Story Telling
When the mood strikes me to randomly watch a DVD I often turn to the first two seasons of Alias (the only seasons I own, or particularly want to). If you dig the schtick of the show, and I obviously do, it's really well made and goes down smooth. Usually, though, when I intend to watch an isolated episode I get sucked into watching an extended run of them, and that's happened this weekend. I noticed something this time, though, the first time it occurred to me consciously.
Alias tends to invert the traditional structure of a television episode. Continuing dramas have evolved through (and evolved into) a number of storytelling formats, but the main story of each episode has a similar dramatic arc which loosely or closely follows the canonical "three act" structure. "Act" doesn't mean a literal act in a play or a complete segment between commercial breaks; a TV show with four commercial breaks or a Shakespeare play has five discrete segments, and the storytelling is molded to invest each act with its own dramatic pulse. The "three act" structure is more of a storytelling principle wherein the dramatic issue is presented, escalated, and then resolved. The Star Wars movies are a good example of how this works, if you imagine each movie to represent one "act". The example has the convenience of illustrating how each "act" - in this case each movie - has its own independent dramatic structure that replicates the presentation/escalation/resolution arc on a smaller scale. This is necessary to provide some sense of resolution and closure to a particular installment; Empire ends with a lot of balls in the air (because by that point it was clear that Lucas would get to make a third film), but it's more tied up than if it was, say, the first part of a two-part television show and ended on a cliffhanger with the words "To Be Continued..."
A show on American network TV is constrained by the imposition of commercial breaks at regular intervals; each between-commercials segment is treated in TV parlance as an act, and many if not most shows attempt to mold all the acts but the last one into a modified miniature of the "three act" structure. A problem is presented and escalated, but we go to commercial before resolution as an incentive to keep you watching through the ad break; when we come back, the resolution of the previous act occurs and we start the cycle again, until the final act of the show wraps up the whole hour's worth of drama. The art of writing scripts that lend themselves to compelling "act outs" is one of the major skills required for television work.
So we've seen how drama, and especially TV shows, take the storytelling concept of the "three act" structure and continually replicate it, with necessary modifications, at every level of division. It's sort of like a fractal in that at each level of magnification it replicates the complexity and (in a Mandelbrot set, IIRC) the actual shape of the larger structure. Television shows that explicitly engage in seasonal arcs, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or most seasons of The Sopranos, also map this structure over the length of their 22 or 13 episodes. On Buffy, the first third, more or less, of episodes set up the pieces in play for a given season, the middle escalates the dramatic action, and the final third, more or less (usually a little less) drive towards resolution. One of the arts of crafting a season-long story is having all this happen at a satisfying pace; there's a balancing act between on the one hand tying off the resolution too soon or too slowly so that the last few episodes drag, and on the other hand delaying so much resolution that the final hour is overstuffed and feels like its solutions came out of nowhere, abruptly.
ANYWAY. Alias eschews the season-by-season story structure (the single biggest paradigm shift in the show happens in the middle of Season Two) but as a continuous drama it clearly draws from the tradition of similarly-minded shows which meld aspects of the soap opera format (where continuous development of relationship-driven plotlines is paramount) and the anthology show format where each episode is a closed box. The Twilight Zone is the ultimate anthology show since it had no continuing characters other than the narrator, but for these purposes procedural-type shows like Dragnet or CSI can be considered as exemplars. On CSI, with the exception of a few recurring antagonists, the "A" story of each episode is a closed-off arc with a defined resolution, but the sub-plots unfold over multi-episode, sometimes season- or series-long arcs (Grissom's deafness, his relationship with Sara Sidle, etc.) The dominance of this form of storytelling goes back at least to The X-Files and probably also draws from Twin Peaks and various 80s cop shows, neither of which I'm familiar with.
Such with Alias: each episode deals with independent missions, but they weave in and out of longer story arcs - Sidney's relationship with and understanding of her father and her mother, the mysteries around Rambaldi, her relationship with Vaughn, etc. Alias was, however, a somewhat notoriously cliffhanger-driven show, which brings me to the point which instigated this post. Imagine a continuing episodic drama's "A" stories as a sine wave, with the crests as the points of heightened drama and the valleys as their resolutions. In most shows, the episode breaks are aligned with the valleys. Alias' method of generating its incessant cliffhangers (seriously, I've just watched episodes two through eleven of Season One in the last few days, and I think there've been three episodes that didn't end with some variant of "How's Sydney going to escape this dangerous situation?") shifts the episode breaks to happen over the crests of the sine wave. Another way to look at it is that the entire show is structured as though its individual episodes were acts of one episode, the week between episodes were a commercial break, and therefore dramatic resolution were disrupted and delayed until we're back from commercial/back next week. The standard Alias episode runs resolution/presentation/escalation. This works pretty well on DVD, but I can understand part of why the show struggled to establish a solid fan base and why network executives eventually mandated more isolated episodes. The cliffhangers were there on the assumption by the showrunners that they'd drive up viewership, but by continually denying a resolution coterminus with an episode's conclusion, the show frustrates (and undoubtedly alienates) the natural dramatic experience we've all been conditioned to expect and enjoy.
In other words, you've got to really enjoy the show's schtick to deal with the weird inverted way it built its episodes.
