Let Me Tell You---

Note: This article first apeared on Flow March 9, 2007.

Broadcast network television in the U.S. seems to have a growing fixation on storytelling. I’m not saying that they’re fixated on telling stories. That would only be natural, as that’s a big part of what they do. What’s new, or at least notable by degree, is the attention being given to the portrayal of storytelling within broadcast network programming.

The first two episodes of NBC’s new family/crime drama The Black Donnellys have both been framed narrations, stories told (in the first episode to police and in the second to his lawyer) by a character named Joey Ice-Cream, a minor figure in his own stories about the four Donnelly brothers. The show’s departure from such shows’ default objective point of view raises interesting complications. Early in the pilot episode Joey begins his narration three different times, restarting after his interrogators challenge his accuracy. Each time he starts, viewers see a different version of the story’s beginning. Right from the start we’re clued in that what we’re seeing on screen in the framed narrative isn’t necessarily what “really” happened, but is instead a performance of sorts, a dramatization of what Joey is telling the cops. This isn’t a flashback. We aren’t privileged to see earlier events as they unfold before us. We’re seeing and hearing only what a decidedly unreliable narrator wants us to. It’s a bit of narrative playfulness, of attention to the act of storytelling and its inherent limitations and biases, that demonstrates a level of respect for its audience that broadcast television networks in this country often seem to lack.

Meanwhile, How I Met Your Mother, a series that I cited in an earlier Flow article as an example of narrative complexity in a banal program, has become more experimental. The show itself is presented from the frame of a future narrator, and is thus one big analepsis, but within that device episodes rely heavily on flashbacks to show us previous action. In the episode “Ted Mosby, Architect,” the show becomes even more playful. Following an argument, Robin goes looking for her boyfriend Ted. As she follows him from bar to party to nightclub to another woman’s apartment, various narrators tell Robin of Ted’s behavior, and we see it on screen in flashback. At episode’s end we’ve learned that another character has been using Ted’s name, and so everything that we’ve “seen” becomes instead something we’re “told,” or, more properly, what appears on the screen is the way Robin is imagining the stories being told to her.

It’s a clever device that is surprising because we expect flashbacks to be “true,” and the show itself has relied heavily on “true” flashbacks throughout its two seasons. Undercutting its own (and the dominant) use of flashbacks provides the episode with its comedic (Barney’s pretending to be Ted) rather than dramatic (Ted’s cheating on Robin) resolution. Despite my earlier near-dismissal of How I Met Your Mother, it deserves more critical attention than its getting, perhaps because it disguises itself so well.

And try as I might, I can never quite get away from Lost. Just when I think we’ve settled into a pattern of flashbacks that raise more questions than they answer, finally a twist in the analepsis: time travel. Whether Desmond actually did or did not travel back in time to before he was stranded on the island, the possibility that he did throws a new twist into Lost’s predictable format. It potentially rearranges the relationship between the show’s narrative present and narrative past. How the writers choose to exploit the possibilities may determine their ability to reinvigorate the stagnating series.

These shows (one in its first season, one in its second, and one in its third) complicate viewing in interesting ways. Viewers are forced to accept that what we are seeing on screen may not be simply “what happened before,” but “what this character says happened before” or “what this character thinks happened before.” Such strategies introduce an element of contingency that undermines viewers’ confidence in the narrative, forcing the adoption of tentative interpretations that might require revision in the light of future information. Judging by the comments on NBC’s official website for The Black Donnellys, some viewers find this confusing. No surprise there. Until recently, broadcast network television had done little to “train” viewers in how to watch this kind of show. And perhaps the demise of narratively complex programs like The Nine or Day Break demonstrates that viewership for such shows remains limited, though it’s hard to pin a show’s failure on its structure. Networks’ willingness to continue with sophisticated programming indicates some faith that narrative complexity isn’t an insurmountable barrier.

Indeed, narrative complexity may be precisely what broadcast network television most needs. The questions generated by such complexity (Did Desmond really time travel? Was Joey Ice-Cream really there?) fuel internet discussion boards, and they provide incentive to catch reruns or download episodes. They invite attention.

