This is a really interesting piece that I've linked to at the bottom of this post. I sometimes find it exhausting, all this talk of seasons and hours and hours of the same telly programme. I find it all overwhelming sometimes and wonder where people find the time to sit and get invested in these things. There's currently a few things on the streaming sites that I'm interested in but I just think "Where am I going to find the time to watch ALL of that?"
I say this as someone who has, this past week, watched and enjoyed something I haven't seen for over thirty years. Take Me Home was a three part series produced by the BBC in 1989 and shown over three consecutive weeks. Nobody demanded to see the next one straight away. You had to wait. For seven days.
And the story, of a love affair between two married people of a large age difference, was begun and ended within three hours of television. It didn't need to be stretched out to ten hours or go to six series. It started and ended in three hours.
I heard this week that the BBC are considering bringing back Play For Today,/The Wednesday Play. How wonderful would that be? A story told within 70/80/90 minutes. When one looks at old Play For Today/The Wednesday Play did anyone demand another seven hours of Cathy Come Home, Up the Junction, Abigail's Party, Blue Remembered Hills, Penda's Fen, Kisses At Fifty, East of Ipswich, Sunset Across the Bay, The Firm or Nuts in May? No, they didn't. Tell your story succinctly but with impact.
Sidebar: despite the pic on this Substack post, I LOVED Mad Men and didn’t want it to end. I could also never understand why Joan or Peggy didn’t get their own spinoff show set in the 1970s.
https://open.substack.com/pub/joelmorris/p/homeopathic-storytelling?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
1 comment:
It's a nice article. I think the analogy with prog rock is an interesting one, although it's also a bit hard on prog rock (as analogies that cite Prog Rock usually are I guess). Rave On may be a more economical and pure version of pop music compared to Dark side Of the Moon, but I bet these days more people listen to the latter, simply because the production is better. I suspect that similarly, if you grew up with Mad Men, then your reaction upon watching I Caligula may be how cheap the sets were, even if the narrative moves more quickly.
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