When television grows out of its box

The day after Thanksgiving break, I went to Leo’s with the intention of having a quick dinner by myself. Two hours later, the staff kicked me out after I had watched 8 episodes of 30 Rock in a row on my computer. I spent the next few weeks watching my way through the entire show, at the expense of studying for finals, going out at night sometimes, and sleeping.
If television is supposed to capture the rhythms and flows of people’s lives, then it makes sense to immerse oneself totally into those lives. Good television, according to my brother, is made up of characters you want to hang out with, and when you watch all of their episodes at once, you get to spend an awful lot of time with them. You can forgive the weak episodes because there’s always more to come, and it’s on tap when you want it.
But you may be different. Perhaps you prefer to consume Gossip Girl episodes in 10-minute nibbles before starting your homework. Regardless of your consumption preferences, television is moving away from the box it came in and is making a slow and steady progression to computer screens. As the technology catches up, viewers are being freed from the tyranny of commercials and half-hour block scheduling, conventions that television industry executives established in the ’50s.
While I believe that these changes are certainly positive, they beg the question of where the industry will go next. What happens to television when you take away the actual TV and all of its limitations? For one, TV shows get a whole lot better; that’s indisputable. But what we don’t quite know yet is how the medium itself will evolve.
In the old days, television existed for the masses. There were four or five shows that everyone watched, programs that the collective consciousness pooled around. That’s great for national unity, but many of those shows were also kind of awful—for every great I Love Lucy, there are so many terrible episodes of I Dream of Jeannie. With the explosion of cable, not every show had to be for every person, and many improved vastly in quality. Your Cheaters watcher didn’t have to also watch Dateline and Sister, Sister.
By the time we hit The Sopranos, TV shows could legitimately be seen as art. Along with the rise of DVDs and the ability to watch shows on the internet, people have begun to accept TV as a medium more than capable of the dissemination of complex stories that we choose to watch, rather than just as filler for air time.
But that doesn’t mean that TV shows are bound to become little movies and lose their unique TV nature.
There have always been elements that make stories told on TV specifically made-for-television stories. They are serialized installments, with a specific amount of time between act breaks. So when you take away the box the medium comes in, what defines that medium? What makes it unique?
Serialized narratives have usually come into being out of necessity, but that does not make them any less enjoyable. Think of Goosebumps novels that end with cliffhangers, or Dickens’ story installments. We now read Tale of Two Cities as a whole, and its serialization only makes it seem frenetic and exciting. It’s possible that TV will go that way as well—without the necessity of network ratings and half-hour commercial blocks, maybe TV shows will play out like long movies, occasionally broken up.
Still, there’s something satisfying about narrative served in pieces; there’s something remarkably reassuring about knowing there will be another episode to come next week. It might be the art form mostly closely resembling the actual rhythms of life. Now that we can take it with us, who needs the real world anyway?