While I’d like to see narratively sophisticated series prosper, I’m not concerned about the survival of any particular program. Indeed I’m curious to see what will happen to complex narrative strategies in the light of the cancellation of shows that employ them. Just as I was interested to see ABC take a chance on The Nine after the failure of Fox’s Reunion, and I was happy to see NBC gamble on The Black Donnellys after the failure of The Nine, I anxiously await the next slate of new shows. It might help us to see whether the last couple of years have been a failed experiment or the start of genuine maturation for broadcast television narrative.

The Simultaneous Dawning and Twilight of Broadcast Network Narrative

Note: This article first apeared on Flow December 15, 2006. It, combined with "How Television Met Narrative Sophistication" and slightly revised, was published in translation in the Italian television and film magazine Duellanti.

In my last article for Flow I made the case that broadcast network television seems to be fulfilling its potential as a medium for sophisticated narratives. While in that article I was looking mainly at the intellectually engagement engendered by structural complexity, I would add that truly sophisticated narratives are emotionally engaging as well. And though perhaps it goes without saying, an intellectually and emotionally engaging narrative takes time to unfold. Certainly short narratives can do both, but extended narratives have substantially greater opportunities for complexity. So it would seem that television series as a format ought to have an edge over feature films. Even unusually long films or film trilogies or series have far less storytelling time than a season of hour-long episodes, much less than a show that has the luxury of multiple seasons to spin out a complicated plot and develop complex characters. Despite this apparent advantage, though, broadcast network television has seldom fulfilled its potential.

While we might point to a number of causes for this failure, certainly one limiting factor is television’s episodic nature. Presenting a narrative in brief installments with long periods between limits an audience’s ability to recall the intricacies of a convoluted plot or recognize subtle connections between earlier and later episodes. Emotional intensity is difficult to maintain over time. Episodic narratives demand much from their audiences might be said to have a high degree of “seriality,” the extent to which understanding one installment of a narrative depends upon familiarity with preceding installments. Low seriality narratives allow an audience to enter at any episode without feeling too lost. In such shows developments across multiple episodes are small of peripheral, and don’t limit the audience’s enjoyment of a particular installment (think of a police procedural in which your knowledge of a character’s private life has little bearing on whether you can enjoy that week’s mystery). The most interesting of the shows that I pointed to in my last article (24, Lost) and new this season (Day Break, Heroes) are high seriality programming. It is difficult to enter the narrative in the middle without feeling confused. This characteristic can present a significant barrier to gaining new viewers, and it points to broadcast television’s inherent limitations as a narrative medium.

As a point of comparison, the novel is far better suited to convey sophisticated narrative. It not only offers the scope necessary to develop complex plots and engaging characters, it allows its audience a substantial degree of control over the narrative delivery that broadcast television almost completely lacks without supplemental technologies. Novel readers can engage the narrative when it is convenient, and when they are most prepared to devote intellectual and emotional resources to it. They can return to earlier parts of the narrative and control how much time passes between narrative installments. Networks are attempting to overcome some of the limits of broadcast through downloadable episodes, online synopses, and “What’s happened up to now” clip shows. While these measures may help to offset the demands put on audiences by sophisticated high seriality shows, they also highlight the inadequacies of the medium and demonstrate the networks’ awareness that such shows stretch (or even surpass) the limits of what the medium can sustain unaided.

Watching a season of a sophisticated high seriality program on DVD makes broadcast’s deficiencies even more apparent. When one can exercise an almost novelistic control over narrative delivery (watching multiple episodes in a row, watching when one wants, freeze frame, slow motion, etc.), the experience is notably richer. One is able to appreciate the intricacies and subtleties of genuinely sophisticated narrative, and to engage more deeply with characters’ emotional lives.

Despite the resources networks are putting into supporting high seriality shows through downloadable episodes and website synopses, neither measure seems likely to sustain sophisticated narrative on broadcast television. Synopses necessarily simplify complex plots and reduce emotional engagement, serving best as occasional placeholders to keep regular viewers from falling behind. Downloading episodes allows an increased level of audience control, but of course then we’re no longer talking about broadcast television, but a hybrid medium. Such a hybrid raises questions about the relationship between the two media (television seems to need the internet more than the reverse). In an age of expanding television screens and home theatres, watching an episode on the computer may not be attractive. While it is possible to port such episodes from computer to television, that’s an inconvenience. In an age of unprecedented narrative availability, such inconveniences can be powerful dissuaders. Why put up with any inconvenience when other media are clamoring for attention?

