However, some of this change is more mechanical. Streaming has challenged the very concept of an episode of television. Traditionally, television episodes have served as units of story. Even in the context of heavily serialised series like The Wire or The Sopranos, individual episodes are structured in such a way as to serve as self-contained narrative. Even Game of Thrones, which tends to construct narrative across seasons, makes a point to structure individual episodes around core themes and events. On broadcast television, even for heavily serialised shows on cable channels, individual episodes need to be satisfying enough to sustain audience interest across the entire week between episodes. On streaming services, this is less of a concern.
On streaming services, where entire seasons are realised at once, the goal is always to keep the audience watching in the moment. Most streaming services blur the line between instalments by automatically playing the next episode as soon as the pervious episode ends; it takes more effort to stop watching a Netflix series than it does to binge the entire thing. The boundaries between individual episodes are elastic, often constructed as minor cliffhangers more akin to the act breaks in nineties television.
This comparison is flippant, but no less accurate for that. Streaming has arguably shifted the narrative focus away from the individual episode towards the entire season. “The first season of Bloodline is the pilot,” explained Netflix’s Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos to Vox of the streaming service’s prestige drama. “It's not like the first episode of Bloodline is the pilot.” Streaming is a model of television production that arguably constructs a thirteen-hour pilot for a television series and then chops up that pilot into arbitrarily constructed episodes.
This model of television production shifts away from the traditional process of television production as an organic and responsive process. Historically, television shows were produced in something close to real time. This allowed the production team to respond and react to real events in a spontaneous manner, to adapt to criticism in the moment and rework their mistakes on the fly. Because the entire first season of a streaming television series has been produced before a single critic or audience member is allowed to see the first episode, streaming television series lack that sense of dynamism; the soonest that the production team can respond to any audience criticism or engagement will be in the following season.
As a result, it can often feel like individual episodes of serialised dramas blur into one another. Because these series are all produced at once, and because there are no real runtime constraints, it is entirely possible for writers to shift entire scenes across episodes as if editing a gigantic thirteen-hour movie. This is something unprecedented in television production. “We’re asking these questions of the DGA and the Writer’s Guild in terms of how to name and brand and pay people for their work on particular episodes when the truth is, we really do want to see it as a five-hour movie,” conceded Transparent creator Jill Soloway in an interview with Uproxx.
With all of that in mind, it is tempting to wonder whether an episode of a given streaming drama is really still an episode? Is an episode of a show like this anything more than a collection of scenes sutured together to fill an arbitrary runtime? Are the opening and closing credits anything more than a chapter break in an unfolding epic? These are legitimately tough questions, and there is a sense that the companies like Netflix and Amazon are wrestling with them on their own terms. There will be no easy answers.
Interestingly, streaming comedy seems to have a much stronger sense of identity and purpose, with many successful streaming comedies striking a delicate balance between the demands of a season-long narrative and the structural opportunities presented by individual episodes. Master of None not only builds its individual episodes around clever premises, but then positions those episodes in such a way that they add up to more than just the sum of their parts. Bojack Horseman manages longer character arcs with strikingly beautiful individual episodes; Fish Out of Water is a fantastic demonstration of the fact that a streaming television series can still produce a must-see standalone episode.
There’s a credible argument to be made that streaming is not really television, that it is an art form with its own unique characteristics and attributes. Trying to categorise what Netflix and Amazon are doing as television might be seen as a clumsy mislabelling, a desperate attempt to make something new and radical conform to a more familiar template. After all, how much of this content is actually watched on television? How much of this material is filtered through phones and iPads, laptops and desktops? Is this some new strange-shaped peg being desperately beaten into a square hole?
This feels like something new and compelling, something that does not conform to expectations. In many ways, it recalls the awkward early years of television, when the medium seemed defined as a weird hybrid of cinema and theatre before finding its own voice. Whatever challenges might face the emerging streaming medium, there is something compelling and vibrant in watching talented creators grapple with these opportunities and these mysteries. These writers and producers often seem to be trying to solve complex equations in real time, with no idea what the answer looks like.
Watch this space.
CinÉireann / November 2017 31