Beginning, middle, and never end

With it being as cold here as it is everywhere right now, and since I am too weakly constituted to deal with the cold, we've been doing a lot of what everyone else is doing: streaming shows all day long. Mrs. Heretic and I are currently watching the entirety of The Mindy Project, which neither of us is crazy about, but since we're too lazy to figure out an alternative, we'll probably watch to the end.

In the mornings, I write short stories where I try to bring about a convincing and satisfying resolution in five thousand words or less. In the evenings, I watch shows where the goal is to keep the story going for as long as it is profitable to keep it going. There are, of course, little climaxes and little denouements within the episodes and seasons of a TV series, but the big resolution is withheld indefinitely, until the stars want to do something else or the sponsor decides to cut bait.

Interrupting ancient tradition

The basic plot structure of exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and resolution or denouement has been more or less the cultural expectation in the West for over 2,000 years. Aristotle described plot in a way that people growing up in my era could find very easy to recognize. It can be a little difficult to find the structure in some ancient stories, partly because we have only fragments of some of them, but it's there. All the literature we read in school follows this outline, whether it's Shakespeare's plays, Homer's epics, 19th-century Romanticism or 20th-century realism. The only exceptions are stories that are intentionally trying, through some avant garde sensibility, to subvert classical plot structure. For the most part, though, it's been something that's been constant whether we're watching Star Wars or reading Faulkner.

When television became ubiquitous, plot structure changed only slightly. Instead of being treated to a story where a character faced challenges, adapted, and either overcame or was overcome followed by a hard ending where we were forced to imagine what would happen afterwards, viewers got miniature versions of the plot cycle repeated over and over. Every week, the stage was re-set and the play took place again, with variations from the last episode, but still very similar. Beaver Cleaver learned life lessons, then would forget them the next week and have to learn all over again.

This wasn't totally without precedent in Western culture. There had been serial narrative. Dickens, of course, is the first example that comes to mind. But a Dickens story, even broken up into dozens of magazine installments, still is headed towards an end the whole time. It's a traditional plot structure that just takes a while. A better early analogue for 20th-Century TV would be Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, with narratives progressing toward an ending, but then re-set to do something similar again. The earliest analogue in American literature would be James Fennimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo stories.

In talking about 20th-century television, I'm talking mainly about the sit-com, or dramas like The Fugitive or Kung Fu, where the overall meta-plot of the story didn't really advance much from episode to episode. This was the dominant model, but there were others. The daytime drama or soap opera had plot cycles or "story lines" within a larger story that, if the network executives were lucky, would never end. The daytime soap was held in low esteem, thought to be trash for shallow housewives, but there were night-time versions with a slightly better reputation.

Around the turn of the century, shows like Ally McBeal started to give audiences something different. This was a comedy where things that happened in one episode carried over into the next one, allowing writers to do things they hadn't been able to do before. As the Internet and fan forums started to exert influence in how people watched TV, fans loved being able to speculate on what would happen with a story from season to season.

As a result, plot cycles started to operate on many levels. There was still the plot cycle of each individual episode, but there was also an emerging plot cycle of a season. As CD sets got sold by season, we started to think of the season as the fundamental unit of a TV show, not the episode. This has accelerated with shows that are now made for streaming services that get released as an entire season and watched, often, in one binge session.

Like having sex for five years

In general, opening up TV narrative past the episode and into the seasonal aspect has made it better. In the old days, shows required us to forget what we'd seen in past episodes, a characteristic The Simpsons has had endless fun making mocking. The application of consequences to TV shows has made it easier for audiences to suspend disbelief and get into the shows.

However, there is a built-in problem with TV's season-by-season approach to building narrative. The climax in plot has the same name as the high point of sex for a reason. Plot is supposed to delight, to build expectation, and then eventually to deliver on that expectation and resolve the tension. Odysseus is supposed to eventually make it home. With a TV show, however, as long as there is a promise of one more season, then we cannot ever really get to the big orgasm. It might sound great to have sex forever, but at some point, delayed gratification starts to pass a point of diminishing returns. (Mrs. Heretic might opine at this point that this would explain why I'm fond of short stories. At least I don't write a lot of micro-fiction.)