It’s perhaps sad to think, but U.S. broadcast network television’s maturity as a medium for sophisticated narrative may be short-lived. Such programming requires investments of audience time and energy that seem increasingly unlikely to occur on any schedule other than the audience’s own. If that is indeed the case, then networks may be constrained to offering low sophistication/low seriality programming. It isn’t hard to imagine a future in which broadcasting serves the role of advertising and secondary revenue stream for the primary medium: complete seasons of episodes packed for sale on DVD or for download. If such an evolution seems improbable, nineteenth century literature offers a model. Writers like Charles Dickens wrote serialized narratives that were then collected and published as novels. While serialized literature has faded to become a relative rarity, the novel as a form dominates print narrative. Given the sophisticated narrative potential of collected episodes divorced from the constraints of high seriality narrative, perhaps such a future is to be anticipated rather than dreaded.

How TV Met Narrative Sophistication

Note: This article first appeared on Flow October 6, 2006

Fox aired nine episodes of Reunion in the fall of 2005. While that hardly makes it last year’s great success story, it was an interesting failure. Like the similarly cancelled Surface on NBC, Threshold on CBS, and ABC’s Invasion, Reunion hoped to borrow some mojo from the previous season’s hit, ABC’s Lost. But while Surface, Threshold and Invasion tried to cash in on the weird factor of Lost, Reunion borrowed from the hit show’s narrative structure, namely its love of flashback.

Cast of Reunion (http://www.fox.com/)

The show began with a present-day funeral before jumping back twenty years, following a group of high school friends through the years, one year per episode, revealing along the way whose funeral we saw in the first episode, and how that character had died. If we believe Fox’s advance promotion, Reunion marked “a groundbreaking concept in series television as it chronicles the lives of a group of six friends over the course of 20 years – all in just one season” (http://www.fox.com/schedule/2005fall/reunion.htm). Or it would have if it had run for a whole season. Like the three shows about water-loving aliens, Reunion was not destined for longevity.

Despite the failure of Reunion, this fall brings us The Nine on ABC, a similarly-structured show. Viewers will follow nine strangers brought together as hostages in a bank robbery. As we watch their lives after their rescue, we’ll get flashbacks that reveal what happened during the siege. So why do the networks suddenly love analepsis? Since when did flashback become more than a few moments of backstory here and there?

Cast of The Nine (http://www.tv.com/)

I’d argue that this genealogy of analepsis demonstrates network broadcast television’s increasing sophistication as a narrative medium. Given network television’s conservative approach to narrative structure (just look at how many sitcoms still employ the same basic structure as I Love Lucy), any trend toward more complex narrative forms demands attention. That The Nine got a chance after the failure of Reunion a season earlier demonstrates ABC’s belief that that a show can be structurally atypical and still succeed. Reunion is just the latest show to benefit from the networks increasing receptivity to narrative complexity, an openness that’s been building over the last five years or so.

Let me be clear. I’m not commenting on whether American network television currently has or has had the courage to confront unpopular, political or complex subjects. I’m not concerned with whether broadcast has been as willing as cable to challenge viewers’ sensibilities. I’m interested here in complex form rather than novel content. Television has been reluctant to explore the possibilities of its potential as a narrative medium, preferring instead to stick close to the shore of linear chronological presentation and objective point of view. Though there have been experimental shows, the most visible experimentation has frequently been limited, often only a one-off aberration, as when M*A*S*H filmed an episode using a subjective point of view, through the eyes of a patient, rather than employing its default objective perspective, or the episode of Seinfeld presented in reverse chronological order.

Over the last several years, shows willing to explore the narrative potential of less-common narrative strategies for more than an episode have become more common. This trend’s most obvious recent historical marker is the first season of 24 in 2001. While the show sticks with a predominantly straightforward linear chronology, it operates under the conceit of “real-time” narrative, a structural decision that denies the show much of the “grammar” of visual narrative developed in film and television, and forces a kind of plotting that compresses events. The show’s success demonstrated that a network viewing audience could adapt to and appreciate a narrative presentation that challenged at least some of its expectations.

