Plot Holes and Revelations and Big Finales

This article contains spoilers up to the penultimate episodes of both Lost and Ashes to Ashes.

For fans of genre TV, this weekend is a pretty big deal. On Friday the last-ever episode of Ashes to Ashes airs in the UK on BBC-1, ending a five-season storyline that began back in 2006 with the first season of Life on Mars and modern cop Sam Tyler finding himself in 1973 after suffering a traffic accident in the present. Then on Sunday in the USA, the final episode of Lost airs, concluding six seasons of convoluted, complex plotting that began back in 2004 with a commercial airliner crashing on a mysterious island in the South Pacific.

The cast of Ashes to Ashes in Season 2.

Unusually for genre shows, both of these series went on to become major mainstream hits. Mars and later Ashes frequently won their timeslot ratings against all-comers, whilst Lost pulled in more than 20 million viewers on several occasions. They have both also achieved some measure of critical acclaim. Certainly all of the UK TV magazines this week have been emblazoned with coverage of Ashes' final episode, whilst in the USA the equivalent mags are dotted with various Lost images. Conversely, the USA is barely aware of Ashes' existence (although the arrival of the series on BBC America has picked up some positive coverage in the last few weeks over there), whilst Lost jettisoned most of its UK audience when it moved from Channel 4 to the cable and satellite Sky service after its second season, and coverage of its finale (which airs next week in the UK) has been altogether more modest over here as a result.

The cast of Lost in their second season.

The two shows coming to an end marks an interesting moment for serialised, mystery-based TV shows. As mentioned in my Arc of Truth series of articles from last year, truly satisfying serialised shows have been somewhat few and far between, due to their lack of forward-planning and tendency to get cancelled halfway through, culminating in the highly divisive and flamewar-inducing finales to shows such as Battlestar Galactica and The X-Files. This is highlighted in those shows, like the two mentioned, which are based heavily around mysteries, secrets and dense mythologies. Shows which have more straightforward and linear story arcs, where any such mysteries are short-term and resolved in a season or two at the most, are notable for ending much more successfully, such as Babylon 5 and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

With both shows having aired their penultimate episodes, it is interesting to see which way they go. Ashes to Ashes, for my money, has the greater potential to end successfully, simply because it's a much less dense show than Lost. It's more episodic, with the ongoing storylines relegated to subplots whilst a 'crime of the week' is pursued in the foreground. This approach has been somewhat inverted in the final season, but it means that the questions that need answering from three years of Ashes and two of Mars are nowhere near as numerous, and all seem to be tied into one central answer.

Sam Tyler, Gene Hunt and Annie Cartwright in Life on Mars.

Lost, on the other hand, is far more sprawling and more epic, with more than twice as many episodes, a much larger cast and a much bigger storyline expanding across decades. There have already been many characters and storylines which have been abandoned or jettisoned, leaving unresolved plot threads dangling throughout the show's history. The potential for disappointment with Lost is considerably greater, although after the penultimate episode I am more hopeful that they can pull at least the major mysteries and plot threads together.

Gene Hunt and Jim Keats on Ashes to Ashes.

Both series have chosen to go down the 'dark and grand epic mythology' route for their conclusions. This route was more unexpected with Ashes, supposedly a chalk 'n' cheese crime drama about a modern policewoman having to work with a bunch of semi-sexist, emotionally retarded early 1980s coppers and clashing badly. Yet the latest season has played around strongly with the imagery of death, with Gene Hunt and new character Jim Keats both 'helping' dying people at the moment of their passing, or tugging other characters' loyalties between them like an angel and devil sitting on a person's shoulders whispering advice to them (or in Gene's case bellowing loudly). At the same time, other characters are seeing the world melt away around them, leaving only a cold, disturbing image of millions of stars behind before things snap back to normal (leading to some British viewers hyperventilating in panic that the producers are going down the same road as the patently ludicrous American version of Life on Mars). Certainly life, death, dreams and a battle between two powerful characters seem to have risen to the fore in Ashes, with perhaps the fate of the world that they inhabit at stake.

Jack and Locke, the final protagonist and antagonist of Lost.

Similarly, Lost's early seasons raised the prospect of it having a storyline involving the ruins of the DHARMA Initiative and a power struggle within the ranks of the native 'Other' inhabitants of the Island (between Ben Linus and Charles Widmore) with the survivors of Oceanic 815 caught up in the middle. Elements such as the disturbing smoke monster and visitations by dead people were more 'out there' but could perhaps have been given credible explanations. Instead, as this last season has developed we have discovered a complex set of 'rules' governing the behaviour of two antagonistic, long-lived beings, the (relatively) benign Jacob and the evil 'Man in Black' (the smoke monster in human form) who have manipulated events from the very start and indeed for two millennia before that to lead to an epic, mythological showdown between their avatars (now identified as Jack and Locke) with the fate of the world hanging in the balance.

The smoke monster on Lost.

In both cases, the move to grand, epic themes has been well-handled, but it's a dangerous move which has the potential to backfire spectacularly. Battlestar Galactica started off as a tense, action-driven drama about the human race on the run for its life with some interesting subtexts about the War on Terror, political rights and civil rights in a time of war. Whilst it had some mystery elements (most notably the identity of the mysterious 'Head Six' that only Baltar could see and hear), the show was mostly based on the idea of a dynamic, forward-moving storyline. A few weeks into Season 3 it switched to asking deep questions about the nature of the 'Final Five' and the Cylon god, going on to bring in mythological concepts and elements (such as the 'Temple of Hopes' on the algae planet) and then brought a character back from the dead. Because the show had not been designed with this mythology in mind from the start, it handled it badly and dropped the ball in its final season and during the finale, leaving a good half or more of the fanbase severely disappointed.

Both Lost and Ashes have the advantage that their storylines have been preplanned, although to what extent remains contentious: the producers of Ashes have admitted that whilst they've known the ending since working on Mars, the character of Keats was created quite late in the day after writing on Season 3 had been underway for some time. The producers of Lost only mapped out the current story arc involving Jacob and the smoke monster in the middle of the third season. Still, in both cases this was far more than what BSG attempted, and should hopefully mean that the endings of both series track better.

This time next week, we'll know if either, both or neither of these shows joins the canon of truly satisfyingly ended genre shows, or if they fall at the last hurdle. Reviews of Season 3 of Ashes to Ashes and the final six episodes of Season 6 of Lost will follow next week.

