Over and Over

Lately, people have been complaining about House. They say it's gotten formulaic, and that a half-season story arc about House being hounded by a detective for drug charges came to nothing. (For those unfamiliar with the show, it's about a diagnostician named Dr. Gregory House, who is brilliant, acerbic, and unsentimental. He has a leg injury, walks with a cane, and pops painkillers constantly. He has a team of three attractive young doctors, a best friend named Wilson, played by the guy from Dead Poets Society, and a sparring partner of a hospital administrator named Cutty. British comic actor Hugh Laurie plays House with an American accent; it's not a particularly comic show, although its comic moments are probably its best.)

The main complaint concerns the fact that every episode goes roughly the same way. A patient comes in with some mysterious disorder, the team misdiagnoses it, everything looks lost, then House has a revelation and realizes what the problem is. This is true. But if you're watching television for formal innovation, you're going to be regularly disappointed. Form must, by necessity, be formulaic for most TV shows, given uniform length restrictions and hectic production schedules that leave writers little opportunity to reinvent the wheel on a week-to-week basis. Even on shows that played with form, like Seinfeld and Arrested Development, played with form in roughly the same way each time. The pleasure in seeing multiple strands come together in Arrested Development wasn't the coming-together but the parts themselves, and admiring, once again, what a good trick the writers had pulled.

Television is like pop music in that the enjoyment comes from the execution rather than the conception. Sure, individual show concepts can be grabby, but ultimately it's just a gimmick--if the show is successful, that grabby concept is going to get ridden into the ground. What matters, then, is not the fact that a rabbit is being pulled from a hat, because we all saw that coming as soon as a hat made an appearance, but what color the hat is, what the stage patter concerns, if it's maybe a marmot instead of a rabbit. Like pop, the form is relatively fixed, because the form is nearly perfect and extraordinarily successful. What you do within those confines is what matters, and the unavoidable confines of a television show are episodes.

In this realm, House has excelled. Memorable recent episodes include one about a girl whose dwarfism turns out to be treatable and her dwarf mother has to decide whether to encourage her to be normal or let her stay within the community she's been raised in, and in the process manages to both address issues of minority rights and make a bunch of great midget jokes.[1] Another ended up essentially legitimizing the gypsy way of life as being pro-family. Another was a genuinely gripping mystery, one that I was able to watch in reruns without remembering what the solution was. And yeah, they all followed the arc described two paragraphs back, but aside from always solving the case, each did very different things. It's a frame for comedy, drama, or both, and it wraps up in 53 minutes, a tasty little one-act (in, uh, 6 acts, if you believe TV writers).

While all this was going on, as I say, there was this whole other story about a cop who arrested House, House was a jerk to him, now he wants to bust House for narcotics possession, etc. etc. It could have been interesting if it didn't pound quite so relentlessly on the go-to themes for the show, which have admittedly worn a bit thin by now: is House's jerkiness a bad thing (no, the patients never seem to complain), is his domineering conviction that he's always right harmful (it pretty much never is, and you'd think he'd have the track record to convince everyone of that by now), are attitudes about pain medication misguided (yes, yes), is his team loyal to him or are they disturbed enough by his erratic behavior to turn him in (once or twice, but generally, no). These all seemed settled issues, and so they were weird things to hang a continuing story around.[2] The writers clearly did so in response to concerns that the series had grown stale, and so they naturally went down the sure-fire path to critical love: the multi-episode story arc.

Taken from a distance, multi-episode story arcs are a good thing. HBO has built its brand around shows with episodes that don't describe a complete circle, instead leaving stories unfinished and placing resolution in unexpected places and with great emotional payoff. On network TV, you think, of course, of Twin Peaks, the grandaddy of them all, but also of something like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, especially the season where Buffy started dating Angel only to see him turn evil once they had sex.[3] And The X-Files' overarching story of conspiracy added layers of depth and greater meaning to a show superficially one step above Alien Autopsy.[4] Today, the form flourishes, with shows like Lost, Heroes, and Veronica Mars drawing audiences and critical acclaim by drawing a story out over the course of a season.

But, although it seems daring, requiring more foresight and allowing for more thematic resonance than single-episode stories, we can clearly see it as problematic. For one thing, it's such a major investment that it can kill an otherwise-good show. Twin Peaks is the classic example of this. By tying itself to a longer story that would require changing the status quo upon its conclusion, it raised the stakes higher than was really healthy, and the focus on the longer story made people miss the great individual episodes that not only followed the murder mystery, but those that were included in it. X-Files got so tied up in a conspiracy story it couldn't actually explain, partially because they knew they might then lose their audience a la Twin Peaks and partially because they had no fucking idea what they were talking about beyond "suspiiiiiicious," that it lost the ability to tell good, self-contained stories. Buffy dedicated itself to season-long "big bad" arcs productively for a while, but by the end the stakes had been raised so high with the world almost ending and ultimate evils and so forth that another episode in which they went and killed some vampires seemed meaningless.[5]

Clearly, too, it can be a crutch. By starting a story but dealing out plot details very slowly, writers know viewers will tune in every week just to see how the longer story is advanced, and so as long as that happens (OMG they kissed, what's that thing over there, a shaky shot of someone on the telephone) the actual episode can be crap.[6]

These problems would be less severe were we operating under a different system. These models can work well under the British model because shows have much shorter seasons and definite ending points. You can raise the stakes or promise a resolution or have a plot that makes sense, because you're not going to have to draw it out for 22 episodes a year, for as many years as you can continue to make money off it. You never know when the end is coming, and so things have a tendency to peter out. Maybe we should start injuring more TV writers' knees so they can retire at their peak like football players are doing now.

