Since Christmas I’ve been watching episodes of the old 1960s-70s Mission Impossible series on dvd. I’ve worked through the first two seasons already, about 50 episodes, and there are five more seasons remaining.
Each episode is roughly the same : team leader gets a briefing via tape recorder or cleverly hidden speaker, he chooses a handful of repeating team members, they discuss the plan in quaintly decorated apartment, the plan is then set in motion to be completed with clockwork precision. Wash, rinse, repeat. It’s a simple, repeating pattern, and it’s the big difference between writing now and writing fifty years ago. Mission Impossible, like Perry Mason and Flash Gordon and a thousand other shows, comic books, and serial novels was episodic, but not at all organic.
That isn’t to say I’ve not enjoyed watching my show. The plots are occasionally quaint ingeneous and it’s entertaining to see how 1960s american solved problems that would take a few minutes on the computer, a rocket engine, or a SWAT team these days. Still, each episode the characters have a new plot, but the same haircut, same nonexistant backstory, same changeless, ageless history and future. There is no grand story arc, no characterization, and no link in time between one mission and the next. Each episode is exactly what modern episodic fiction cannot be.
In my opinion, the last great non-dyanamic television series was Star Trek: The Next Generation. Since then each new show seems to have a larger, more dynamic story arc culminating with shows like 24 and Lost. The mini-series format has become the minimum expectation.
It’s no different with writing. The lone novel remains a venerable and successful format, but within genre fiction (fantasy and science fiction) the trilogy and shared world are by far more popular. Just as with television the expectation is on changing characters and a plot of ever-expanding scope. In fact, given that the written word can carry so much more detail than a television show, these demands are exponentially greater.
I say this in relation to my constant pet-project: micro-fiction. Short writing pieces can’t just tell entertaining vignettes. There must be a greater story being propogated (I think X-files) and also characters that change and grow (and die) in relation to the demands placed upon them. The expectations upon a story have just flat changed. Pure escapism has given way to intellectual exploration. Readers and watchers who run into brick walls stop paying attention; the age of Dick Tracy is dead. Even Batman is no longer the ever-vigilent Dark Knight returning night after night to foil the Joker. Stories today are more complex, more vibrant…and for all the neat gadgetry and clever plotlines, have the potentially to be a thousand times more exciting.
