Episodic and Seasonal Pacing on Television

If you somehow weren't aware, season two of Mad Men premiered last night. The episode was everything I expected and hoped for and more, with a couple of surprises along with the general thoughtful evolution of characters that have aged more than a year since we last saw them. (Season two begins in February 1962; I believe season one ended Thanksgiving 1960, although I'm not as sure as I'd like to be.) What struck me--what has always struck me about Mad Men, since I watched the first episode, even as I have grown accustomed to it--was the pacing. Mad Men is a brilliant show, and while these are of necessity rare, it is by no means alone. I do believe, however, that Mad Men is unique, or nearly so, among television shows in its pacing. At the very least, I have never seen another show like it in this regard.

When searching for a way to describe Mad Men to friends who have never seen it, the word that almost always comes to mind is "pensive". So much of the show it seems is not in the dialogue or the actions but in the inaction, the moments of quite solitude when characters simply stare off in the distance, lost in thought. Of course, describing the show like this usually makes it seem boring and dull, but because of the acting and the writing it's not. Because Mad Men is a show about characters, more, a show about characters who are trapped in lives they do not want, in a structure and society they do not like but nonetheless uphold like some kind of nation-spanning Abilene paradox, we understand why they must take a moment, or many moments, to contemplate how fucked up their existences really are (and drink a hell of a lot of alcohol).

John Slattery as Roger Sterling in Mad Men (2007).
And it couldn't be done any other way. If Mad Men were a fast-paced show about action and snappy banter, full of people walking down hallways, issuing quick orders, and exchanging rapid barbs, the characters would never get anywhere, because without those moments of reflection they would never come to the piercing self-awareness whose tragic juxtaposition with the flashy, glamorous action of the ad agency is the heart of the show.

I don't mean to say that such a fast-paced show can't have strong characters--Battlestar Galactica has proven that many times over. Although now I can't help but wonder, considering other things as well, if Battlestar's characters really came across as well as Mad Men's do in its first season. I suspect the answer is no, but I think that's more because Battlestar, as much as I like to think of it as a character drama (and the people behind it, according to press, do, too), in many ways it's not, or at least it's trying to do a lot more than just character drama, and it loses some of the character development in order to further those other goals in the limited time that it has. However, I think this, too, ties into pacing, because could a show really focus on its characters without a slower pace that allows them moments of reflection? A character study or portrait, perhaps, but not any show in which the characters were expected to change and grow, I think.

Pacing doesn't just apply to the style and structure of individual episodes, of course. The pacing of seasons--or even an entire series (here's looking at you, Babylon 5)--also deserve consideration. Episodic series, obviously, don't have any real seasonal or serial pacing, but shows with long-term arcs (sometimes referred to as "novelistic" series) do. Several years ago, following the unlikely runaway success of Lost, "arc-based" shows briefly became a fad on the major networks, with shows like Threshold and Invasion trying to repeat Lost's success by replicating its long-term story (with almost no success). On cable and premium television, of course, there was nothing new about arc-based shows, and arcs have been a fixture even of network television for decades. And the existence of arcs themselves doesn't necessarily constitute a sense of pacing, although it does force those behind a show to at least consider it (I hope).

One of the best examples, or at least one of the most extreme, of such seasonal pacing is The Wire. In the past couple of days I've watched the first ten episodes of season one. The Wire's creator and show-runner, David Simon, has famously compared each season of The Wire to a novel, with each season telling a single long, over-arcing plot and (somewhat infamously) early episodes being devoted (as in the early chapters of a novel, the analogy goes) to character development and exposition rather than direct plot development. I'm not entirely sure I agree with the "novelistic" moniker: yes, it's closer to a novel than anything else I've seen on television, but nonetheless it's not a novel, and the comparison tends to be used more to implicitly reference the supposed superiority of literature to television rather than any real commentary for the structure of the show.

At left: The Wire (2008). At right: a book (photo by Lars Aronsson).
Setting that aside, however, The Wire does demonstrate a very deliberate and slow seasonal pacing that marks it from other shows. After watching as much as I have, I'm honestly quite glad that I never tried to watch this show as it premiered, because the individual episodes are so obviously simply a part of a larger whole that I'm not sure how satisfying it would have been to watch only one a week. It's not uncommon in The Wire for details mentioned in one scene of one episode to come to bear relevance on the plot three, four, or much more episodes later. Several times, such details are startling "cliffhanger" revelations in the final scene of an episode, which are then never mentioned and have no obvious impact on the next episode. Watching it as I am, in close procession, this isn't particularly bothersome, but it does at times feel like sloppy television. The Wire is supposed to be the best show on television, and I'm not denying its brilliance, but even the best have flaws, and to me this seems one of them.

I don't mean to degrade arc-based plotting in general; in fact, quite the opposite: I love arc-based shows and strongly prefer them over episodic series, which tend towards popcorn entertainment. (This is intrinsic to the nature of episodic television, I think: in order for a show to be episodic, to begin with the same premise every episode, it must end with the same premise every episode. Nothing can change, leading usually to the frequent usage of a "reset button" that fixes whatever changes might have occurred as a result of the episode's events and prevents any real development of the plot or characters.) But the episodic nature of television cannot be ignored or denied.

A television season is not a thirteen-hour movie (and even a thirteen-hour movie would have its own special pacing requirements rather than simply being a feature length film extended so many hours); it is a progression of thirteen, or twenty, or however many episodes, each of which are a contained unit. While nowadays sales of television DVDs are strong and growing, and many people are encountering critically acclaimed but popularly ignored series for the first time in this format that obviates some of these pacing concerns, this is still true. (Watching a season on DVD could be directly compared to watching a thirteen-hour movie--but again, that's not the same as a regular movie.)

Mad Men knows this, as does Battlestar. I honestly think the best example of such episodic yet arc-based television may be the first season of Veronica Mars, a critical darling that skirted cancellation for three years before finally (and tragically) losing the battle. While the following seasons were questionable as to their greatness, the first season is to me among the best ever on television, and it perfectly balances a season-long mystery plot, with a slow progression of clues, red herrings, and true revelations, with cleverly done individual mysteries in each episode, along with seasonal character development and well-developed guest characters in individual episodes. While I watched the first (and second) seasons on DVD, I never felt that the series would have been difficult to watch weekly (and I did watch the third season weekly, which handled the structure about as well, if the actual plots and characters were not as well-done).

Kristen Bell in Veronica Mars (2007).
Ironically, the first season of Veronica Mars was developed from an unpublished novel by creator Rob Thomas; supposedly most of the progression of the seasonal mystery was taken more-or-less directly from this novel. (This also to some degree explains the quality of the first season's big mystery in comparison to the next two, which were developed on the time of the series.) But Veronica Mars is not a novel, and doesn't try to be, and that is its strength. I have never seen anything pointing one way or the other, but I assume that the vast majority of the individual episodic mysteries were written specifically for the series and the general pace of the novel greatly slowed in order to accommodate the new format of the story. It is because Veronica Mars recognized its format and didn't try to pretend to be something else--regardless of its origins--that it succeeds so well (in addition to brilliant writing and acting, of course).