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August 03, 2015

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I'm of the opinion that the 'best' TV is when a series fans and it's writers KNOW they have EXACTLY x number of episodes, PERIOD. Have a beginning, a middle and an perhaps MOST IMPORTANTLY, an END. I think it's one of the reasons I like a lot of anime. They knew what they had to work with and didn't try to make a money grab by extending it.

Obvious exceptions, in that genre of course, but most of what I consider 'great anime' follows that pattern (beginning, middle, end).

I think you can still have great TV when each episode has a real beginning, middle, and end. You can still have an open-ended series with the same characters, and even have some on-going character development, but each piece has to be essentially complete in itself.

The other thing that great TV needs is some realistic interaction among the characters. That is, different characters interact in different ways. You don't have everybody treating one guy the same way. It's a concept a lot of TV shows manage to miss.

wj,

Even the style of TV you describe needs some things:
*If status quo is god, you aren't going to get any real character development.
*If the networks don't commit to showing episodes in the correct order, you cannot have anything but a return to status quo at the end of every episode.

Nowadays, the networks show all series in correct order, so you can have storytelling. However, you can't really have a closure for stories if you don't know when you need to end the series. For example, "Rome" was destroyed by the fact that it was cut short. The second season became an awful mess as the writers tried to tie up several seasons's worth of loose ends in a few episodes. On the other hand, the harbinger of the Golden Age of TV, "Babylon 5", was marred by the fact that it was continued by one more season after closing the story arc.

An episodic TV may be great and compelling entertainment but the a fixed length series gives much better opportunity for real.art.

And yet, you can have a series of books, good books, featuring the same character(s). Each book complete in itself. But the number of books being open-ended.

Granted, there are lots of book series which continue on long after the author has run out of things to say. Likewise there can be (and are!) TV series which continue too long. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the length of the series needs to be set in advance in order to be good.

But "Breaking Bad," for instance, had 62 episodes. It would be more appropriate to compare books to full seasons in a TV series rather than individual episodes. I also think the variables that go into whether or not a writer puts another book out as part of an existing series are very, very different from those that determine whether a TV series gets renewed, not to mention the differences in the writing process (or the fact that, even when the writing is done for a TV show, there's still lots and lots of stuff to do to make it something people can watch on TV).

Actually, I'd say that the variables on renewals are pretty identical: sales. If advertisers see big audiences, that means sales to them. If the publishers see high sales figures, that is obviously sales for them. And that, in either case, drives contracts to continue.

if a writer gets dropped before finishing the series she can, at the very least, self-publish.

but self-publishing a TV series is essentially impossible.

Actually, I'd say that the variables on renewals are pretty identical: sales.

That's one variable, though it's a big one. Then again, it's a variable with a value determined by a bunch of other variables, and those variables differ greatly between TV and books.

The other variable that matters greatly is cost. Some TV shows aren't profitable because they cost so much to produce. Producing a book about people who spend most of their time in one place talking to each other doesn't cost much less than writing a book about people who fly around the universe interacting with alien civilizations.

You also don't have to worry about the actors portraying the characters in books, because there are none. You don't modify the story line midstream because somebody got a better gig in another book. Same goes for writers on TV shows, really. Most books are written by an author, not a writing staff (editors aside).

They're just different ballgames in many ways.

I never watched Smallville and I feel sad for the waste of potential. The tragedy you described didn't happen was what I thought Smallville was about, so it's disappointing to hear that they didn't even try.

I didn't watch Breaking Bad, but after hearing about it I expected that the ending would involve the wife destroying the drug money. Maybe just burning the big pile of cash, right in front of Walter, so it's clear he achieved absolutely nothing. I hear this isn't how it went, that he did manage to provide for his family with the drug business. That does seem to undercut the tragedy.

there was plenty of tragedy in the BB ending.

(spoilers, obvs)

Walter's two tragedies are: 1) he was ostensibly trying to get money to cure his cancer, but what killed him was the quest for that money and not the cancer itself. 2) he kept telling himself that what he was doing was providing for his family, but in the end he ended up destroying it - by death or by betrayal or by neglect.