The Arc of Truth: Part 4

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

At the start of the 21st Century, the story arc had begun to dominate dramatic television after some hesitancy on the part of the networks throughout the preceding two decades. The arrival of DVD in 1998 saw a marked change in attitudes to television, with people now buying up entire seasons of a TV show at a time, and this format made appreciating long-running storylines more practical. Not just genre television but big, mainstream shows like Friends were now employing long-running storylines which millions of people were able to follow weekly with no problems.


Despite this, there was a curious failure to follow in the footsteps of Babylon 5 and create a show with a pre-planned story arc with a beginning, middle and end. Most shows continued to make it up as they went along, sometimes effectively but more often leading to confusion and pacing problems. A show which fits into this bracket, and one of the most successful arc shows of this decade, is 24. Beginning in late 2001, 24 is presented in real-time, with each season taking place over the course of one day as counter-terrorist agent Jack Bauer fights off various terrorist threats to the United States. Over the show's seven seasons to date, Bauer has fought Middle Eastern terrorists and domestic enemies and saved LA from nuclear attack, being devastated by a bio-weapon and various other threats.

Given the limitations of the format, it would be logical to assume each season was pre-planned in some depth. However, each season is in fact written on the fly (with the notable exception of the seventh, which was delayed by a year due to the 2007 US Writer's Guild strike, giving the writers time to complete all the scripts and revise them before production resumed). This is especially notable in Season 1 during a rather odd storyline in which Jack's wife becomes amnesiac, a 'filler' storyline introduced to pad out the narrative for several additional episodes. This approach is problematic, leading to some dubious writing decisions, but on the other hand it does help give the show its trademark air of barely-controlled chaos. 24 became a huge hit show and a massive seller on DVD, showing the widening appeal of the story arc format.

The dominant television production company of the 2000s was almost certainly HBO. The Home Box Office cable channel had started life as a premium movie and sports channel but soon deviated into producing original, high-quality television programming. Free from the restrictions of regular network television (including no ad breaks), HBO could feature nudity and swearing and its shows were not limited by the traditional network production schedule, meaning that several years could elapse between seasons if deemed necessary. Critical acclaim was also deemed almost as desirable as high ratings. In short, HBO and several similar networks (such as Showtime, AMC and Starz) became famous as the homes of cutting-edge and original drama that the regular networks couldn't show.


The jewel in HBO's crown was The Sopranos, which began airing in 1999 and ran for eight years. The story of a mobster family in New Jersey, The Sopranos won great acclaim, significant ratings and huge DVD sales. The series had a number of story arcs which ran across its length, but the show stunned audiences with its final episode in 2007 which had several storylines still in-progress when it suddenly and abruptly cut to black fifteen seconds before the scheduled end of the episode. The show's creator, David Chase, had decided that some kind of neat conclusion would be unrealistic and simply chose to pull the camera and the audience out of his characters' lives almost at a random moment rather than with some kind of meaningful ending. Critics were divided, a lot of fans were pissed off and other writers loved the artistic daring of the maneuver. This kind of ending would probably have been challenged rather more thoroughly on a network show, but thanks to HBO's preference to give their showrunners greater artistic freedom they let Chase deliver his vision without hindrance.

Throughout the 2000s several other HBO shows garnered critical and commercial success, such as the WW2 drama Band of Brothers, the New York comedy series Sex and the City, the partially-improvised Curb Your Enthusiasm (from Seinfeld's Larry David, again complete with season-long story arcs) and the unusually death-fixated Six Feet Under. A 2003 show named Carnivale was notable for its pre-planned storyline, meant to sustain the series over six seasons. Creator Daniel Knauf saw the series as a trilogy consisting of three 'books', each lasting two seasons. With the show's expense not being reflected in its ratings or critical acclaim, HBO failed to negotiate a budget cut with Knauf and Knauf chose to end the show with the second season, completing the first 'book' of the story with some closure but also many storylines still in progress. Two further HBO series, Deadwood and Rome, also had ambitious storylines (planned to some extent) but were both cancelled due to creative and budget problems, leading to HBO garnering a bit of a reputation as a station that kills shows prematurely.


Luckily, this reputation was eroded by the successful conclusion of HBO's other great masterpiece, The Wire. Airing for five seasons between 2002 and 2008, The Wire was the creation of David Simon, whose Homicide: Life on the Street series had been a success despite significant network interference and constant pressure to dilute the reality of life on the streets of Baltimore for a mass audience. Simon took advantage of HBO's greater artistic freedom to create a much bleaker, less compromising but also altogether more human series with complex characters, extremely detailed storylines and an unusual sociological commentary. The result was one of the greatest achievements in the history of television drama, meticulously constructed with each season mapped out in advance (and ideas and plans for later seasons being generated right from the start). The show won immense plaudits and, despite modest viewing figures for HBO, became a big-seller on DVD. The Wire seemed to reinforce the argument made by Babylon 5 that if you have an arc series you need to plan the story out in advance to get the best results.


Further reinforcement for this concept came from a source almost completely diametrically opposed to HBO's The Wire. Avatar: The Last Airbender was an animated show airing on Nickelodeon, running for 61 episodes from 2005 to 2008. But it also had a complex, pre-planned story arc, this time running for three seasons and depicting the attempts of the evil Fire Lord to conquer the world and the emergence of an 'Avatar' who can use all four forms of elemental magic to oppose him. Avatar won critical acclaim (even from adult viewers) for its occasional dark moments, its sense of humour and its logical and well-thought-out storyline that was delivered in a relatively timely manner and concluded with a generally satisfying finale.


In 2003 the American Sci-Fi Network (now SyFy) resurrected Battlestar Galactica, the 1978 show which was an early example of an arc-driven SF series. The new series, a total reboot of the concept, ran for four seasons and 75 episodes airing between 2003 and 2009. Roughly the first half of the run of the show was greeted with universal acclaim and kudos for its grittiness, its multi-faceted political commentary and its excellent acting and effects. However, the second half, starting a few episodes into its third season, was plagued by long inter-season delays, writing and pacing problems and some very odd story-turns. A loyal audience hung in there, hoping to see the show come to as barnstorming and satisfying a conclusion as its beginning. Instead, the final episode was lacking in logical coherence and several long-running mysteries, for which definitive answers had been promised by the showrunners, were simply not resolved at all. The finale shattered the previously strong fanbase into warring factions, between those dissatisfied with the outcome and those who believed the show was being ambiguous as a deliberate artistic statement, but the latter POV lost credibility when producer Ronald D. Moore confirmed that they made the show up as they went along and included ideas because they were cool or crazy rather than because they necessarily made sense. Whilst BSG's early seasons remain jaw-dropping examples of television space opera at its very best, its ending seriously tars the quality of the whole series.

