As I mentioned in my first post back on Tuesday, we are heading into May sweeps season, which means that all the big network shows are currently lumbering toward some giant, melodramatic, shocking, bloody, gooey cliffhangers. I think the place you can see this most clearly is Michael Ausiello’s May Sweeps Scorecard on EW – based on all the insider info he’s gleaned, Ausiello made an enormous fill-in-the-blanks list of the deaths, pregnancies, proposals, births, resurrections, and other special events that will be eating up TV these next few weeks. He’s already filled in several of his anticipated eighteen fatalities based on this week’s Lost, but the scorecard is still relatively empty. It’s early.

It’s just one of those vagaries of the television production world, the bi-annual presence of the Nielsen ratings sweeps, but I cannot get over how odd it is that we now have a season where television fictions all rise up simultaneously into frenzies of melodrama. For most of these shows, the bulk of the winter is a slow burn, where characters change in tiny, easily reversible stages, and the startling events that threaten to explode prematurely quickly die back down. On Lost, characters have been marching determinedly around that silly island, forging and breaking allegiances, pointing to creepy kids standing in the jungle, but never making much progress toward resolution. On shows like Bones, Booth and Brennan moved inexorably closer to a romantic relationship and immediately backed away before it could overtake the familiar episodic patterns. CSI, Law and Order, and NCIS continue to chug on as they always have, although Law and Order: SVU has increasingly begun to go off the rails into strangely burdensome emotional stakes – an attempt, no doubt, to wrest popularity back to NBC’s still-floundering 10pm timeslot. Rick Castle will never actually get together with Kate Beckett, even though her apartment did blow up a few weeks ago, and Dr. House is still a jerk.

But every May, just because it’s May, the months-long slow burn erupts into a full on conflagration, and the aim of the game is to present as convincing an argument as possible that the rules of the show you’ve been comfortably watching aren’t set in stone, despite what you may have thought. The characters you assumed were immutable and eternal will die in dramatic car crashes, or they will finally marry each other, or if it’s a J.J. Abrams show, the organization the protagonist assumed she was working for has all along been just a part of another, much more secret organization, and it’s actually evil. You watch, and you keep watching, because the show needs to keep alive the possibility that what you’re watching is progressing rather than repeating, and these fin de siècle gestures at the end of every season are crucial to that belief.

For a lot of shows now, particularly on cable and premium channels, that belief in progress and the possibility for real change is one that’s well founded. On Mad Men, Sons of Anarchy, United States of Tara, Treme and the like, characters have memories, and retain the experiences of previous episodes and seasons, so when a character dies or someone gets married, it tends to stick in a way that deaths and marriages often don’t on network shows. But you’ll notice, none of the shows I just named are reaching the ends of their seasons right now – two aren’t even on. Cable and premium channels work on a different audience model, and aren’t nearly as beholden to the Nielsen sweeps as the networks still are, and so they don’t participate in the annual month of May eruptions. I’m not suggesting that Bones and Booth don’t remember that they just kissed a few weeks ago, but that events like those, and particularly, events that crop up as a result of these May shenanigans, tend to be erasable. Characters die, and they do tend to stay dead, but the consequences of those deaths dissolve pretty quickly, leaving everyone about as cheerful as before come next November. When was the last time you heard anyone mention poor, disfigured, tragically dead George on Grey’s Anatomy? How about Edgar on 24? (Confession: I haven’t been watching 24 in a while, so maybe Edgar’s death is being mourned more fully than I’m supposing). How about that life-threatening brain tumor Allison had on Medium last season?

It’s May, the season of deaths, weddings, and babies on TV. Enjoy them now, because in most cases, they won’t last.

So yesterday I was in full swing on procedurals and Why They Work, and I had ended on the conclusion that in order to fully appreciate their fictional value, you have to think about the most obvious aspects of the shows. The pleasure of the procedural can’t just be the thrilling, pseudo-scandalous content (more on pseudo-scandal in a moment) or the very small percentage of each show dedicated to plot development outside the self-contained episode – there has to be some consideration of the underlying, inescapable reliance on predictable, comfortable, familiar, even tedious repetition.

