I’ve always loved watching television, and can remember being really little and wanting desperately to know what would happen after the comparatively minor suspense of a commercial break in David the Gnome. That desire quickly upgraded to a small seizure over the possibility of not knowing what happens in the next episode of Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, followed by one of the more obsessive relationships with Babylon 5 to ever grace a preteen psyche. Narrative absorption of any kind was the ultimate pleasure, and I had as little trouble blocking out the world with a copy of The Golden Compass as an episode of GhostWriter. (I almost missed my entrance in a drama camp performance of Carousel because I was reading back stage, and remember impatiently feeling like the chorus songs were just too long, because who would not rather be reading The Golden Compass backstage with the script flashlight than actually performing this play that we were all in?) Total absorption in books, in particular, was so dangerous that I managed to mentally skip most of Algebra 1 by blatantly reading in class.

It wasn’t until some point in college when television’s ability to capture my entire brain overtook my easy daily slide into a text, and it is especially thanks to one summer in Boston that the most basic advantages of television as a narrative medium became clear to me. The enemy of absorption is distraction, and I finally realized while trying to finish Adam Bede next to a wall actually vibrating with the impact of a reggae bass line that the simple presence of sound coming out of a speaker – my headphone speakers, not the neighbors’ blasting behemoths – made a marathon viewing of Buffy the Vampire Slayer far more attractive than poor George. I watched every single episode of Buffy that summer, thanks to equal parts fascination with the show and desperation to focus on something other than that awful, perpetual noise. Television was far more reliable than an audio book, which has none of television’s multi-layered aural aesthetic, and leaves too much empty space in the background. Music made an effective sound block, but it left my brain running in circles, always testing how much of the Constant Bass Line from Hell was slipping through. Buffy was my best friend, and once I spent time powering through many episodes a day, I began to appreciate the way the repeating rhythms of an episode format were laying bare the skeletons of plotlines, making it easier to see character development and audience suspense stretched out over the frame of a twenty-three episode season. I went to Buffy for the improved escape of multi-sensory entertainment, and almost in spite of myself, stumbled into absorption with television as television and not just a story that kept going and kept me going.

There inevitably comes a time when life interjects into one’s seven season marathon, and you have to figure out how to do things that you wish you could do quietly, like read or write, inside a space that is cluttered with bass lines and stomping and overheard conversations. At the moment I’m exploring the potentials of a noise machine. I wish I were watching TV.

If episodic storytelling is characterized by perpetual endings and re-beginnings, it is perhaps curious that endings are a dominant source of anxiety around serial storytelling, a narrative defined by continually delayed resolution. Does it end, or is canceled with little warning? Does it end on its own terms, or is it forced to finish when still in full swing? Does it end “well,” or does the final conclusion fail to answer all of the remaining questions? For some shows, these questions are given the power to validate or invalidate entire viewing experiences. I’m thinking here in particular about shows like Lost, of course, where so much pressure was placed on the show’s finale to justify what was often a frustrating viewing experience. It’s true for other shows similarly centered on plot, including mysteries or soap operas, where the resolution has the burden of presenting a solved puzzle or a love triangle made square. But it’s also true for shows more driven by character development, like Friday Night Lights or Gilmore Girls, where the final episodes are needed to bring a character to a stable conclusion or gesture toward a character’s continuing future.

It makes sense that a serialized story pushes viewers away from a standard week-to-week viewing pattern, as continuing plotlines create desire for the next installment and make it pleasurable to view several episodes at once. Maybe a viewer will opt out of a show for a few weeks and then catch up all at once on DVR or hulu, or maybe he or she will wait until a season is completed and watch it all on DVD. More than just establishing a desire for multiple episodes at a time, though, the ability to view television outside of weekly installment structure allows viewers to hold off altogether until they can be sure that a show has ended. When season six of Lost appears on DVD, there will be nothing between you and a legal, uninterrupted, start-to-finish viewing experience. Aside from the promise of continuous narrative, alternate viewing technologies allow audiences to watch completed shows with a determinate length, as well as know in advance the circumstances of their endings. A viewer sitting down with Deadwood right now can choose to learn that its abrupt cancellation will likely lead to a frustrating resolution, or that despite its beginning appearance as a show centered on high school, Buffy the Vampire Slayer will continue long enough for its characters to grow out of their awkward teenage years. The presence or absence of these two simple pieces of knowledge – how long a story will be, and how it will end – make serialized television stressful and potentially frustrating in the moment, and profoundly satisfying in retrospect. This, in large part, is why television serialization continues to be a topic of interest for television creators and viewers. It is the form of narrative that best strains the gap between traditional television viewing and alternate methods (how long will it be?), and it reflects viewers’ anxieties away from the fiction and onto the creation process (how will it end?).

As a way of coping with the inevitable worry and potential dissatisfaction that comes from unknown endings, serialized television shows have also retained a much stronger episode structure than earlier forms of long-term storytelling, like the serialized novel. Without the benefit of a known end point, serial television shows often provide a strong impression of the episode as a whole unit, either by coupling the long-arc stories with episodic plotlines in shows like The X-Files or House, or by establishing the episode as a unit that is whole outside of, or in spite of, incomplete plot. Shows like Mad Men or The Wire work with thematic or aesthetic motifs to displace any anxiety about large-scale endings onto episodes that are meant to be complete and satisfying as individual pieces as well as seamless parts of a longer story. This, too, is a reason for our continued consideration of serialized television as a form – its strong episode structure, even in shows that play with the limits of how porous an episode’s boundaries can be, make it a different and more complicated type of serialization than simple long-form storytelling. Even in the most serialized shows, the divisions are still more powerful than the continuous line.