The last major arc show of the 2000s, and one whose ending will determine how it will be seen in the grand history of television drama and arc shows alike, is Lost. Beginning in 2004, Lost's final episode will air in May 2010. JJ Abrams conceived the show with a strong opening premise: an airliner crashes on a remote Pacific island and forty-eight of the passengers and crew survive. As the show progresses, it becomes clear that the island is not just an island and other people dwell on the island with their own agendas.


Abrams was (and remains) a very respected 'ideas' man, but his history in delivering satisfying long-form storytelling was patchy. His previous show, Alias, had a very confused central story and petered out rather than coming to a satisfying conclusion, in a manner not dissimilar to the earlier X-Files. Fans feared that Lost would suffer the same fate, and after penning the pilot it indeed appears that Abrams did not have strong ideas for the overall shape of the series, although his co-writer and producer Damon Lindelof did have a few ideas for what was really going on. Abrams departed shortly after the pilot and Lindelof and his new writing team sat down and thrashed out a background concept and story for the series, but were hamstrung by not knowing how long the show was going to run for. This meant that major storyline developments came slowly and many filler storylines had to be introduced to keep the series ticking over. Dissatisfied with this as they moved into the third season, they convinced ABC to allow them to set an end-date for the show. With this achieved, the second half of Season 3 saw a marked improvement in quality and the dispensing of the filler material. Seasons 4 and 5 won additional critical plaudits as the storylines slowly begun to be tied together for their conclusion in the forthcoming sixth and final season (which begins airing at the start of February). How successful the finale is remains to be seen.

This brings the story of the story arc-driven TV series up to date. Today it's a normal component of television drama. From Desperate Housewives to Doctor Who, the use of ongoing storylines and recurring plot elements is now standard, but the pre-planning of such story arcs remains strangely the exception rather than the rule. Battlestar Galactica's creative failure at the last hurdle was unusually problematic, but the mildly tedious filler elements that 24 is occasionally forced to throw up and Lost resorted to in its late second and early third seasons show that mishandling or not planning your storyline in advance can be a bad idea. Lost's later, greater coherence and tighter storytelling is an excellent example of how giving a TV show direction and purposes can improve its quality, whilst Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Wire both show that pre-planning can be the key to ensuring your show ends strongly. It now remains to be seen if Lost matches the quality of their finales, and if future TV shows will learn from their success.

The Arc of Truth: Part 3

Part 1.
Part 2.

In 1993, two science fiction TV shows began airing. Both shows were set on space stations in the future. Both shows involved a large cast of diverse characters, human and alien. Both shows - eventually - depicted chaos and hardship as wars erupted between various factions. Both shows employed cutting-edge special effects and epic storylines. Both shows were pretty damn good. And, perhaps most surprisingly, both shows ran their allotted lifespans and ended their runs successfully.


The first show was Babylon 5, created by veteran TV scriptwriter and producer J. Michael Straczynski and produced by Warner Brothers. The second was Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, created by Star Trek: The Next Generation writer-producers Michael Pillar and Rick Berman and produced by Paramount as a spin-off of The Next Generation, then in its sixth and penultimate season. They took radically different approaches to the idea of the long-form story arc, but oddly ended up in a similar place.

J. Michael Straczynski (or, as he prefers to be known, JMS) created Babylon 5 after trying to develop two separate concepts: one was an epic, galaxy-spanning space war featuring intricate politics and huge space battles, inspired by the Lensman and Foundation novels; the other was a small-scale, character-driven drama located aboard a space station, focusing on realism and character development. Whilst developing these ideas, JMS was hit by inspiration: unify the two stories and use the space station and the characters on it as the 'window' onto the world of the larger, more epic storyline. He eagerly developed a large ten-year story arc spanning two separate shows (later, and somewhat more realistically, paring it down to one five-year show), won the support of veteran TV producer Douglas Netter and spent the next several years trying to sell the idea. Eventually Warner Brothers took a chance on the project.

The development of Deep Space Nine almost killed Babylon 5 at birth, but Warner Brothers chose to press on with it. Straczynski, for his part, was suspicious of Paramount, as he had presented Paramount with the Babylon 5 proposal some years earlier (including detailed storyline information down to the presence of a shapeshifting alien on the station, something he had to drop from Babylon 5 to eliminate the appearance of stealing the other show's ideas), but eventually decided there was nothing he could do and moved on.

Babylon 5 ran for five seasons from 1994 to 1998 (with the pilot airing by itself in early 1993). It won a loyal audience following, won several major awards (including two Hugos) and picked up a lot of critical acclaim. It was lauded for its intricate, pre-planned storyline, its epic scope, its razor-sharp characterisation and its elegant final episode. It was also applauded for being made well on a modest budget and introducing the use of CGI to TV SF. It was also, at times, criticised for dubious dialogue and a long run of poor episodes in the final season. Broadly, however, it was very well received.


Deep Space Nine ran for seven seasons from 1993 and 1999 and gained larger audiences than Babylon 5, although it never won over as many viewers as The Next Generation. It took longer for the show to 'get going', as it were, but by its third season the show was enjoying a consistently high run of quality episodes. Some Babylon 5 fans mockingly noted that the show seemed to be treading in Babylon 5's footsteps by introducing CGI space effects, large-scale space battles and political and storyline developments only after B5 had done them first. However, the reverse was also true at times: the introduction of the White Star - an experimental warship - in B5's third season followed the introduction of the Defiant - an experimental warship - in DS9 a year earlier.

When DS9 ended it had also become warmly critically received. Although there were some thematic similarities to B5, the show had ended up in a somewhat different place and with a different focus. DS9 had also become extremely consistent in episode quality (arguably more 'reliable' in weekly episode quality than B5 over the course of its lifespan) and was also much funnier (despite his sometimes awesome skills with dialogue, a JMS comedy episode is a painful thing to watch). The oddest thing about DS9, though, is that if you sit down and watch all 178 episodes in relatively close order (as I did a couple of years back when I was working abroad for a while), its storyline is extremely cohesive, appears to be pre-planned and the ending is tied-in well to where the story began.

