the introduction
I've had an idea rattling around the past few days, one which passes the following filters:
It's not an idea so simple to execute that I should go do it
It's not an idea so complicated to follow-through that no one could
It's not so good an idea that I'm concerned about being scooped
It's not so bad an idea that it's not worth sharing at all
Television these days can be fresh and exciting. There are fewer constraints, bigger budgets, more distribution platforms.
Each of these opportunities can be taken to impose upon the lowest common denominator a perfectly palatable series. That's how we're delivered uniform cinematography for every show on a given streaming service, incessant, tonally incongruent quips, and bad copies of beloved characters from better shows. Sequels, reboots and rehashes, formulaic plots, hackneyed— you get the point.
There exists good, excellent, groundbreaking material surrounded by dreck. That cruft will persist no matter the success of the network's flagships. Slot-fillers are necessary.
The lazy stuff can't be improved, mostly. The high-quality programming that succeeds at its aims shouldn't be tampered with. The failed attempts at something highfalutin, now those should be changed, and inasmuch as they're failures anyway, they should be interesting.
I don't think it's possible to perfectly predict a failure. If it were, there wouldn't be any to remedy. I do think it's possible, however, to recognize where one is likely (e.g. Lost, so I've heard; Westworld, so I've seen part of.) There's a (relatively) super-common bracket of prestige television that has to have a complex overarching narrative because it's obsessed with being smart, that can't tell a story in one episode because it must be "binged," that's vaguely pretentious and proud of it.
That swing-for-the-fences production risks —predictably— viewers finding the show boring, overwrought, and overly abstruse without compensation for these drawbacks. The form is a slog, and the contents lack compelling reveals or catharses.
When the T.V. show collapses, any remaining value is in the concept, and maybe parts of the execution —score, visuals, writing— but not the whole. It's less than the sum of its parts, because the parts were what drove its creation: chunks like "season-long arc," or "spin on other show," or "decipher what's actually going on during a given sequence." The executive mandate rests on those pillars in and of themselves, not their potential uses to examine setting and character from alternate angles.
These platforms recognize that they have a captive audience willing to try to interpret their output with Internet fora, explainers, social media, and auxiliary content, so they take advantage. It's a trend I welcome, at least for a subset of their portfolio, because it's advancing the technology available to every other filmmaker.
That's the genesis of this brief: push the envelope even further. The downside is known, and the upsides are higher than ever. There's already infrastructure to make experimental tools the selling point of a series.
It's exploited with larger and grander storylines, each fabricated from episodes long and few enough they're practically movies. Why not try the micro- for a change?
the idea
What we want to do is try out the gimmicks that Internet geeks think are great. Play with the format, let the audience in on a little inside baseball, show off the chops of everyone involved in a way that's immediately visible. We're not using the tricks as supports for convolution, we're putting ourselves in intricate puzzle boxes for the purpose of solving them. Because it's cool— a cool that's genuinely new if it works, and no harm done if it doesn't.
Say you order a television season. (And you're in the United States, so that's ten-to-thirteen episodes now, hopefully doubled. Each is two-thirds of the slot, to leave advertisers room to do what they must.) To make it easy, that's twenty episodes of twenty minutes each, or four hundred minutes of television total. With minimal research, I could try to ballpark what this would cost, but it's directionally accurate to call it inexpensive. Strip away the frills, call it a flyer.
In each episode, we have twenty minutes to try one T.V. trick. We write around those assignments, we market the show to the people who enjoy digging into unusual structures, and everything else —characters, actors, setting, tone, style— serves that unifying aim. It's consistent through the season, but flexible. If a clever episode premise demands tweaks, we make them. Most shows shouldn't do this because it distracts from their ostensible focus. Breaking that rule distinguishes ours, and it's a rule that can be broken because that's the one allowance we're affording ourselves.
You get one, free, and the rest are costly. So everything else has to be played completely straight, believable, thought-through. There can't be plot holes or incongruities, and there shouldn't be excessive anything-that-censors-hate. Two load-bearing asks, if they're big, is a death knell.
clarifications
I've given it the comedy slot for convenience's sake and to minimize initial investment. A drama could also pull it off, potentially, but the shtick is best if it's in full view, and it's made most obvious if the scripts are forced to be maximally tight.
The obvious comparison here —to me, anyway— is Community, which has some great concept episodes. It's also a through-and-through comedy with a fairly large ensemble cast and a plurality of (good, competent, smart) episodes that lean towards the typical. This pitch is differentiated by 1) calling the shots before, not as, they're taken, 2) the concepts aren't vehicles for existing material.