The word “work” is important here. It is the basis of every single procedural I think of – maybe it’s lawyers, or doctors, or cops, or forensic scientists, or mathematicians – but every procedural inevitably justifies its repetition through the rhythms of someone’s job. They’re always exciting jobs that are fast-paced and put the main characters (err, main employees) in constant contact with drama, violence, extraordinary human circumstances, and usually some good gory bits. It’s work nonetheless, and however thrilling each new case may be, our protagonists always remind us that it will soon come to an end. That drive toward resolution seems like it’s just the familiar pressure of an hour-long episode, but the fictional structure of the show embeds that awareness into its main characters just as much as its audience. Our hour will end, and it will be just another episode of Law and Order: SVU, just as for Olivia Benson or whoever, at the end of the day, it’ll be merely another in a long career of crazy days at work. The audience’s familiarity with the rules of the hour-long procedural guarantee that the drama will not bleed over into other episodes, but that assurance also comes from within the show’s fictional premise. Of course this isn’t going to be a life-altering murder investigation that will forever damage your relationship with your family or force you to reconsider your worldview. It’s just work.

Temperance Brennan, just doin' her job. Next to some dessicated human remains.

Let me make sure this is straight. Procedurals appear to be about drama and violence and sexual dysfunction, but they’re actually just about people at work, doing the same tedious examination of the crime scene they always do. At the same time, the procedural format re-inscribes the repetitive rhythms of performing a job. Bones may look like it’s about whether Booth and Bones are ever going to discuss their feelings for one another (and they do sometimes! Last night they totally did!), but even on Very Special Episodes like that one, the solid majority of the hour is just repetition of the familiar formula. We are introduced to a victim, we run through the possible cast of suspects, we investigate the evidence, we do a funny bit with the support staff, and, aha! A murderer is caught! These shows allow us to watch people work, and then build the repetitive, even mind-numbing reiteration of doing a job into the experience of watching.

Why are these entertaining, exactly?

As I mentioned yesterday, the procedural gets a lot of criticism for being aggressively un-lifelike. On the level of an individual episode, and often in terms of the fictional content of those episodes, I think that’s true. No one goes to the bathroom in television shows unless someone is hiding inside a stall to attack them, or they’re about to overhear some vicious gossip. But taken as a whole mass of regular, formulaic stories, the procedural actually does a pretty good job of representing what a middle class, working life might look like. It is repetitive, it is predictable, and for the most part, the major scandals of the day are ultimately pseudo-scandals. The chance that any particular day is going to contain a life-altering event is not very high, and the stuff that fills the day in the mean time tends to seem scandalous or highly dramatic, but is usually pretty trivial in the long term. Just as in life, procedurals allow characters’ personal lives to occasionally interject into the workplace, but it’s always placed inside the framework of their jobs, and always subsumed within the constant, fairly arbitrary delineations of the work’s closure – the end of a workday, a business week, a law suit.

Maybe I’m reaching, here, but I think procedurals are entertaining because we like watching ourselves, or at least, our own lives rewritten into a slightly different perspective. First, the job itself, which contains all sorts of taboo subject matter that rarely shows up in a cubicle. But that’s really just a side benefit of the bigger project: procedurals valorize work. It helps when that work is exciting and has obvious real-world impact, but the form of the procedural affirms any sort of work. It transforms the negative aspects of any job – repetition, tedium, conventionality – into positives. The procedural (your life) is not conventional; it’s familiar. It’s not tedious; it’s comforting. Repetition may be boring, but it’s also knowable and controllable.

Bones and Booth, walking back to work

This is the beating heart of every procedural, even the ones that make the exception appear more important than the rule. Last night’s episode of Bones was all about understanding the foundation of Bones’ and Booth’s relationship, which is ostensibly the story of how they met and were attracted to each other, how their personalities conflicted, how they negotiated their opposite worldviews. They kissed! They kissed not just in the flashback I teased yesterday, but they kissed again, in the current timeline of the show! This show is a romance!

But it’s not. Booth and Bones met because Booth needed help with his job. They liked each other because they were good at doing the job together, they fought when one person’s approach to the job opposed the other person’s, and at the end, after daringly suggesting that they try to have a relationship, Bones shoots Booth down. “I’m a scientist,” she says. “I can’t change, I don’t know how.”

Note: Once I started writing this, I quickly realized that it was going to be quite long, and that I needed more time than I have today. So this post will continue tomorrow, which will have the added benefit of being able to actually use the 100^th episode of Bones rather than just try to talk about in a stupid spoiler-free way.

The 100^th episode of Bones is airing tonight, and as often happens on the momentous milestones of long-running shows, there will be some extra-special events that I’m sure will get fans all riled up about Booth and Brennan.