This cuts to the core of what makes a story arc work or not work. Deep Space Nine had achieved the impossible in being a show which winged it and played it by ear, but somehow ended up working. Virtually every single other arc-based show which tried this fell flat on its face: The X-Files eventually collapsed into a confused morass of UFOs, black oil and shapeshifters, crushed by the weight of its own mythology, whilst Battlestar Galactica spectacularly self-destructed in its final season with its unresolved mysteries, under-developed storylines and unwise use of half-assed ideas combining to bring the show to an underwhelming conclusion.

The reason Deep Space Nine works so well is that the story is not based on mysteries. If it had been, it would have probably run into the problems experienced by BSG a few years later. However, with the series' main storylines all being forward-moving plots not based on an intricate 'mythology', the playing-it-by-ear approach actually worked very well. The show remained fresh and interesting, with the producers having the freedom to adapt to changing circumstances. Even apparent deviations from the overall series arc, such as the bringing in of the Klingons in force in the fourth season, work well in the overall scheme of things. The only moments where the series wobbles are a series of 'surprise' revelations about Sisko's personal history in the final season, which scream of "Unconvincing retcon!" and are distinctly unconvincing. Nevertheless, Deep Space Nine succeeded in being a great story arc show with a definite beginning, middle and end, despite none of it being planned ahead of time.

Babylon 5 is the stronger series in the sense that having the arc planned out ahead of time allowed much more intricate use of foreshadowing and forward planning. However, this also bit the show on its ass a few times. Having the storyline pre-planned meant some spectacular hoop-jumping had to be performed whenever something unforeseen happened. The abrupt departure of actress Andrea Thompson at the end of Season 2 saw her storyline transferred to another character in a manner that initially seemed clever but later on appeared to be somewhat artificial (when you realised both characters had near-identical superpowers and overall story arcs). The departure of lead actor Michael O'Hare at the end of Season 1 was initially handled well, but his return in Season 3 to resolve his storyline led to the most brain-meltingly complicated two-part story in the history of SF TV, in which his entire story had to be retconned, rewritten and completely changed whilst remaining in the confines of a series of visions experienced by the characters in the first season. It is a Herculean miracle of writing that it makes any sense at all, but it does show that, whilst pre-planning is fantastic, it does have a few drawbacks.


During the time the two shows were on air, several other shows ran which made interesting use of the story arc. The X-Files started off brilliantly in 1993 and by its second season had become a cross-Atlantic phenomenon, its stars on the covers of every major magazine and ratings going through the roof. It was a less insane version of Twin Peaks for the masses, with sharp dialogue and strong direction giving rise to some fantastic episodes based on horror and mystery. The show's story arc, in which lead character Fox Mulder tries to find his missing sister and the true nature of a clandestine government conspiracy involving UFOs whilst being 'investigated' by his partner Dana Scully, was initially compelling, with strong 'mythology' episodes moving the storyline forward at regular intervals. However, as the show continued its sheer success meant that the studio didn't want the mysteries resolved any time soon, so creator Chris Carter kept spinning the show's storylines out further and further. The myth-arc became more and more complex, with shapeshifting alien bounty-hunters, black oil, experiments to turn humans into aliens, the genetic engineering of 'super-soldiers' and yet other elements being crammed into the story. Viewers stopped following the story and grew more bored with the mythology, to the point where the 'myth' episodes were less popular than the stand-alones (in sharp contrast to Babylon 5 and Deep Space Nine's corresponding 'arc episodes'). The X-Files was cancelled after nine seasons with the central storyline unresolved and the audience not really caring any more.


In 1995, Steven Bocho, the creator of Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue and LA Law, developed a new project. He had hit on the idea of doing a show about a legal case which unfolded over several months. A common criticism of TV drama series had been that they were inherently unrealistic, often featuring a crime, the arrest of an alleged perpetrator, bail proceedings, a legal investigation, a full trial and verdict all within the space of 45 minutes. Bocho concurred, but by the mid-1990s had come to believe that viewers were now ready for a more challenging approach by allowing one complex case to develop over the course of a full season. Murder One was the result. In the first episode a Hollywood actor is accused of the murder of a young girl, and he calls on the help of attorney Ted Hoffman and his team. Hoffman and his associates spend the next twenty-odd episodes investigating the case, eventually exonerating their client. The series attracted plaudits for the idea, its execution and its greater realism and accuracy, with the long-brewing storyline allowing greater character and story development. However, the show failed to win a mass audience and ratings soon dropped, with viewers complaining about missing an episode and not being able to catch up again easily. Murder One was cancelled after a second, less impressive season based around shorter cases solved in a few episodes each.


Similar complaints led to the cancellation of two other arc-heavy series. Dark Skies, created by Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman, ran for a single season in 1996-97 but is notable for being the first post-Babylon 5 show to have a pre-planned story arc. Using the tagline, "History as we know it is a lie," the show's backstory saw aliens launching a clandestine takeover of the Earth in the 1960s, opposed by an American government agency of dubious morality called Majestic-12. The show was designed so that each season would span a decade or more, with Season 2 planned to span the 1970s, Season 3 the 1980s and Season 4 climaxing in 'real-time' with the first day of the new millennium, when the alien invasion would become public knowledge. The remaining season and a half would depict the public fight against the aliens. The show cleverly played on X-Files imagery without ripping off the other show, with a richly-depicted 1960s background and a much less enigmatic storyline taking the show in a different direction. Dark Skies failed to attract a major audience and it was cancelled after one season, although it did provide a boost to the careers of Eric Close (later to star on Without a Trace) and Jeri Ryan (who went almost straight from working on Dark Skies to appearing on Star Trek: Voyager as Seven-of-Nine).


Meanwhile, musician Shaun Cassidy had developed a sideline in writing television and in 1995 launched a show called American Gothic, starring Gary Cole as the apparently satanic sheriff of a small town who binds people to him by agreeing to solve their problems in return for them owing him a 'favour', which usually involves a painful sacrifice of some kind. The show's dark atmosphere and its surprisingly bleak tone (the 'good guys' win very few victories against the evil Sheriff Buck) saw it cancelled after one season, despite the development of a strong, arc-based storyline. Ten years later, Cassidy did it all over again with a new show called Invasion, which was similarly critically lauded, lasted one season, and was promptly cancelled.

