Different types of serial storytelling

Nobody presses the big reset button anymore

Let’s talk about modes of serial storytelling. I mean, to be fair, I’m always banging on about serial storytelling, but today I’m going to attempt to deconstruct different approaches across various mediums.

I have definitely forgotten and overlooked some great stuff. See you down in the comments, where we can all have a collective nerd session.

There’s a lot to learn from how serials have been tackled over the years. The key thing for me is that writing and publishing in a serial form is not the same as just taking a novel and posting each chapter one after another. Serial storytelling works best when the writer structures the narrative purposefully.

Old style serial fiction in the papers

This has been brought up a lot when people write about the ‘resurgence’ of serial fiction. I’m guilty of it. As such, I’m not going to spend too much time on this one, and I’ll try to resist naming the big D. Well, other than in this image:

The short version is that serial fiction used to be very normal and popular, published in newspapers and magazines in the 19th century. You can imagine it being the talk of the town, readers eagerly awaiting the next instalment. The writers could adjust the story over time based on responses from readers, and the finished stories could be adapted into novels.

Key thing is that these were long-form stories, which needed to bring people back each issue.

Next, we’ll fast forward into the 20th century and the emergence of the TV and radio serial. This has evolved and taken on various shapes.

Small screen serials

Serial literature gave way to The Novel. This always strikes me as being a bit of a shame: aside from anything else, serial fiction would have provided a way for a fiction writer to earn a regular income during publication, rather than gambling on the release of a book.

Serial storytelling was still around, of course, and had been embraced by newer forms. Television in particular has explored many variations over the decades.

Big reset episodic

When I was a kid, almost all television other than soap operas was purely episodic. There was a general setup for the show, which would be established in the pilot, and every single episode after that would follow the same general formula.

There would be limited character growth, and any major changes to the status quo would invariably be reset at the end of the episode or forgotten about entirely by the following week.

The premise would be neat and easy to explain in a sentence: the crew of the Starship Enterprise explore a new planet each week. A detective investigates a murder each week. And that’s all you need to know.

The benefits of this are obvious: audiences can start watching at any point and immediately understand what’s happening. Each episode is self-contained and includes enough information to bring new viewers up to speed. This is where the infamous “as you know, Bob” exchange become commonplace, as characters bizarrely reminded each other of things they had personally experienced.

There’s a cosy familiarity to the repetitive structure. The drawback is that the potential for story and character development is kept deliberately minimal.

Infinite soap

I mentioned soap operas earlier. These are in some ways the ultimate form of the serial. Never-ending, internally consistent, and often real-time. Coronation Street has been airing weekly in the UK since its first episode in December 1960.

The show’s creators have produced over 10,000 episodes.

I never expected that I’d write about Coronation Street on this newsletter.

While soap operas have never been my thing, no matter how you look at it we’re talking a major, historical achievement in serial storytelling. Where this becomes especially fascinating is that show’s premise: it’s set on a very ‘normal’ street in northern England, and has updated and evolved in real-time to keep pace with the times. That means the show itself is now a historical record of sorts, depicting the changes in British society from the 1960s to modern day - albeit through a fictional, heightened drama lens.

Some fans of the show will have watched it for their entire life. Astonishing!

Short serials

On the opposite end are short serials. Often adapted from novels into television, previously referred to as ‘prestige drama’ or ‘mini-series’. I remember this being very common in the UK growing up: while US shows would come in at 22 episodes per season, British shows would be around 6 and often one-offs rather than on-going.

In the 80s and 90s Dennis Potter ruled the short-form serial on TV. I still vividly remember his final works, Karoake and Cold Lazarus - even if it seems nobody else watched them. He’s better known for The Singing Detective. (related, this is my favourite news story of the month)

Don’t read about Devs. If you haven’t watched it, go do so now. Trust me.

Short-form serials have less time to play with and are therefore more focused in their storytelling: there is little in the way of narrative fat. This means less time to get to know everyone or play with the formula, and the overall ‘feel’ tends to be more literary and novelistic.

This form still exists! More recently I’ve thoroughly enjoyed short-form one-offs like the remarkable Devs and Emily Blunt’s devastating The English.

Long-form continuous

The 90s and 2000s were dominated by US long-form television, coming in at around 22 episodes per season. This was especially the case in science fiction, from the Star Treks and Babylon 5 to Farscape, The X-Files and Battlestar Galactica.