Cast of 24 (http://www.tv.com/)

Another rather obvious milestone is another Fox show, 2003’s Arrested Development, whose extensive use of an omniscient voiceover narrator offered an atypical way to assemble scenes and offer insight into characters. Though the show struggled to survive through three seasons, it had time to explore and exploit the potential of the structural decisions made at the show’s creation. And that’s really what’s interesting here, that there are increasing numbers of programs willing to adopt unusual fundamental narrative premises that then both impose constraints upon how they can tell their stories, and simultaneously allow for an examination of the potential of those premises.

Cast of Arrested Development (http://www.tv.com/)

I’ll touch only briefly on 2004’s debut of Lost, though its obsession with flashback and hit status are critical to the increasing acceptance of narrative experimentation. The centrality of analepsis to the show is in itself unusual, but what’s really curious is the show’s atypical employment of the device. Whereas flashback is most often used to explain characters’ motivations or reveal previous events, the flashbacks in Lost create as many questions as they answer.

The success of 24 and Lost helps explain why shows like Reunion or The Nine can not only employ but also promote their unusual structures. Thus Fox’s use of “groundbreaking concept” to describe Reunion. Clearly the networks believe that some viewers find such experimentation intriguing. But it isn’t enough to find some suggestions of a television avant garde. For narrative exploration to be more than an aberration, we’d have to be able to find it in shows that aren’t being promoted as “edgy.”

NBC’s The Office, while quirky, isn’t marketed as cutting edge. Though the show borrowed its pseudo-documentary format from the British original, the American series has already aired more than twice as many episodes as the original, giving it more time to play with the implications of having a camera visible to the characters. Its interview segments allow characters to speak directly to viewers while, thanks to the documentary premise, not entirely violating the fourth wall. But it is when the camera follows the characters that the most interesting narrative moments occur. When characters grown accustomed to the camera’s presence suddenly notice it again and alter their dialog or actions accordingly, or when the camera surreptitiously films the characters’ private moments, we’re seeing the exploration of narrative form: how do you convincingly capture intimacy when you’ve taken away the camera’s privileged invisibility?

Cast of “The Office” (http://www.tv.com/)

If “quirky” is a step below “edgy,” where we really want to see evidence of this trend is amongst the banal. CBS’s How I Met Your Mother, a situation comedy with obvious debts to Friends, Seinfeld and Arrested Development, debuted, like Reunion and The Office, in 2005. The show’s subject matter, the romantic lives of twentysomething New Yorkers denies it “edgy” or even “quirky” status, but its atypical narrative structure and its survival into multiple seasons demonstrate that narrative experimentation is going mainstream and surviving there.

How I Met Your Mother employs a voiceover narrator who provides commentary. What makes this more than a simple borrowing from Arrested Development is that the narrator lacks omniscience, and is instead a future version of the show’s central character. Set primarily in contemporary New York, the show follows Ted as he looks for his soulmate. The framing narration has future Ted telling his teenage children how he met their mother way back in the Oughts. Because future Ted knows how things work out, he sometimes reveals information in passing. For example when he tells his children about their “Aunt Robin” he excludes the obvious love interest character from being the eventual titular Mother, thus intensifying the show’s central, if less than gripping, mystery: who will be Ted’s soul mate?

Cast of How I Met Your Mother (http://www.tv.com/)

That How I Met Your Mother is hardly groundbreaking television is precisely the point. That atypical narrative strategies now appear, without fanfare (CBS barely mentions, and certainly doesn’t actively market, the show’s narrative structure), in successful if unremarkable mainstream broadcast shows demonstrates that television may be ready to fulfill its potential as a sophisticated narrative medium.

Break Over

Note: This article originally appeared on Flow July 28, 2006.


In my last column for Flow (“Buy, Robot”) I examined the advertising campaigns for films like I, Robot (2004) and Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004), marketing that presented products from within the films’ fictional universe and presented them, through television commercials and cinematic trailers, as available in the real world. Just as that article appeared, ABC took the strategy a step further by airing commercials for the Hanso Foundation during commercial breaks in its prime-time show Lost. The trick, of ocurse, is that the Hanso Foundation, despite apparently having an advertising budget, exists only in the fictional reality of the ongoing Lost narrative. The commercial spots serve as pointers to websites for the Foundation, and are part of an ABC promotional campaign called the “Lost Experience,” designed to keep viewers interested in the show through the summer.