The glut of serialised series which began in the mid-1990s only to be quickly cancelled can probably be explained by the greater difficulties in allowing newcomers to get quickly up to speed with the storylines. In the mid-1990s this was a difficult process, with the Internet not in widespread use, no facility for downloading (legally or otherwise) TV episodes quickly and often many months elapsing between the end of a season and it appearing on VHS, not to mention that collecting a series on VHS (with only two episodes per tape being the norm) was extremely expensive and space-consuming. Thus, the break-out of heavily serialised TV series was held off for a time when a more user-friendly medium would appear to allow the rapid and relatively cheap catching up on missed episodes.

Babylon 5, made relatively cheaply and with strong VHS sales, was a notable exception to this tendency, whilst The X-Files's lack of major story developments, frustrating to regular viewers, also helped win over the casual audience despite its backstory.

Meanwhile, other answers to the serialised-storytelling 'problem' were being explored by two rather different TV showrunners.


The first was a guy called Larry David, who had co-created a sitcom based (very loosely) on the life of his friend Jerry Seinfeld. Seinfeld was a massive success, the biggest American sitcom of the decade (although it's almost unknown here in the UK), all the more amazingly due to its relentlessly bleak and cynical tone: a key show guideline was, "No hugging, no learning." The show started using ongoing story elements early on, since David found the idea of people's lives being neatly encapsulated in 25-minute segments where no-one refers to what happened the previous week to be utterly ludicrous. Hence, main characters sometimes dated recurring other characters for several weeks rather than just for one episode and that was it, whilst character relationships would develop and change over time.

In the fourth season David and Seinfeld took this to the next level and thoroughly blew the audience's minds by introducing them to a meta-narrative: the (fictional) characters of Seinfeld and George (who is based on Larry David's real-life persona) develop and propose to NBC a sitcom based on the (fictional) Seinfeld's career as a stand-up comedian. The fictional show used many of the same gags, ideas and catchphrases as the real show (which in turn were derived from Seinfeld and David's real-life experiences). Over the course of the fourth season the show-within-a-show was developed, eventually culminating in a pilot being shot and then the show being turned down. It was a fantastic idea and was very successful. For the seventh season they decided to do it again, with George proposing to his girlfriend in the first episode and then spending the remainder of the season trying to get out of the wedding, culminating in a shock ending to the season. In both cases, the idea was straightforward: not having a series-spanning arc, but merely just one spanning a season. It's easier for an audience to follow and if you miss out on too many episodes you can usually just jump back in at the start of the next season.


Taking this idea to its logical conclusion was Joss Whedon. Having previously written or co-written a number of successful movies (such as Toy Story), Whedon's show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, based on an earlier, cult movie, began airing in 1997 to immediate success. The show featured a female 'vampire slayer', a teenage girl named Buffy who was the 'chosen one', the only person in the world capable of standing up against the vampires and demons who threatened mankind. Driven by smart, funny dialogue and some winning performances by the main cast, Buffy was a big hit. A strong element of the success of the 12-episode first season was its story arc: Buffy arrives at a new school, discovers it's been built over a portal into hell, and gradually acquires a circle of friends to help her stand against the forces of evil. In the first season a vampire called 'The Master' is trying to open the Hellmouth and plunge the world into darkness, and seems to be protected by a prophecy that states he will kill the Slayer. This story arc is resolved satisfyingly at the end of Season 1 with the Master defeated and the prophecy circumvented (kind of).

For the longer, 22-episode second season, Whedon decided to do this again, introducing British vampires Spike and Drusilla as a new, recurring foe. However, aware that pacing the storyline across 22 episodes would be trickier, he introduced his trademark 'mid-season twist', with the arrival of a much bigger, more threatening enemy at the mid-season point to shake things up as they threatened to get stale. Once again, this threat was defeated at the end of the season, although the ramifications to Buffy's character and confidence were significant, and echoed into the third season.This set-up, with each season featuring a 'Big Bad' that had to be defeated and the presence of a mid-season twist in the story, was largely followed throughout each of the show's seven seasons, mostly successfully. An exception was the fifth season, in which the mid-season twist wasn't the emergence of a new foe but instead a personal tragedy that makes Buffy's life much harder, whilst in the sixth season the 'Big Bad' was actually rather pathetic and unthreatening, and only existed to trigger the release of the real 'Big Bad' in the season finale.

Whedon's formula - pre-planned story arcs, but only planned in detail one season ahead - was successful and it worked quite well, although the clockwork-like rise of a new major enemy every yeard did get a little predictable. Buffy was also helped by the fact that its VHS releases were done by season (rather than just two episodes per tape), allowing fans to 'binge' on numerous episodes in a day and catch up with previous seasons quickly. The show was also helped by the arrival of the DVD format during its run, and the show quickly embraced the new format.


With Buffy a success, Whedon developed a spin-off, Angel, that debuted in 1999. Cleverly, Whedon decided not to repeat the 'Big Bad' formula of Buffy and instead introduced a constant enemy, a demonic law firm called Wolfram & Hart which became Angel's enemy in the first episode and remained a constant threatening force in the background for the show's entire run. The show's dominant story arcs also crossed seasons, with a major storyline begun halfway through Season 2 continuing to the end of Season 3, for example, and its consequences set up the apocalyptic fourth season (which saw Angel and Wolfram & Hart reluctantly join forces against a far greater, mutual threat). Angel was also a hit, winning audiences larger than Buffy's on quite a few occasions, but with Buffy ending after seven seasons in 2003 it was decided to also end Angel (after five) the following year.


Whedon's success in these two shows encouraged him to develop a new show set in a new universe that would feature a slow-burning, long-form story arc that would gradually unfold over several years. It would feature Whedon's strongest characters, some of his best writing and several of the finest episodes to come out of any of his shows. It was called Firefly, it was insanely ambitious and it was mercilessly killed by the network after fourteen episodes. Due to sheer willpower (and some industry contacts), Whedon successfuly got a modestly successful feature film made, Serenity, which wrapped up some of the storylines left dangling by the series. Once again, the problems of creating a heavily arc-dependent series only for it to end prematurely had become clear.