Temperance Brennan (Bones) and Seeley Booth on Bones

I don’t usually write about shows like Bones, partly because they’re not the types of shows that are considered great fiction worthy of extensive critical attention. Bones’ creator Hart Hanson has described the process of writing Bones as being more like craftsmanship than artistry, and it’s easy to see where that argument comes from. Unlike art, which we usually associate with words like “new,” “innovative,” “unique,” “unusual,” “genius,” – words defined by singularity and novelty – procedural dramas like Bones are carefully built around constant, predictable repetition. That certainly doesn’t mean they’re easy to make. There are good procedurals and bad procedurals, and I promise, if you think about it, you’ll be able to tell the difference. But the process of creating them is about thoughtful re-combinations of familiar elements; it’s a craft of arranging things you already recognize into slightly altered, unexpected patterns, so that even if you’ve never seen an episode before, you already sort of know what’s going on. They’re partners with opposite personalities. They solve murders. They have a team of wacky sidekicks who help them. They are perfect for each other, but they will never get together. This happens over, and over again – in fact, on Bones, it’s happened 100 times already.

In this sense, it’s pretty obvious why I don’t devote a weekly blog post to the new episode of Bones, or any procedural. Every post would be essentially the same, and once every few months, there’d be an “oooh, Booth said something sexy to Brennan. I wonder if this is finally going to make something happen between them!” paragraph. Nevertheless, these shows are worth talking about, because it’s clear they’re doing some kind of important cultural work. Procedurals have an audience, often much bigger than the number of people who watch Mad Men or even Lost. It’s not unusual for the ratings on a repeat of CSI to beat up anything else airing in that timeslot. One way of attacking the problem is thinking about the standard content of a procedural, which is certainly compelling. They’re almost always about crimes, so you can look at Law and Order and talk about how comforting it must be to watch a show cram the senselessness of violence into a pat, conclusive, hour-long drama and force it to fit inside some kind of logic once a week. Procedurals usually take place from the perspective of a cop or lawyer, so there’s probably something pleasurable about seeing things from the side of People Who Can Do Things About It rather than the typical, mundane Other People Are Supposed To Do Things About It viewpoint.

When thinking about procedurals, though, I’m much less interested in the content than in the perpetual, unvarying repetition. Maybe it’s fun to watch a fiction that draws black and white lines around tricky, subtle, frustratingly ambiguous problems, but how can it be fun to watch a television show that does that in the same way, in the same timeframe, with the same main characters, every single week? One of the oft-repeated criticisms about crime procedurals is their total lack of realism. Detective work or forensic science requires massive amounts of tedious, unexciting work that never gets depicted on television – it’s squashed into a montage of banging on doors and peering fixedly at test tubes. And yet oddly, the form of a procedural makes it so that even though these shows may not be depicting tedious repetition, they are actually reenacting it, carefully and without variance, every single episode.

What to make of this weird contradiction? Why do we find it pleasurable to watch something that, in its repetition and predictability, seems more like work than entertainment?

Yeah, this picture is sort of a spoiler. But, spoiler!, it's a flashback, so don't get too antsy. And plus, this episode will be airing in *three hours* on the East Coast. C'mon now.

Tonight’s 100^th episode of Bones is part of the solution. As I said when I described what my weekly blog post would look like, every few months there’d be an added line about how Booth said something suggestive to Bones, or about how they held hands. The show is entertaining because in the midst of the work (in the case of Bones, the murder investigation), occasionally there are glimpses of other, bigger, personal things. At the end of last season, Booth had brain surgery, and it has forced him to deal with his feelings for his partner and re-think his own character. These life-changing moments don’t happen in every episode, so most of the time, you’re just going to get the same old murder investigations, with some co-worker jokes thrown in. But every once in a while, gestures toward change and development pop up. They are suspenseful, or scary, or exciting, or hopeful – they are pleasurable. And they’re as pleasurable as they are because they take place against a largely unchanging backdrop.

Procedurals have a hard time balancing this stuff; if you introduce too many new elements, the formula changes. Either you figure out a way to start repeating the new formula, or you refuse to let any of your changes have long-term implications for the show. Bones does the former – when Bones’ favorite intern was found to be guilty of a particularly gruesome (and cannibalistic!) crime, the show introduced several new quirky interns, and built a repeating cycle of reappearing interns into the show’s everyday routine. House uses the later system, which I find to be far more frustrating. At the end of last season, House undergoes a significant character shift, has a mental break, and spends a long time in a mental institution, where he figures out how to cope with his Vicodin addiction. While he vows to become a better person, this season has allowed him to slip back into all the old obnoxious foibles, and rebuild the show’s initial formula.