I argued in that earlier article that this strategy of product projection, treating a fictional product (or in this case non-profit organization) as real works to blur the boundary between reality and fiction by employing reality status markers (in this case advertising) for fictional constructs. ABC’s use of this strategy to market a prime time network television program not only blurs that boundary, but in effect retrains television viewers’ sense of the division between programming and advertising.

For starters let’s construct an oversimplified model of the traditional status of television advertising in the context of prime time narrative programming. The general expectation for decades of television viewers has been that television commercial breaks are just what they sound like—breaks in the narrative advancement to take care of the commercial needs of the network and its affiliates, clearly signaled pauses in the ongoing action. Necessary evils or welcome intermissions, they punctuate the narrative progression and have become an integral element of broadcast television’s pacing. Viewing any of the myriad programs now available on DVD but originally produced for network broadcast demonstrates the solidity of the boundary between show and commercial, as even (especially?) with the commercials removed, the breaks are obvious. Differences in shot type or musical cues separate them from other scene changes. The unspoken promise of such commercial breaks has been that no new narrative information would be supplied until the episode resumed.

The commercials for the Hanso foundation aired during episodes of Lost violate that expectation. In them, the Lost narrative crosses the boundary of fiction (marked by the ending of the scene before the break) and poses as reality in the quotidian world of advertising. Though it may be done with a wink (ABC doesn’t seem to be trying to deceive viewers—quite the opposite, in fact), this strategy complicates viewers’ experience. The commercial break is no longer a “time out,” no longer a safe period when one can let one’s attention to the screen lapse. Instead, every commercial is suspect, as it may relate to the episode’s or series’ narrative arc. This is particularly significant with a show like Lost, which has built its fan base in part through the inclusion of both blatant and subtle clues to the answers to the show’s mysteries. Such clues encourage attentive viewing (and re-viewing, and episode download for a fee, and boxed-set purchase).

With the introduction of the Hanso Foundation ad spots, avid Lost viewers will be less likely to feel safe leaving the television for fear that significant narrative information might be conveyed even before the episode resumes. This, of course, is the likely goal: keep viewers watching the commercials during broadcast and keep DVR-users from skipping the “break-that-might-not-be-a-complete-break.” Success for ABC means a kind of retraining of viewers, a challenge to their desire to ignore or even skip commercial interruptions. It also means an erosion of the boundaries of program as something separate from but enabled by advertisement. Certainly Lost isn’t the first show to confuse the distinction. Complaints that some children’s programming is little more than extended advertisements for toys and other licensed merchandise go back decades. The Hanso Foundation commercials are different, though. Rather than trying to sell action figures or happy meals, their goal seems to be to foster and expand Lost’s already considerable fan base, to engage and create viewers who will spend time on the companion websites created for the “Lost Experience,” and use whatever information is revealed there to fuel speculation and discussion about the show’s future revelations. The Hanso Foundation commercials both feed and fuel the Lost “community,” while simultaneously demonstrating to advertisers that the network is taking steps to ensure that viewers see and pay attention to their ads.

Even before these ads, Lost was the subject of a conscious attempt to decentralize its narrative and playfully confuse its status as fiction. A website for Oceanic, the show’s fictional airline, has been up since the show’s start, and other websites have appeared as the show progressed. A novel, Bad Twin, supposedly written by Oceanic passenger Gary Troup (and read by characters in the show) is available. Amazon treats the fictional writer as real, including a clip from the author’s taping of a book chat show. Taken together, all of these actions serve to make the broadcast episodes just one element in an overarching Lost narrative, one that seeks to blur at the edges into reality.

Whether the “Lost Experience” succeeds in its goals of retaining viewer interest in the show and compelling attention to the advertisements, the Hanso Foundation commercials have broken new ground in prime-time network programming. They are the first colonies that such narratives have founded in the previously closed territory of the commercial break. While they raise new possibilities for networks, and new challenges for viewers who can no longer trust traditional expectations of where a show begins or ends.

New Blog, Old Articles

I'm jumpstarting this blog by posting articles I've written in the past. In part this gives me some immediate content, but it's not purely crass blog-stuffing. The article "Buy Robot," below, remains on the website at Flow, where it was originally published, but not with the accompanying images intact. I'm putting these articles up here to exercise greater control over them (they are mine), and also to provide some back story on my thoughts about narrative. More classics to come.