By now it was the early 2000s and the advent of DVD and the massive booming in popularity of the Internet had placed the arc show in a very different place to where it had been previously. Next time, I'll be looking at HBO, the new Battlestar Galactica, a TV show called Avatar (no relation to the movie), a TV series about the world's most indestructible (and sleep-deprived) man and bringing the story up to date.

The Arc of Truth: Part 2

Part 1.

Back in the United States, the early 1980s saw a change in the attitude of TV networks towards serialised television. This had been heralded by the arrival in 1978 of the glossy prime-time drama Dallas on CBS. Although technically a recurring series (divided into seasons of approximately 25 episodes per year), Dallas employed storytelling techniques more commonly encountered in much cheaper soap operas, with complex character relationships and long-running storylines spanning many episodes. Dallas was so successful that ABC launched its own derivation, Dynasty, in 1981. Both shows went on to tremendous success.


Also in 1981, the storytelling techniques of these shows were applied to the genre of the cop show. Steve Bocho and Michael Kozoll, Hill Street Blues differed from previous cop shows in that it did not focus on a 'crime of the week' format with the investigation and resolution of a criminal act being neatly packaged in 45 minutes. Hill Street instead had a number of different storylines unfolding across its seasons, with some stories self-contained in a single episode, other plots taking several episodes to come to fruition and some larger plots unfolding across and between seasons. The series also heavily focused on more realistic issues and stories with less interest in the cliches of genre television, and significantly less emphasis on 'good guys' and 'bad guys'. Hill Street proved enormously influential, with many shows picking on its storytelling devices. Bocho's own subsequent project, LA Law, took many of Hill Street's storytelling ideas and applied them to the court drama genre with great success, whilst St. Elsewhere applied a similar story arc structure to a hospital drama format (culminating in the infamously surreal final episode of the series).

In 1982, although with far more limited popular success, Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker developed Police Squad!, a comedy series starring Leslie Nielsen as cop Frank Drebin (and, famously, Rex Hamilton as Abraham Lincoln). The series was designed to deliberately target the cliches of cop show television and indeed seemed to delight in annoying the syndication channels by including a reference in every episode to every previous criminal case Drebin had investigated (so at the end of the sixth episode he name-checks all five previous criminals arrested in the five previous episodes). However, it is fair to say that it was probably Hill Street Blues that had a bigger impact on the rise of the arc show that followed.


Still, whilst shows like Hill Street were a big success, the more traditional episodic model still remained the norm, although recurring storyline elements were now slightly more common. Whilst the hugely successful Miami Vice was a big hit with its mostly episodic structure, some subplots (such as romances or the progress of a lead character's divorce) did unfold over multiple weeks.

In 1987 Star Trek: The Next Generation commenced airing in first-run syndication. With the show being sold immediately into syndication, there was even greater pressure than normal not to include ongoing story elements, but nevertheless some crept into the show. The pilot episode established romantic tension between Commander Riker and Counsellor Troi, and between Captain Picard and Dr. Crusher, and the hint of a suggestion (later thankfully forgotten) that Picard was actually the father of Crusher's son Wesley. Other early character points established included Lt. Worf's difficulties with being the first and only Klingon in Starfleet, Lt. Yar's difficult and painful upbringing causing problems with her attitude and Data's wish to become human. For the most part these elements were kept firmly in the background and brought forward only when needed for a particular episode, although Picard's slowly growing acceptance of Wesley Crusher competence and the latter's development into a full crewmember did qualify as a story arc of sorts.


A more ambitious arc was set in motion halfway through Season 1. With the new 'main' enemy, the Ferengi, not working out as planned, the writers decided to introduce a considerably more dangerous threat, an insectoid alien race who would incorporate a hive-like intelligence and ferocious appetite for consuming technology. These aliens would be established late in Season 1 as a growing threat that would also reintroduce the Romulans to the Star Trek universe after a lengthy absence. The original plan was for Season 1 to end with these new insectoid aliens launching a failed attack on Starfleet HQ, followed up by the Romulans and Federation coming to the brink of war due to the alien machinations, with the aliens being 'outed' in the Season 2 opener and the Federation and Romulans joining forces to defeat them once and for all. However, the prohibitive cost of the planned alien effects and then a writer's strike between Seasons 1 and 2 that led to the crippling of most of the second season effectively ruined these plans. The first episode became an unrelated stand-alone called Conspiracy, the second (The Neutral Zone) relegated the alien threat to a remote and vague rumbling of problems on the horizon and the third was dropped altogether, replaced by The Child, an old script for the abandoned Star Trek: Phase II project from the 1970s which introduced Guinan, a new and highly enigmatic regular character played by Whoopi Goldberg.

However, this 'pipe-laying' for an abandoned storyline nevertheless proved to be beneficial later on in Season 2. With the aliens behind the attack on the Neutral Zone colonies still unknown and Guinan's background still a mystery, the writers re-introduced the alien threat in a different (and cheaper) guise, as a race of cybernetically-enhanced humanoids called the Borg. Guinan's race was revealed to have been almost destroyed by them. With the Borg now aware of the Federation's existence, it was made clear that they would now be coming to destroy and assimilate the Federation, and periodic references were made throughout Season 3 to the Federation preparing new weapons and defensive measures. These were put to the test at the end of Season 3 when the Borg invaded the Federation in full force, annihilating a Starfleet battle group in the Federation's greatest military defeat in its history and assimilating Picard.

18 June 1990. The day The Next Generation finally stepped out from its predecessor's shadow.

Star Trek: The Next Generation had successfully transitioned from a purely episodic show into one that, whilst still mostly consisting of stand-alone episodes, was no longer afraid to reference previous episodes and employ real character development. It's story arcs were still unplanned, but the writers were able to use the wealth of history and backstory to generate new storylines that gave rise to the feeling of a much more connected whole. The benefits to this form of long-form storytelling was made clear in the Season 3 cliffhanger ending, The Best of Both Worlds, still widely regarded as the finest episode of Star Trek in its history. The use of a cliffhanger ending to a whole season, with the audience left reeling and anxiously discussing the show and waiting for its return over a whole summer, was a major success and quickly became something The Next Generation and its spin-offs (and later their rivals) used every year.

