays, gritty and unhappy characters march onto our screens, demand some kind of resolution to their problems, and then run around in circles until the episode ends. This season, for example, they’ve been trying to track down and catch Davies Bloome, i.e. Doomsday, however every time that they catch him, he either runs away, or is saved by Chloe. This week we were in formed that [spoiler] he has dug himself up from a grave into which he was placed last week, and is on the rampage AGAIN.[/spoiler] If it were not for the fact that something similar to this, involving the same characters, has happened in EVERY episode this season, that would be a good storyline. I much preferred it in it’s happy days, when everything was more brightly coloured, and there was more “plot advancement” every week (as in, things happened during the episodes).

I will admit that Smallville is particularly bad for this change, most of the other shows started off with mildly overarching storylines (bar Scrubs and, of course, The Simpsons), however I think some of them have managed to change their storytelling perspectives better than others. Grey’s Anatomy has gone for a strange and eclectic system in which scenes from random characters are fired at you through the episodes in the hope that you will somehow piece it all together and manage to keep up with the story as a whole. LOST started off that way, although they too seem to have been favouring the “throw random bits of story at the audience and hope that they stick” method, which has improved in later episodes, but is still nowhere near as good as it was previously.

Scrubs is just a sorry corpse, sadly held animated by Bill Lawrence and dancing worryingly as you see limbs fall off from age. Whilst they are obviously trying to keep the show going by going back to its roots, it’s just been on for too long now, and all of the character’s eccentricities, which were the main reasons that the show was funny in the first place, have been played out to their full, so that now, we really just wait until JD and Elliot get married and we learn that the Janitor’s name really IS Jan Itor.

What I’m really saying is that all of these (apart from Harper’s Island obviously) have just got too old. They can’t conform to the new and gritty television standards that we expect nowadays, and that, rather than continuing on forever, the writers/producers should really have seen this coming and ended their shows gracefully, rather than continuing until they die, shedding actors and quality until all that they leave us with are poor imitations of their former brilliant selves.

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