STREAMING > MOVIES

It has reached the point where, when I watch a movie, I predict the next scene and I’m often right. About 15 minutes in, after introducing the main characters, the scene shifts to the villain doing something villainous. Unless they’re a main character in a buddy movie, the cop’s partner is always the double crosser. When motifs and scenes from the beginning of the movie reappear, things are about to wrap up.

Older TV shows work just the same way, but worse. With less time to complete a story and the need to reset the status quo for next week’s episode, older shows are often super predictable.

But things have improved over the past few years.

While network TV is still largely stuck in this rut, streaming services have adopted a new model. They greenlight sets of 8-10 episodes per “season” which allows the story to develop over a much longer period of time. HBO has been doing this for a while, but now lots of streaming services are.

As an example of what would have never happened before, we can look at Game of Thrones. There are entire episodes that focus on just one or two of the sets of characters, but in the old days of TV every episode had to feature every character. And the fact that some characters experienced genuine character development was made possible by an overall multi-season plan instead of a need to reset to the status quo every 45 minutes.

This is different from how it used to be. Think about all the pointless subplots in episodes of Star Trek. If the main story didn’t feature some of the characters, a low stakes story was shoehorned into the runtime just so everyone got screentime. Not only did that break the mood of the main story, it robbed that story of time it needed to tell a good story, weakening it further.

With show writers now being able to think about telling a story over a course of 10 hours instead of 44 minutes or even 2 hours, much more complex stories are possible. Problems can take longer than 45 minutes or 2 hours to resolve and narrative seeds can be planted that pay off several hours later.

This extra space is a large part of why I think we’re living in the golden age of TV storytelling. Genre shows like Westworld, Game of Thrones, Arcane, and Shadow and Bone can explore a variety of interesting places (and include time jumps). More real-world shows like I May Destroy You, Boardwalk Empire, and Broadchurch can use that time to explore multiple sides of a complex social issue.