The Next Generation's embrace of this story-telling technique also allowed writers to pen episodes that weren't necessarily fully resolved at the end, with elements left open to set up future 'sequel' episodes. An early fan of this technique was a young staff writer named Ronald D. Moore, whose fourth episode, Sins of the Father, saw Lt. Worf dishonoured in the eyes of the Klingon Empire and forced to bear the shame for a crime apparently committed by his father. Worf discovered that the crime was actually committed by another Klingon noble family, the Duras, but this fact emerging would tear the Empire apart in civil war, so he accepted the dishonour for the sake of peace. This was obviously an unsatisfactory arrangement, and in the Season 4 episode Reunion Worf became a blood-enemy of the Duras family, leading to his alliance with their rival for the Chancellorship of the Empire, Gowron, and to the outbreak of full-scale civil war, in which Worf finally regained his honour and name. Moore orchestrated most of this storyline, writing Sins of the Father, Reunion and the Redemption two-parter, forming a single coherent piece of drama and character development that unfolded over two years (and, four years later, would later be revisited in Deep Space Nine).

A scene from Twin Peaks unusually not dripping in deep symbolism and visual clues to the show's central mysteries. Also, note a surprising lack of cherry pie in this shot.

Star Trek: The Next Generation proved to be a vanguard of a new wave of arc-based shows that finally began moving the format to the norm in the early 1990s. Twin Peaks, developed by David Lynch, was a massive success, with the gradually unfolding mystery of who killed Laura Palmer enthralling millions of viewers each week across the world. The symbolism and surreal imagery of the show was debated in numerous magazine letters pages and on very early Internet message boards. The show also built up a notable 'mythology' of creatures, characters, entities and recurring storyline elements. The benefits of Twin Peaks' 'myth-arc', with its fiercely loyal, obsessive fanbase, became clear. However, a weakness of arc-based storytelling also became clear. The casual viewers, although fascinated by the Laura Palmer mystery, were less intrigued by the secondary storylines. Once the Laura Palmer mystery was resolved early in Season 2, audience figures plummeted and the show was cancelled, leaving the hardcore fans frustrated with the ending (that saw the main character apparently trapped in some weird other dimension).

Whilst Twin Peaks' fate proved one possible headache caused by arc-based storytelling, another was demonstrated by the CBS show Beauty and the Beast, which ran from 1987 to 1990. In an updated version of the fairytale, Linda Hamilton played a district attorney named Catherine who discovered the 'world below', a group of people ostracized from society living a secretive life in tunnels below New York, whilst Ron Perlman played Vincent, a large disfigured man who became Catherine's protector. The first season comprised stand-alone episodes with the development of Catherine and Vincent's relationship as an ongoing story element. This element came more to the fore in Season 2, as did the arrival of recurring villains. Beauty and the Beast's key weakness was exposed, however, at the start of Season 3 when Linda Hamilton elected to leave the show. Catherine's violent murder and Vincent's quest for bloody vengeance proved a development more than the show could sustain, with a drop in audience numbers and cancellation swiftly following. Interestingly, one scriptwriter and producer on the show who was credited/blamed for the shocking death of a key character was a guy named George R.R. Martin, whose frustrations with the creative limitations of television led to him starting to write a novel a few months after the show's axing, a novel in which the key character is also unexpectedly and abruptly killed halfway through...

"So, is our show going to have a happy ending?"
"George R.R. Martin is one of our writers. What do you think?"
"Oh yeah."

Despite the relative failures of Beauty and the Beast and Twin Peaks, arc-based storytelling became more and more popular. NYPD Blue, a successor of sorts to Hill Street Blues, began airing in 1993 and also featured a reuse of the earlier show's use of short, medium and long-running storylines. Another cop show airing on NBC, Homicide: Life on the Street (based on a book written by a Baltimore reporter named David Simon), also featured similar storytelling devices in its attempt to depict crime and police work in a much more realistic manner than previously attempted.

1993 also proved to be the year that the story arc in science fiction television really kicked into overdrive with the arrival of The X-Files, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and apparently the first TV show, SF or otherwise, which had its story arc developed and pre-planned in full beforehand. This show was called Babylon 5, and we'll pick up on that next time.

The Arc of Truth: Part 1

Over the last fifteen years or so there has been a major change in how American drama television operates. The traditional model has shows mostly consisting of stand-alone episodes which the floating viewer can dip in and out of at will, which can be shown and re-arranged in any order without any problems and in which a reset button has to be hit so the show can return to the status quo at the end of every half-hour or hour, ready for the next week's hijinks. Previous episodes would only be referenced in the case of, say, a returning guest star or an old enemy.

That model has gradually been eroded in favour of the story arc format. In this format TV episodes have to be viewed sequentially and feature building storylines, continuous character developments and, in extreme cases, the idea that no episode can end with characters in the same places they started in. Storylines could build from unlikely sources, with a single line of dialogue from twelve episodes earlier suddenly proving pivotal to the resolution of a long-running plot, or a minor character established in an earlier episode suddenly becoming a major player.

"Right, so whilst this is chronologically our fourth appearance from the viewer's point of view, it's actually our fifth from within our internal timeline."
"Have you factored in the new post-2005 series?"
"Ah crap, wait whilst I figure that out..."

Story arcs are, of course, not new. Both radio and television soap operas stretching back to the 1950s or even earlier have been built on the same model, whilst in the 1930s serial movies like Tarzan, Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers (all starring Buster Crabbe) pursued the same idea. Doctor Who, which began in 1963, was made up of serialised storylines, with each storyline typically running between three and six half-hour episodes in length (with outliers as short as one episode or as long as twenty-six), and minor storylines running between serials, particularly in the earlier seasons when each serial had an ending leading into the next and recurring enemies like the Daleks and Cybermen (and, to a lesser extent in Patrick Troughton's tenure, the Ice Warriors and Yetis) appearing with some regularity.


In American television an influential show for the development of the story arc was The Fugitive ("A Quinn Martin production!"). This was mostly an episodic story in which Dr. Richard Kimble is on the run from the police for a crime he did not commit, and as he fled the law he helped other people who were in trouble. It wasn't until the fourteenth episode of the first season that we learned what the crime was that he'd been accused of and what his ultimate goal was, of finding the 'one-armed man' who killed his wife and clearing his name. Also unusually, the series didn't just keep this as a remote goal on the horizon, but several times brought Kimble and his nemesis into contact with one another. Also, and this truly was and remains highly unusual, The Fugitive got a proper ending, in which after four years the one-armed man is apprehended and Kimble's name is finally cleared. The Fugitive's final episode in 1967 was watched by three-quarters of the American viewing public at the time, a colossal amount and arguably the result of people wanting to see how this story that had been unfolding for four years was wrapped up.