So sorry to go off-thread (and yet still dealing with long-running TV), but just in case you all hadn't seen this, I thought it worthy of note:

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/hacktivists-sent-a-love-letter-to-jon-stewart-by-hacking-donald-trump

Yes, "Breaking Bad" was a tragedy and superb watching.

What I like about this show, and many others now, is that the dense intensity of being involved with characters over dozens of episodes involves me like reading the great novels.

Add in great writing and production values and then exquisite choices in music to define a scene.

With "Breaking Bad", I came to it late on Netflix and didn't expect to like it, since anything to do with meth makes me queasy, but after three episodes, I was hooked (on the show, not meth).

The end of every episode had you by the cojones and all you could think was, well, what possibly could happen next that could be more gruesome and compromising to human decency than last episode and yet Walter White overcame every ruthless obstacle in the ruthless world he thrust himself into as a tragic result of not only the cancer, but also, as a revenge drama, his bitterness over the loss of his entrepreneurial wealth pursuits in private business coeval with his former lover leaving him for his former business partner, and really, when you think about it, the ruthlessness of these setbacks trained him, crippled him with vengeance, to take on the unimaginable technicolor ruthlessness of the Mexican drug cartel.

It was like watching Richard III. You cringe at the awfulness of it all, but you are seduced by the central character taking you into his confidence, not via soliloquy as in that play, but by the audience spending lots of quiet time alone with Walter White as he rationalized and connived his actions, and used those around him to his ends.

Really, wouldn't it be justice if El Chapo, the tunneling, murderous drug lord who just recently escaped -- again -- dug an elaborate fresh-air fed, well-lighted two-mile long tunnel the next time, and lowered himself in and just as he reached his escape hatch, met Heisenberg, his hat at a jaunty angle and his eyes behind dark lenses, and was blown to bits or upended into a vat of methylamine, sort of like Clarence in Richard III, who was not exactly a pristine human being his own self.

See, what I really like about the character's development was that he didn't start with a master plan. He met each challenge as they came along with narrow-eyed masterful competence like anyone does in his or her job, and his confidence in his abilities, so long held in check by life's previous obstacles, powered him on to meeting the next obstacle.

He finally realized he was smarter than all of the other d*ckheads.

It was a job, making a product, and he made the very best product and no one was going to thwart him.

The metaphorical possibilities of that are extensive.

And his confederates, the unwitting innocents, and then the professional sociopaths, were swept along in his wake. I mean, if a high school teacher (Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach --- the sociopaths in "Breaking Bad" had the same opinion of teachers as the pigf*cking sociopaths we deal with in real life every f*cking day) can win over a hard-case like Mike Ehrmantraut, who had seen everything sh*tty in life, as least twice, you have yourself an Ubermensch heading for uncharted grief and trouble.

I love too the fact that Ehrmantraut knew from the beginning that Walter was bad news, not in the conventional sense, not like the ruthless "businessmen" for who's bidding Mike worked, who had a set of rules, ruthless ones, but rules nevertheless.

This guy, Walter, didn't have any rules. He was a disruptor like Uber or Facebook, and he had other fish to fry, so don't get in the way. He made it up as he went along and if anything is more effective than ruthlessness, its unpredictable ruthlessness.

But, yes, most assuredly a tragedy. Innocence and the innocent betrayed and a damaged man destroying himself.

What did you expect? The Two Gentleman of Verona?*


*Although, at least one of those gentleman could see himself clear to furthering his own ends in a different setting by behaving like Walter White.


Good catch, GOTNC.

Stewart was great last night with his coverage of the Rethug candidates applying their lips to the fragrant, moneyed posteriors of the Koch twins and the idiotic coverage of our willingly and thoroughly compromised and corrupt media, let alone FOX.

Like Hector Salamanca took care of business, it's too bad someone doesn't bring a nervous finger to bear on the problem of the Gus Fring brothers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vp_LfXUe6pE

Is Donald Trump the Hector we need?

I mean, if a high school teacher (Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach...

I think you're missing one of the essential ironies of the show: that WW was an absolutely godawful teacher.

(Though many I know in the teaching profession do admit that the temptation to scrawl "APPLY YOURSELF !" across a pupil's work, rather than marking it, is sometimes intolerable.)

Well, another, but similar ironic way of looking at it is that he found his calling by applying himself instead of whiling away his life in a profession he was ill-suited for.

