Prime-time television adopted a more serialised format towards the turn of the millennium. During the nineties, television series like E.R., Babylon 5, Buffy: The Vampire Slayer and The X-Files embraced long-form storytelling. However, the shift away from episodic towards serialised storytelling largely coincided with a number of technical innovations that made it easier for audiences and viewers to control their own access to television series independent of syndicated reruns.
As a cable channel, HBO was able to experiment with shorter seasons and tighter plotting in television series like Sex and the City, Oz and The Sopranos. However, serialised storytelling only really broke out into the prime-time slots of the major networks in the early twenty-first century. 24 was a television series that unfolded in real time over the course of a single day, premiering in late 2001. This narrative experiment would have been unthinkable a few years earlier, but the release of the show coincided with a radical shift in media technology.
DVD made it possible (and affordable) to buy entire seasons of a television show in packaging that could fit neatly on a shelf. Although shows like Star Trek released episodes on VHS, the format was too clunky and too expensive to be viable for most series. VHS favoured shorter self-contained narratives like film. In contrast, a viewer could buy an entire season of a series like The X-Files or The Sopranos on DVD and watch it at their leisure. In 2001, DVD sales eclipsed those of VHS for the first time. Similarly, TiVo allowed viewers to pause, record and rewatch live television at their leisure. In August 2002, Neilsen announced plans to factor TiVo into their ratings data.
These innovations very quickly and very dramatic changed the sort of content being produced by the major networks. Although 24 succeeded in growing its audience across its eight-season run, perhaps the biggest success serialised success story of twenty-first century broadcast television was Lost. The series structured itself as a mystery box that revealed new details every week, developing a complex mythology and an intriguing structure that encouraged viewers to rewatch and to dissect in a way that would have been very difficult only five years earlier. Lost paved the way for a string of copies; The Event, Flash Forward, Terra Nova. Serialisation became a feature of the television landscape.
However, the arrival of DVD and TiVo at the start of the twenty-first century was only a taste of what was to come. These innovations laid out a blueprint for a model of media consumption that would come to be known accepted as “binge-viewing” in the era of streaming. These developments laid a foundation upon which future media providers would build.
Netflix began life in 1997 as a service allowing subscribers to rent movies through the mail over the internet. Interestingly, the early service developed in parallel with the growth of DVDs; the company found that VHS cassettes were too tough to mail. However, ten years later, the company realised that the DVD market was in decline. The company sought to expand into new areas. In particular, Netflix was interested in supplying media directly to consumers over the internet.
Naturally, this transition was driven by technological factors. Between 2000 and 2007, the percentage of Americans connected to the internet grew from 43% to 75%. More than that, the percentage of Americans using broadband connections grew from 2.5% to 23.2%. There was clearly an audience for streaming digital content direct over the internet to a personal computer. In the years that followed, technology only made the streaming model easier; it became easier to broadcast downloaded content from a computer to a television, and faster internet speeds made it easier to stream high-quality content. All of this combined to create a perfect storm, allowing audiences to guzzle film and television through Netflix.
As Netflix grew, content providers began to take notice. In recent years, various studios have made efforts to establish their own equivalent service, motivated by the frustration of watching their content drive Netflix subscriptions. Increasingly, it seemed like the future of streaming would find studios pitching their own content directly at consumers. In October 2014, CBS announced plans for CBS All-Access and HBO announced HBO Now. In October 2015, NBC announced plans for their own service called Seeso. In April 2017, Disney announced plans to pull all of its content from Netflix and launch its own streaming service.
"Serialised storytelling only really broke out into the prime-time slots of the major networks in the early twenty-first century"
CinÉireann / November 2017 29