Still, the traditional arguments in favour of episodic television remained strong, and arguably even The Fugitive was still mostly episodic, with the 'anchor' arc episodes only occurring at rare and key moments in the series, with all the in-between installments still watchable in isolation on their own merits. In fact, even the utterly bonkers British genre series The Prisoner arguably only needed the first and last two episodes to stay where they were, with the rest of the episodes interchangeable in order.

The reason why episodic television was favoured in the States was due to the power of syndication, where TV shows were sold into constant re-runs after their original airings on the networks, and selling a show into syndication was often essential to turn a profit. The local channels carrying the shows on syndication were not particularly bothered about showing series in the right order, so making each episode stand alone as possible was a key concern for TV producers. Ironically, soap operas were able to overcome this influence by their very disposability (each individual episode costing peanuts compared to a weekly drama) and their sheer mass of episodes.


This 'syndication trap' was responsible for putting down even successful shows. The original 1978-79 Battlestar Galactica had a definitive opening story arc (the destruction of the Twelve Colonies and the flight of the survivors into space) followed by a series of stand-alone episodes, but these were punctuated by occasional shifts in format. For example, Baltar is captured by the Fleet in one episode and remains a prisoner for several weeks before staging a break-out, whilst one regular character established in the pilot dies three weeks in. Halfway through the season the battlestar Pegasus arrives and, although it doesn't stick around, several crewmembers (including a new regular) join the Galactica crew. The second half of the season also sees a building storyline in which mysterious alien spacecraft apparently made of crystal starts shadowing the Fleet, and at the end of Season 1 a hint to the location of Earth is discovered. BSG's cancellation at a time when it was still getting 15-20 million viewers a week remains baffling to this day, despite its enormous-for-the-time budget, but certainly the show's serialised storyline not being popular with syndication channels has been occasionally put forward as one reason why it was dropped.

Over in the UK, with no comparable phenomenon to syndication, this was less of an issue. Shows were typically shown once, maybe repeated a year or so later, and then disappeared for good, often literally as the BBC would wipe the video tapes for re-use (although thankfully they had abandoned this practice by the late 1970s). In particular, during the 1970s the BBC got into the swing of making 'event' mini-series based on books, such as their ambitious adaptation of War and Peace starring Anthony Hopkins or I, Claudius starring Derek Jacobi and John Hurt, and these serials would obviously include epic and detailed storylines spanning many episodes to some success.


In SF&F terms, Doctor Who was continuing and had flirted with a much longer form of storytelling in its sixteenth season in 1978-79, which consisted of one big meta-narrative called The Key to Time, divided into six sub-serials. This huge narrative, partly written by Douglas Adams, proved successful and for several seasons the show continued to pursue larger narratives, such as a 'trilogy' of serials two years later where the TARDIS was trapped in another dimension called E-Space (with the purpose and fate of E-Space then revealed in the season-ending, Doctor-replacing episode Logopolis).

However, an arguably more influential (and I'll explain why in a moment) SF TV series also debuted in 1978. Written by Terry Nation, the creator of the Daleks, Blake's 7 was, at least conceptually, a rip-roaring space opera, complete with a heroic crew of seven do-gooders fighting the evil forces of the Terran Federation. In real terms, the show undercut its own premise almost from day one. The show was, to start with, very heavily serialised. The crew come together slowly, with the full roster only being completed after the first four episodes. Their mode of transport, the alien starship Liberator, was only discovered in the second episode and turned out to be a threatening force in its own right, routinely threatening the crew with death through its defence mechanisms or the callous disregard of the ship's sentient AI for most of the first season. Blake would routinely mention a Federation military target he wanted to destroy and this would then show up as the next planet they visited a week or two later. Half the crew wanted to kill the other half. Often individual Federation personnel were revealed to be perfectly decent, good people just doing a job to feed their families and unaware that their role as cogs in the machine was causing greater suffering elsewhere.


Blake's 7 was brilliant, bleak and subversive, having more in common with Nineteen Eighty-Four and even The Prisoner than with matinee serial Westerns or other heroic stories. One of the reasons for its brilliance was definitely its story arc. Regular characters died, often with zero forewarning, and new ones joined. There was a recurring cast on the Federation side devoted to catching our heroes. Blake and Avon's relationship developed from mutual distrust to grudging respect only because Blake agreed to give the Liberator to Avon once his dream of a general uprising against the Federation had been achieved (a promise Avon calls on Blake to deliver in the Season 2 finale). Most of Season 2 was dedicated to one storyline as the crew desperately hunted for the Federation's central command and control centre, hoping to destroy it and plunge the Federation into anarchy from which a revolution could be launched. Then, at the last moment, a completely new threat dwarfing that of the Federation arrived. When the series finally ended in 1982, having lost Blake, the Liberator, most of the original cast and all but one of the recurring villains along the way, it ended on a jaw-dropping, mind-blowingly nihilistic and even cruel note that left the viewers completely bewildered and the show's place in the canon of TV science fiction forever secure, even if the show's profile would eventually decrease over time.

Ironically, of course, Blake's 7's 'revolutionary' approach to genre television was achieved mostly by accident. Nation planned out the slow introduction of the cast simply because it was too expensive and confusing from a production standpoint to introduce them all at once. The Season 2 story arc was planned out in great detail and depth and then promptly had to be thrown out when the writers couldn't get the scripts ready in time, replacing it with a less complex storyline. The show was supposed to end with the much neater and, at least relatively, happier ending of Season 3 and only came back because the head of BBC drama liked the final episode so much he rang up the continuity announcer whilst the show was still on the air and told him to announce the show was coming back the next year. The supposedly apocalyptic ending of Season 4 was actually just a 'normal' cliffhanger which the writers could overcome easily for the next season, in which they hoped to resolve the story more traditionally, but the show was cancelled instead, leaving that ending as the series' last word, which hadn't been planned.

Given that its storyline had unfolded as a happy accident, why was Blake's 7 so important and so influential on the gradual shift to arc series that followed, given than most people don't even know the name today? Simple. Two young Americans were watching the show at the time and taking mental notes. One was called J. Michael Straczynski and the other was called Joss Whedon. We'll catch up with them next time.