There are three plot cycles in a TV series: the episodic, the seasonal, and the overall series cycle. As long as the series cycle is not resolved, Odysseus will never get home again. The audience never gets its big orgasm. In a great series, you can have moments that certainly feel orgasmic, like when Sansa Stark releases the hounds on Ramsey Bolton's ass. But for most shows, we just get points in the narrative that feel better than others--like season openers or finales. (One strength of Game of Thrones is that the series always had an end point in mind. It is just a very long plot instead of an indefinite one.)

Finally, at some point, the audience gets rubbed raw by all this foreplay. The show starts to jump the shark, and the executives, if they're smart, plan for a final season that finally resolves the show's big narrative issues. So we do finally get resolution. But there is a strange effect on the evolution of a show.

House, Nurse Jackie, and essential character armor

We all know about plot armor: the certainty an audience has that the show's main character cannot die until the end. The modern TV series introduces another kind of armor, one that makes the main character invulnerable from fully maturing past his or her shortcomings until the end.

I commented before about the movie Train Wreck, how it's satisfying once Amy Schumer's character finally overcomes her self-destructiveness. But it's also clearly the end, because now we, the audience, have nothing left to laugh at. With shows like House or Nurse Jackie, the main character is not going to fully overcome (or be overcome by) their shortcomings until the end, and the end is not now until we have the announcement that we are in the show's last year. Until then, we can have false climaxes--both House and Nurse Jackie had a season where the main character kicked their addictions and tried to live right. But that made it hard to keep the momentum of the show going. For viewers, it was an interesting contrast from seasons past, but we all knew that the writers would pull the plug out of the tub of that transitional season.

In a movie like Train Wreck, the main character's personal development is linear. Events change her little by little until she makes a big change. In a TV show, the character is resistant to hundreds of events before it starts to change the character. The development isn't linear; it's a circular holding pattern. The character gets close to getting it right over and over, but always falls away until the show finally gets clearance to land.   

The TV series does not have to answer one of the big questions in traditional narrative--Why now? Why are we being allowed into this person's life at this point in it? Usually, it's because that's the point we need to start at in order to witness the change. In TV, though, we come in at the point where the change is furthest away.

The result on modern viewers

It's hard to say what the actual psychological effect of stories are on readers and viewers. Hopefully, they help to produce empathy. But does reading about or watching a character overcome personal flaws (or fall to them) help the reader to do (or avoid) the same? I'm not sure, although I operate on faith that it does. I feel like it has in my own life, so I write in the belief it might do the same for others.

But I feel like there is an entirely different psychological effect of a television show that goes on indefinitely and only decides to end when external factors make it end versus a story that ends organically on its own terms. Not to sound like one of those annoying people who make a big show of how international and cosmopolite they are, but I prefer watching a Korean drama, where there is an end built-in from the beginning, and we are working toward it through all 20 episodes. The season is also the series. It has an entirely different narrative impulse.

I suppose a show where the main character limps on for seven years with the same basic issues is more like real life than a show where the main character overcomes a flaw within the space (to the audience) of a few hours. We do tend to face the same life issues year after year and decade after decade. So maybe the modern, streaming show is a truer model of how to deal with our weaknesses. Maybe Bojack Horseman can't stop doing drugs and drinking and wallowing in self-pity, but he can try to find ways to deal with his horrible flaws so he can face his day-to-day issues. He wins some, even if he usually loses, and the losses have much direr consequences. But maybe that's really all most of us can really do--try to minimize the downside of ourselves rather than overcome it and conquer mightily.

But this feels like a loss, somehow. The greatest fiction in fiction might be the illusion that we have control over our lives, but as Lander said in Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, "Sometimes a useful delusion is better than a useless truth." I think readers and viewers lose some sense of agency when they follow narrative arcs that last from the time our kids start kindergarten to the time they're asking out prom dates, especially if we all know the show only ended because two of the characters left to go be on a different show.

Speaking of The Underground Railroad, I hear it's going to become a series on Amazon Prime. I look forward to watching it. It will deal with a question the writers of Handsmaid's Tale are dealing with now: how do you take a single novel and turn it into several seasons of stories? If there is a novel that's not itself a series but that might work for a TV show, it's this one. Like the underground railroad in the story, the narrative of the book has a lot of hidden passages that might lead to places nobody even knows about. Since the book is as much about the journey of African Americans as it is about the main character, it ends with more questions than answers.

The age of streaming video, which most are viewing as a golden age of television, has given us some brilliant moments and some stuff that's just better than being outside when it's freezing. I hope The Underground Railroad will become some of the best we've yet seen.