Most of the earlier shows adhered to the ‘big reset button’ approach, with self-contained episodes and little on-going storytelling outside of the occasional fancy 2-parter. This shifted in the mid-to-late-90s, as The X-Files began to weave a long-running conspiracy plot into the individual episodes. It felt like it was going somewhere - although I never stuck with that particular one past season 2.

I mean, you all knew I was going to mention Babylon 5 in this post, right?

For me, the big shift came with Babylon 5, a low budget sci-fi show that aimed for a more complex approach to storytelling. It was designed from the start to be a 5-year show with a defined beginning, middle and end. It had a singular creator at the helm with J Michael Straczynski and was a formative experience for teenage me.

There were two key successes to B5 that hadn’t really been done on TV before:

1. Character development was consistent over those 5 years. Every character at the end of the show is different to at the start, and that progression makes sense. coming at a time of characters being largely static within the ‘big reset’ framework of TV, it was a revelation.

2. Plot points were important, and often connected across several years of the show. A seemingly throwaway time travel episode halfway through season 1 suddenly becomes massively important halfway through season 3. This is simply not something that happened on TV.

This format was taken into other shows and pushed in all sorts of directions - being a sci-fi fan, I saw the techniques popping up in Deep Space Nine, Farscape and Battlestar Galactica.

The 8-hour movie

In the last decade+ there’s been another shift, with essentially all shows moving to this format, while also reducing down to 8-10 episodes. Even Star Trek has gone this way. There’s a trade-off there, though: by having tight story arcs but relatively few episodes, the show becomes very plot-heavy. Characters have to undergo rapid change, and there’s little space to breathe.

B5 had episodes that were more comedy focused. There was an entire episode with one lead character being interrogated for the entire hour. Farscape had all sorts of fun with its formula, which was only possible because it had the space of 22-ish episodes per season.

The biggest shows these days, from HBO stuff to Disney+ and Netflix, all focus around the 8 episode mark, and can simultaneously feel relentless and padded. The pacing is off, and producers, writers and directors are often heard gushing about being able to create ‘an 8-hour movie!’, as if that’s a good thing.

I’m a bit of a snob when it comes to this thing. A serial is not an excuse to make an 8-hour movie that happens to have breaks every hour. That isn’t a serial, it’s just a badly paced movie. Movies average around 2 hours for all sorts of reasons, but that’s also where the storytelling has settled in that medium. It works. Extend a movie to 8 hours without adjusting the narrative structure and it’s going to feel flabby and uneven. Rushed and languorous at the same time, somehow.

Still the best TV show ever made, according to me.

There are exceptions, of course. The Wire, Breaking Bad. Wandavision and She-Hulk did very interesting things on Disney+ that experimented with the form, rather than just trying to be a long Marvel movie. For my money, Strange New Worlds is the best of the new Star Trek, as the writers have managed to find a way to bring back to the episodic aspects of the original shows while still embracing modern sensibilities.

The movie sequel

Movies used to work differently. Franchises didn’t really exist in the same way. If a movie did well, it would sometimes justify a sequel being made, but common wisdom back in the day was that sequels were always worse (occasional exceptions aside, like The Godfather).

The Superman and Rocky sequels I remember from my childhood were all quite standalone. And increasingly silly. James Bond films weren’t even really sequels - it was a new Bond movie, but with almost nothing to do with what had come before. Same with Indiana Jones You could watch them in any order. The general idea was more of the same, to make some extra cash. Furthering a story wasn’t really a factor.

An outlier was Star Wars, which had sequels that directly continued the story. The films even had episode numbers! Which started at #4, which always hurt my child brain. Lucas was deliberately recreating the pulpy serials of his own childhood, a form that hadn’t been around for a while.

In the 80s, post-Star Wars, things started to shift. Filmmakers started playing around with longer story structures. Back to the Future told its story over three films, with the second and third being tightly intertwined. Cameron’s Aliens sequel was a direct furthering of the story, rather than a repeat. Same with Terminator 2. Mostly, though, you still had weird sequels like in the Batman franchise, where there was clearly no creative bigger plan and the focus was solely on repeat revenue.

Then it all shifted as we headed into the new millennium. Star Wars was back and doubling down on its serial nature. Lord of the Rings showed how to do epic fantasy on the big screen. Harry Potter had been hooking readers for years and started doing the same for filmgoers.

Then along came Iron Man. There had been superhero sequels for decades, but Marvel were trying something different: they wanted to take comics storytelling and translate it for the movies.