Yes, now that you mention it, he had the same contempt for teaching as did most of the American public, and went on to bigger and more remunerative competencies.

;)

I suspect that if all public school teachers in America quit their jobs tomorrow to get into the meth game, candidate attendees at the Koch lollapalooza would say good riddance and finally the former teachers can't do any more damage now that they are in a private sector endeavor whose profits are not encroached upon by taxes, nor does it depend on our hard-earned tax dollars to thrive.

1) he was ostensibly trying to get money to cure his cancer, but what killed him was the quest for that money and not the cancer itself. 2) he kept telling himself that what he was doing was providing for his family, but in the end he ended up destroying it

As I remember it, he didn't expect at the outset to survive the cancer, and genuinely was trying to stay alive long enough to leave sufficient provision for his family (including new child and son with disability). How that slowly morphed into a threadbare excuse made it interesting.
And in the end, he saved his family by (falsely) exonerating his unwitting/witting/repentant accomplice wife.

Actually, I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the partially redemptive ending - either brilliant, or something of a copout.

Yes, there was clearly tragedy in the BB ending. However, the Greeks would have had his son become a junkie (and probably die of it), because they knew that you can't save your family by poisoning the community, your family is *part* of the community.

I don't know if Gilligan knew that this would be a more logically tragic ending and rejected it, or if he just didn't consider the possibility.

schneefink:

I won't say that they didn't even try to make Smallville tragic, but the showrunners didn't really commit to the idea. It's clear (from DVD commentaries, interviews, etc.) that they weren't even trying to make "quality" TV -- with the kind of writing and production values that was put into BB, for instance.

They were committed to more episodes a season than they could do well (they had a lot of trouble staying within budget) and so they didn't try all that hard. Their continuity was *terrible* -- they used fan resources to keep track of plot elements.

What really sold it to us was the acting: Michael Rosenbaum should have been nominated for an Emmy in Season 3, for Lex Luthor. John Glover as his father Lionel Luthor was wonderfully villainous: we called him "the Magnificent Bastard". Annette O'Toole and John Schneider as the Kents were also extremely good.

And though Tom Welling wasn't all that great an actor at the beginning, he could still sell an innocent, open-hearted Clark Kent. While being astoundingly beautiful, in a way that isn't the usual for Superman.

I suspect that if all public school teachers in America quit their jobs tomorrow...

Don't look now, but we're not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy!

We await with great expectation the forthcoming explanation from a free market conservative voice admonishing us libruls about how markets "really work".

Honestly, I resisted Breaking Bad, but was hooked once I finished the first season. And so forth with a lot of tv series now: my latest binge-watch was Peaky Blinders (still going on).

The fact is, the best drama these days is TV series. There are so many talented people. Who knew?

I like the count's take.

"It was a job, making a product, and he made the very best product and no one was going to thwart him.

And his confederates, the unwitting innocents, and then the professional sociopaths, were swept along in his wake."

*SPOILERS*

I didn't watch Smallville or very much BB but I did catch the last episode and as I watched Walter lying on his back with "Baby Blue" I noted he was smiling and I thought...

...Love or Glory, Baby. Love or Glory.

Personal ambition versus social responsibility (including toward family)or for the Japanese Giri vs ninjo duty vs compassion, a lot of narratives and tragedies can be viewed under this lens.

The Greeks were not so simple and clear. Was Oedipus being selfish, doing his duty? My other favorite, Odysseus gets the kid kill in Philoctetes. I never have quite figured out where Antigone's duty lies.

But duty aside we still have smaller glories, the boy running off to the army, the farm girl abandoning family for the Streets of Baltimore. Is Ray's Apu Trilogy a tragedy?

There are so many talented people. Who knew?

I'm often surprised by that, too. It's one thing when someone you've never heard of gives incredible performances, and that's surprising enough sometimes. It's even moreso when the actor is someone picked for a very particular purpose, like playing a younger or older version of an already-established character, looking very much the part, while still delivering not only a very convincing version of the character, but otherwise performing outstandingly while doing it.

If they can find someone under those specific constraints who can act that well, how many great actors are there out there in the first place?

Feel free to remove a "there" in that last.

Breaking Bad is also incredibly funny in a Cohen Brothers way. It's brilliantly edited as well.

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