As one example: episode 36 (S2E11) is stop-motion animated and good. The formula repeats in 80 (S4E9) with puppets (bad) and 95 (S5E11, animation, bad.) 36 is in stop-motion for a reason; the reason to make 80 and 95 is to justify the switches in style. This trifecta is low-density and extremely diegetically noticeable. If those qualities weren't present, the strain to shoehorn in a weak framing device as a scaffold for the latter two would ease, and you can then ask: why puppets? No one loves puppets, no one thinks puppets are cool. No one is nostalgic for puppets.
If you pack in interesting ways to film while carefully considering what's worthwhile, without grabbing the audience by the lapels, you can make an episode by saying "hey, wouldn't it be cool if" far after you'd otherwise run it into the ground.
specifics
So here's the listing. Split the season into four blocks, to give it some structure. Five episodes each. We can then determine the needs each must fulfill, even without a huge narrative proceeding apace in the background. Divisions let us break down what to use when, since there's no other guiding principle yet.
As a reminder, we want continuity, but everything should also be watchable on its own. Self-contained, standalone, even if there's backwards compatibility.
Block One needs to be gripping. We need to have a serious handle on the characters; we're going to present them unusually, so the fundamentals must be present early. Also, we need to set the precedent: you've heard we're being ambitious; here's how, though it's not so extreme early on.
Block Two will direct audience expectations for the remainder of the season. We establish trust by spending our strangeness where the first block didn't: weirder stories, stable camerawork.
Block Three lets us flex the muscles developed in the first two. We focus on side stories, changing perspectives. This expands the setting, sets up a finale and possible second-season elements, and lets us jam the budget-savers into a contiguous-feeling clump.
Block Four has the bulk of our set pieces, because it must be a conclusion and it must be memorable. By this point, anyone who hates the show is out; we're playing to the die-hard fans here and praying we impress them enough to get renewed.
Rough guidelines, and we can shuffle episodes around within the framework to be sure they play well with those they're adjacent to.
Block One
1.1 (Pilot) — Real-time
1.2 — One-shot
1.3 — "Two-hander"
1.4 — Split-screen
1.5 — Bottle episode
We bookend (1.1/1.5) with two episodes about dense character interactions. The first is time-narrow, the second is space-narrow. The pilot touches briefly on the entire main cast, while [1.2, 1.3, 1.4] focus primarily on the most prominent character, then the most prominent interpersonal relationship, then the cast members closer to "supporting" or "ensemble." By the time we hit 1.5, we have expectations of every character to play with.
Block Two
2.1 — Montages
2.2 — Flashbacks
2.3 — "Rashomon"
2.4 — Alternate timeline
2.5 — Diegetic titles
With the interpersonal dynamics fully established in the first block, we can hit the daily routine in 2.1 and some of the past in 2.2, which rounds out everything "normal" a viewer wants to know early on. We're also setting up a pattern to break in 2.3, which lets us return to the characters' perceptions of those actions (and boosts the replay value of the "introductory episodes" that make up 1.1-2.2.) 2.3, in turn, sets up 2.4 in frame device or simply in tone, which is a break harder still from "objective reality." 2.5 is grounding, and finally explains the title sequence.
Block Three
3.1 — "Found footage"
3.2 — First-person
3.3 — Guest star
3.4 — Multi-camera
3.5 — Clip show
The third block is all about saving time and money for the more ambitious sequences. 3.1-3.5 each use a mechanism that makes it easier to film or lowers the density of large cast interactions. The key here is to twist as hard as we can. For one example, 3.5 will largely be shot in bits and pieces, and it'll —crucially— include scenes and partial scenes that add to what we've seen already. (Not replaying them, no isolated gags. The equivalent of "here's what the editor cut.")
Block Four
4.1 — Noir / Musical
4.2 — Musical / Noir
4.3 — Dream sequences
4.4 — Reverse order
4.5 — Boom
In the final five, we blow the budget, sum up, and recontextualize. 4.1 and 4.2 are a two-part story (two stories, different tones, intercut) that function as an excuse to do both and to keep either from getting stale. 4.3 has partial animations and effects, 4.4 is filmed back-to-front, and 4.5 has an extended action sequence or something of that nature.
etc.
I could elaborate further with regard to episode details, or the exact genre of the show, cast size, and production, but I'll instead reiterate that that information is secondary. A second season or a set of scripts fills in that information from a framework similar to the one outlined above.
There's a lot going on, which is what makes that elaboration possible; I don't pretend to have all the answers. I do know this is something I'd like to see, and I suspect that there'd be others.
Orion