I wonder, incidentally, where the breaks were in, say, the serialized publications of Dickens' novels. Did he just write until he reached his page count for a given installation and stop wherever necessary, or did he craft each installment to have its own dramatic arc?
Alias tends to invert the traditional structure of a television episode. Continuing dramas have evolved through (and evolved into) a number of storytelling formats, but the main story of each episode has a similar dramatic arc which loosely or closely follows the canonical "three act" structure. "Act" doesn't mean a literal act in a play or a complete segment between commercial breaks; a TV show with four commercial breaks or a Shakespeare play has five discrete segments, and the storytelling is molded to invest each act with its own dramatic pulse. The "three act" structure is more of a storytelling principle wherein the dramatic issue is presented, escalated, and then resolved. The Star Wars movies are a good example of how this works, if you imagine each movie to represent one "act". The example has the convenience of illustrating how each "act" - in this case each movie - has its own independent dramatic structure that replicates the presentation/escalation/resolution arc on a smaller scale. This is necessary to provide some sense of resolution and closure to a particular installment; Empire ends with a lot of balls in the air (because by that point it was clear that Lucas would get to make a third film), but it's more tied up than if it was, say, the first part of a two-part television show and ended on a cliffhanger with the words "To Be Continued..."
A show on American network TV is constrained by the imposition of commercial breaks at regular intervals; each between-commercials segment is treated in TV parlance as an act, and many if not most shows attempt to mold all the acts but the last one into a modified miniature of the "three act" structure. A problem is presented and escalated, but we go to commercial before resolution as an incentive to keep you watching through the ad break; when we come back, the resolution of the previous act occurs and we start the cycle again, until the final act of the show wraps up the whole hour's worth of drama. The art of writing scripts that lend themselves to compelling "act outs" is one of the major skills required for television work.
So we've seen how drama, and especially TV shows, take the storytelling concept of the "three act" structure and continually replicate it, with necessary modifications, at every level of division. It's sort of like a fractal in that at each level of magnification it replicates the complexity and (in a Mandelbrot set, IIRC) the actual shape of the larger structure. Television shows that explicitly engage in seasonal arcs, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or most seasons of The Sopranos, also map this structure over the length of their 22 or 13 episodes. On Buffy, the first third, more or less, of episodes set up the pieces in play for a given season, the middle escalates the dramatic action, and the final third, more or less (usually a little less) drive towards resolution. One of the arts of crafting a season-long story is having all this happen at a satisfying pace; there's a balancing act between on the one hand tying off the resolution too soon or too slowly so that the last few episodes drag, and on the other hand delaying so much resolution that the final hour is overstuffed and feels like its solutions came out of nowhere, abruptly.
ANYWAY. Alias eschews the season-by-season story structure (the single biggest paradigm shift in the show happens in the middle of Season Two) but as a continuous drama it clearly draws from the tradition of similarly-minded shows which meld aspects of the soap opera format (where continuous development of relationship-driven plotlines is paramount) and the anthology show format where each episode is a closed box. The Twilight Zone is the ultimate anthology show since it had no continuing characters other than the narrator, but for these purposes procedural-type shows like Dragnet or CSI can be considered as exemplars. On CSI, with the exception of a few recurring antagonists, the "A" story of each episode is a closed-off arc with a defined resolution, but the sub-plots unfold over multi-episode, sometimes season- or series-long arcs (Grissom's deafness, his relationship with Sara Sidle, etc.) The dominance of this form of storytelling goes back at least to The X-Files and probably also draws from Twin Peaks and various 80s cop shows, neither of which I'm familiar with.
Such with Alias: each episode deals with independent missions, but they weave in and out of longer story arcs - Sidney's relationship with and understanding of her father and her mother, the mysteries around Rambaldi, her relationship with Vaughn, etc. Alias was, however, a somewhat notoriously cliffhanger-driven show, which brings me to the point which instigated this post. Imagine a continuing episodic drama's "A" stories as a sine wave, with the crests as the points of heightened drama and the valleys as their resolutions. In most shows, the episode breaks are aligned with the valleys. Alias' method of generating its incessant cliffhangers (seriously, I've just watched episodes two through eleven of Season One in the last few days, and I think there've been three episodes that didn't end with some variant of "How's Sydney going to escape this dangerous situation?") shifts the episode breaks to happen over the crests of the sine wave. Another way to look at it is that the entire show is structured as though its individual episodes were acts of one episode, the week between episodes were a commercial break, and therefore dramatic resolution were disrupted and delayed until we're back from commercial/back next week. The standard Alias episode runs resolution/presentation/escalation. This works pretty well on DVD, but I can understand part of why the show struggled to establish a solid fan base and why network executives eventually mandated more isolated episodes. The cliffhangers were there on the assumption by the showrunners that they'd drive up viewership, but by continually denying a resolution coterminus with an episode's conclusion, the show frustrates (and undoubtedly alienates) the natural dramatic experience we've all been conditioned to expect and enjoy.
In other words, you've got to really enjoy the show's schtick to deal with the weird inverted way it built its episodes.
I wonder, incidentally, where the breaks were in, say, the serialized publications of Dickens' novels. Did he just write until he reached his page count for a given installation and stop wherever necessary, or did he craft each installment to have its own dramatic arc?
posted by medrawt at
20:41
<< Home