TV in general has gotten tremendously more daring, and that means that an attention-grabbing premise is no longer enough. Networks need to give viewers a reason to keep coming back after the novelty of the premise has worn off. For broadcast networks, that has meant keeping shows spinning their wheels for as long as possible. Thus the case-of-the-week format of crime shows where every story is self-contained and there is rarely any forward momentum to a show’s overall narrative. Forward momentum means moving towards an eventual endpoint, and networks don’t want that. They want viewers coming back week after week out of sheer, lazy habit.
Basic cable networks, following the lead of HBO, have started to feature shows that have an actual narrative arc. AMC found critical success with Breaking Bad and Mad Men, and finally found major ratings success with The Walking Dead. FX has followed their lead with The Americans, in addition to providing a home for Louie, one of the most critically adored comedies of the last few years. It also happens to be a show that would be right at home at HBO, even if Louis C.K.’s previous effort, Lucky Louie, didn’t quite make the cut.
It is that willingness to let a story have a true narrative arc, with an actual beginning and an end, that Showtime has lacked. Dexter followed basically the same pattern every season: one big baddie Dexter pursues over the course of the season while individual episodes occasionally have self-contained stories with more minor bad guys. Dexter comes to some sort of realization about himself (“I’m just like a drug addict, but with murder!”) that is ultimately swept under the rug lest it should lead to some sort of character development. At the end of the season, some tragedy befalls him. Then at the beginning of the next season, he starts the whole process over again. There is never any real character growth. There is never a real sense of forward momentum.
Homeland is starting to show signs of repeating itself, too. Each season there’s a different terrorist threat. Each season Carrie struggles with bi-polar mood disorder and nobody takes her seriously because they think she’s crazy, even though she has an amazing track record of being right 100% of the time. Each season terrible things happen to Brody, and a separate set of terrible things happens to his family that is only tangentially related to the main plot. It worked for the first season, when the show’s motifs were still fresh. It worked in the second season which, despite being markedly less plausible, ramped up the action and made it exciting enough to forgive its shortcomings. Now we’re in the third season, though, and it’s like waking up next to someone after the previous night’s beer goggles have worn off. To be fair, the writers could certainly turn it around by the end of the season, but they’d pretty much need to retcon that whole Brody-in-Venezualan-limbo subplot to do so.
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