Comics and the infinite recycle

If soap operas create an infinite ‘slice of life’ drama that can exist theoretically forever, comics are the medium that perfected this for action. DC and Marvel had been happily producing never-ending serials for decades, but the form had never quite translated over to TV or film.

Sure, you’d had Superman and Batman and the X-Men and Spidey show up, but they followed film conventions primarily. The post-Iron Man Marvel stuff didn’t do that, instead building a complex narrative web across multiple characters and mini-franchises.

Say what you will about its impact on cinema and popular culture, or the individual quality of the films, but the interaction of storytelling and complex film production over multiple years I find fascinating. Nobody had tried anything quite like it before. I’d happily argue that up to Avengers: Endgame it was a largely successful storytelling experiment, fusing daring ideas and structures with crowd-pleasing blockbusterdom. That it works at all is a miracle; that the quality is pretty high throughout is remarkable.

The interesting thing for me is what’s happened after Endgame, though. That film worked as an ‘end’, creating a satisfying closed story that had started with Iron Man. And then….they kept making films. More and more and more of them, plus vast numbers of TV shows on Disney+.

Marvel Studios has now successfully replicated the comics medium in its entirety: the ongoing series is now obtuse, increasingly self-referential, unnecessarily dense and lore-obsessed, and ever-harder to understand for a newcomer.

Long-running superhero comics can be impenetrable to new readers. There’s simply so much of it. And therein is the problem with never-ending stories - at some point, the emotional impact is diminished, because the stakes become obfuscated. The constant recycling and reworking counts against any of it actually mattering; something which is exacerbated by the inevitable introduction of multiverse plotlines.

It’s when an entertainment products tips over from being fun to being work.

Two good actors realising they’re in a bad movie.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 was fantastic, though. As was Wakanda Forever. Just like there are occasional exemplary runs of particular comics titles, in-between the run-of-the-mill treadmill.

Hey, you forgot about books!

It’s a fair point that most of what I’ve talked about here has been from the worlds of TV and film. My own storytelling in Tales from the Triverse is most heavily influenced by screen storytelling.

Novels have played with longer forms for a long time, of course. Fantasy and science fiction in particular loves a good multi-book epic. I find it interesting that non-genre literature tends to shy away from sequels and serials, though. Why is literary fiction so disinterested in longer forms? Sure, a gigantic fantasy adventure lends itself naturally to multiple books, and crime fiction works well for a rinse-and-repeat investigative formula, but surely there are interesting serial opportunities to explore for literary writers? I’m sure there are exceptions.

One thing to note is how a lot of successful serial forms in movies and TV have originated in print, either structurally or with direct adaptations.

Manga & anime

I’m only going to touch on this briefly because I am a long way from being informed on the subject. I’ve seen Akira and Ghost in the Shell and Ghibli stuff, of course.

More recently I’ve watched Evangelion and Naruto, and I just finished reading the entirety of Attack on Titan. Being a bit of a noob in this area I don’t know whether these observations apply to Japanese storytelling in general or just happen to be present in these titles, but I found it fascinating to discover brand new approaches to serial storytelling.

Believe it.

There’s a lot of plot, for a start, and it takes its time. Naruto can take an entire season of the TV show on a single fight, which to my British storytelling instincts sounds completely mad. But it works! In fact, it’s brilliant, though did take some mental gymnastics for me to get used to it. No different to watching The Wire or Babylon 5 for the first time, though, and having to adjust my expectations to something new and exciting.

Characters are often archetypal. Most of Attack on Titan’s cast don’t change much over the course of its 30+ volumes. When they do change significantly, it’s often done out of scene and during narrative time jumps. They are there to serve specific story points. It is thematically rich throughout, but there’s no great pressure to move a character from A to B.

Exposition is dealt with entirely differently. Naruto and Attack on Titan indulge heavily in voiceover and overt inner monologues, with characters explicitly detailing their plans and motivations. There is little ambiguity in that regard, with subtext becoming more declarative, but there’s still a wealth of nuance in their portrayals.

Anyway, I’m still learning from manga and anime. Can’t wait to watch and read more. If you’re an expert on the field, please do chime in with a comment below.

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THAT’S A LOT OF WORDS. I’m going to stop typing and hit refresh excitedly on the comments section for the rest of the day. I’m sure there’s vast amounts still to say that I’ve overlooked.

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