Coulda, woulda, shoulda. Point it, we're not operating under the British system. We're operating under the American system, and hell, if it was good enough to culturally colonize the whole damn world, it should be good enough for you, buster. We just need to be a little more aware of the particular charms of episodic television.

For illustration, consider the recent clip from the Craig Ferguson show on YouTube (here). It's a 12-minute monologue explaining that he's not going to make fun of Britney Spears for shaving her head. This is because he recognizes his own 20-year-old alcoholic behavior in Britney, and so he recognizes that she needs to get help. This may sound preachy, but it practice it's remarkable, richly detailed and full of emotional twists and turns that throw you from comic to serious. In other words, it's a good story, and apparently, a shitload of people have watched it.
But before the technology changed, before YouTube and DVDs, the only people that would have seen it would be that night's viewers, and even many of these would have been making a snack, or dozing off, or having sex. They wouldn't have watched it with the attention you give to something being presented as uniquely worthy of your time, as we do every time we click a YouTube link.[7] Maybe it would've come out on a compilation 12 minutes later, or maybe it would've gotten passed around a small circle of people as a bootleg VCR tape, but probably not--it is a 12-minute monologue about Britney Spears by a late-night talk-show host. It would have gone unremembered. Before the internet and video recording, once a moment was broadcast over the air, it was more or less gone forever--or, at least, there was no reliable way for a viewer to recapture it.

The structure of the episode was television's way of dealing with the blink-and-you-missed-it conundrum. By taking those memorable moments and injecting them into multiple broadcasts, you could be reasonably sure that an audience would catch it, and thus catch on to the program. TV faced the problem of each week being a new performance that would be gone as soon as it happened, like theater, but without theater's idea of a "run." You got one shot at things, because next week you had to be on to something else. So by retaining certain elements, TV was able to be inclusive, to give everyone similar experiences even if you weren't able to make it to a particular broadcast. And by doing so, it was able to discover quite clearly what worked and what didn't, while simultaneously acclimating its viewers to the conventions of a new medium. In short, the episodic nature of television was its institutional memory. The laugh track is the old guy in the mailroom who knows what the notations on old files mean; the wacky neighbor is your great-uncle who knows the family tree by heart. It creates a throughline to the future that now extends into the past.

Of course, this sounds like a bad thing, with its repetition and its codification and its normalization. But as all commercial art does, through compromise and limits it evolved strategies to make art work under restrictive circumstances, and in doing so created a supple form. In a way, TV episodes are like little rituals. Sure, rituals can be empty, there only for the sake of convention, and even when they're meaningful they only confirm things--but they confirm different things, and sometimes a ritual, properly invoked, can cause change.[8] With the reassuring base of formula, you can say whatever you want.

[1] It also provides an interesting contrast with another show that's excelled on an episode-by-episode basis lately: Boston Legal. The actress who plays the dwarf on House, Meredith Eaton, also plays a lawyer and Shatner love interest on the legal thriller, but where House bonds with the dwarf on the basis of being an outsider, on Boston Legal she's almost aggressively sexualized, but not in an exotic way. Among tall, leggy blondes, she's the sexpot. She's the normal one.
[2] There was one interesting element: the cop put a lien on Wilson's bank account and invalidated his license to prescribe medication, thus pretty much ruining his life. But this never really paid off. The cop's megalomania went largely unexplored, and after a bitter confrontation and Wilson eventually turning House in, essentially nothing changed. They're still friends, Wilson's got his life back. This would seem to indicate that the show wasn't ready to make the kind of changes a multi-episode story arc requires be at least nominally at stake.
[3] Tell me about it!
[4] It also gave the show enough legs to allow for some truly fantastic episodes, especially the Cher one. X-Files is arguably the progenitor of the modern extended-story series: try and imagine 24 or Lost without it.
[5] You'll notice that the whole idea of "jumping the shark" doesn't have to do with a show repeating itself, but with a show changing, by altering the status quo in ways that are stupid. Call it the Poochie Principal--a show never really dies by staying the same.
[6] Sadly, at this point I think we can safely term it "Gilmore Girls syndrome."
[7] Almost always in error, but we keep trying anyway.
[8] This is how The Simpsons permanently changed TV comedy.

Labels: Boston Legal, Buffy, comedy, House, pop, TV

posted by Mike B. @ 12:39 AM