This, by itself, cannot be sufficient explanation for the strength of the procedural form. For one thing, while the Very Special Episode where they kiss is always everyone’s favorite part, it happens so rarely that you have to wonder how a show could hold an audience’s attention while they wait for those events. More importantly, claiming that the special 100^th episode comprises the dominant appeal of the show is to ignore the thing that actually takes up 98% (okay, maybe 95%) of the show’s running time – the repetitive, formulaic aspects. Any argument about why these shows are so appealing has to include the impact of the shows’ most distinctive element: the procedural.

Stay tuned tomorrow for the thrilling conclusion of On Procedurals!

The most fascinating thing I read this weekend was not David Copperfield (as, ahem, it probably should have been), but actually this transcription of a keynote address given by Hart Hanson at the “Future of Story” conference at Edmonton. (Things going on in Canada other than the Olympics: a “Future of Story” conference). The talk seems to have been fairly colloquial, as the transcription isn’t exact and Hanson sometimes trails off into “…”s and “?”s, but it’s nevertheless one of the more thoughtful discussions of network television I’ve seen in a while, and especially interesting coming from Hanson’s perspective.

Hanson is the creator and showrunner of the Fox series Bones, an impressively popular mash-up of forensic procedural and romantic comedy starring Emily Deschanel and David Boreanaz. In the keynote, Hanson talks at length about the differences between the kind of television he makes and shows like The Wire, and he describes the process, moral content, and careful calibrations required to make truly mass audience programming.

If you know The Wire, they never reset the plot for you, they never explain the dialogue, it’s really difficult to follow. There’s no effort made to explain anything, and characters who are weak [?] and horrible triumph, and good men die like dogs in the street. That’s not entertainment, but it’s awesome to watch… for a very small group of people. The Wire seldom gets above a million viewers.

My show – and this is not boasting, it’s just a difference – my show, that one [pointing at the screen] gets around twelve and a half million viewers. So, it’s much better than the one… [laughter]

The question is, is it better than The Wire, and that’s a crazy question: the answer is definitely yes and definitely no.

Hanson draws distinctions here and elsewhere between television that entertains, which Bones certainly does, and television that does… something else. He doesn’t get too bogged down in defining that “something else,” but relates it to that old debate about the artist vs. the craftsman. Hanson sees himself as a craftsman, a guy whose job is to get 12 million people to enjoy what he makes, and he’s clear about what that entails. He has to mirror their own values back to them and walk the careful line between what they desperately want (an ending, a romantic conclusion between Bones and Booth), and what they actually need as long-term viewers (further complications, endlessly spinning out the tension between the two leads). Unquestionably, he does his job very well.

And yet, as thoughtful, down-to-earth, and common sense as Hanson’s keynote is, there are all sorts of assumptions hidden inside his comments. Saying that The Wire and Bones have completely different audiences is accurate, but doesn’t take into account the fact that you can watch Bones for free by simply buying a television and plugging it in, whereas HBO isn’t even a part of the standard cable package. Sure, you could never put The Wire on a network because there would be an enormous audience outraged by its obscenity and immorality, but it would also find viewers it didn’t reach on a premium cable channel. Hanson also glosses over any argument that an audience can gain pleasure in more than one way. Without question, the show he writes is entertaining, but he doesn’t accept that The Wire is also an admittedly different form of “entertainment,” even though he describes his own “great delight” in watching it. That same contradiction appears again as Hanson insists that he writes Bones because it’s what he’d want to watch, and yet The Wire is one of his favorite shows in spite of its total failure to be “what America wants to watch on TV.”

The whole keynote is worth a read through, and he goes on to discuss a world-changing episode of Magnum, PI and slipping a line about Jesus being a zombie into his show. I came away from it equally intrigued about his refusal to view himself as an artist and frustrated by the contradictions between his imagined audience for Bones and himself as a viewer. If Hanson likes to watch both Bones and The Wire, why shouldn’t the rest of his audience? I could keep going on this for a long time, but I’ll leave with this, which seems to be at the center of Hanson’s conflict.

You have to be proud of what you do if you want to entertain a lot of people. This is why I instantly forgive and even admire the pulp writers – they don’t like it when you call them that – the pulp writers who somehow believe they are Proust or Mann or Stegner, when they’re writing crime novels or law novels or forensic novels. They are giving us what they want. They are appealing to a huge audience. I try my hardest to provide what I like to watch on television, on network television.