I am still here, fully ensconced in a strange world where everyone chuckles appreciatively at a reference to eating one’s own head and the biggest daily obstacle is that someone’s using a Norton edition when everyone else is using a Penguin. (The Norton, of course, was taken from the later completed novel editions, while the Penguin comes from the earlier serial edition first published in Bentley’s Miscellany. What, you didn’t realize how different they were? Oh ho, you’re in for a treat.)

It’s hard to think about anything other than Dickens, frankly – a trap this person clearly fell victim to while registering his or her car. Occasionally I get flashes of TV or new media -related ideas, among them, “Were Dickens’ sketches the YouTube videos of his day?”, “What is it we like about really long stories if it’s not plot?”, and, “If his insistence on repeated public readings of the most violent scene in his corpus, the scene in Oliver Twist when Sikes murders Nancy, did indeed contribute to Dickens’ premature death (as was argued by a lecturer this morning), do we need to worry about the health of such TV violence aficionados as the Davids Chase, Milch, or Simon?” (Answers: Yes, hmm, and I hope not.)

At the moment, though, television looks like a far-off vision of the future when seen from a world emphasizing daily Victorian teas and frequent discussion of the New Poor Law. Better luck tomorrow.

I’ve written in the past about a peculiarly strong affiliation TV writers have claimed with nineteenth-century novels, and especially with Charles Dickens, and the many qualities of his work that are useful for people who think about television today – Dickens’ serial publishing, his focus on urban spaces, his melodrama, his intricately woven plots. It’s something I have continued to muse about over the past several months, and it’s a topic I feel especially drawn to expound on this week. Because I am at Dickens Universe.

Yes, Dickens Universe, a week-long Dickens-themed conference/workshop/summer camp/party held at UC Santa Cruz every year, and featuring lectures from Dickens scholars, seminars for graduate students and members of the general public, workshops on writing, pedagogy, and presentation skills, and nightly parties with themed cocktails that coordinate with the current year’s primary text. (This year: Oliver Twist and Sketches by Boz. Last night’s drink: Nancy’s Heart of Goldschlager cocktails.) It’s an unusual space for academics, something that combines graduate student development opportunities with a forum for peer feedback, and then adds in the nearly unheard of element of presenting one’s ideas to an audience outside of the academy. It’s pretty great, really, and not just because each day’s schedule includes two coffee breaks, a Victorian tea, post-prandial potations (yes, really), and the aforementioned nightly party.

I came to Dickens Universe well aware that ol’ Charlie has been actively re-appropriated in the world of television as a father of intellectually respectable mass entertainment of a form not unlike Lost or Deadwood or Damages or [insert multi-plot serialized show here]. I was also aware that from what I’ve found, most references to television’s nineteenth-century analogues have been whittled down to just one authorial figure, a jovial Dickens perched in the background of today’s television landscape. Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Gaskell, or Thomas Hardy are nowhere to be seen, much less Balzac or Flaubert. What I have been surprised to discover is that at least colloquially, many Dickens scholars have performed the same kind of singular appropriation, only in reverse.

Where interviews and critical pieces about television reference Dickens over and over, Dickens scholars reference one show – The Wire – with similar fervor. I’ll admit, some of this is at least prompted by me. “I work on television,” I say, and the near-unanimous response is “The Wire!” But I hasten to add that it would certainly be here whether or not I were here, frequently bringing up TV. On the Universe’s first full day, graduate students and faculty got into small groups to brainstorm teaching ideas about Oliver Twist, and when we reported back to the big group, we ended with a giant list of possible avenues for further discussion. We had the novel as a form, affect theory, Dickens as a social reformer, caricatures and characterization, thingness in Oliver Twist, Oliver as the novel’s vacant center, negative depictions of marriage, etc. etc. etc., and as a suggestion from one of the groups, The Wire. In connection with Oliver Twist, they mentioned that season four might be particularly relevant.

It is particularly relevant, of course, but so would a discussion of melodrama, serialization, violence, audience, and any number of other things about television more generally. Right now, though, I find the selection of that singular touchstone show to be sort of satisfying. Television seems to have picked Dickens, and in turn, Dickens scholars have picked The Wire. Even if it’s somewhat unfair on both sides, the symmetry is too pleasing to pass up.

So, Comic-Con is one of the crazier places I’ve ever been. We tried to prepare ourselves for the impending bizarre hilarity, but nothing really prepares you for walking fifteen minutes just to get to the end of a line, and passing five women dressed as Slave Leia in the process. Unfortunately, we only had tickets for the first two days, which means I missed several of the awesome TV panels on Saturday and Sunday, but did manage to make it to a few really great panels, including the Girls Gone Geek panel I mentioned in my post last week, and the nerd-stravaganza that was the Joss Whedon and JJ Abrams panel on Thursday.

The Whedon/Abrams panel was probably the panel highlight of my Comic-Con experience, and it particularly stood out after the long string of much less exciting movie release panels that we had to sit through in order to guarantee we’d have seats. This is of course a severe reduction, but my impression of the big name movie panels we saw (including RED, Battle: Los Angeles, Salt, MegaMind, and Tron Legacy) is that most actors are pretty boring (except for Will Ferrell and Tina Fey for MegaMind), most of the screened questions from the audience are repetitive (“What kind of fight training did you have to do?” “How are you dealing with this as an adaptation?”), and although the idea of using Comic-Con as a platform for previewing new things is a good one, everyone has a higher level discussion when we see enough from a preview to actually talk about it. (“So, we really didn’t see any glimpse of what the evil aliens will look like in this film, but… could you talk about them?”)

Seriously, look at Mary-Louise Parker's face as she listens to Bruce Willis.

Which is why it was such a relief, and so completely awesome, to have Joss Whedon and JJ Abrams come out and be able to talk about well-known work, about narrative and storytelling, about inspiration and the production process, and about their own experiences as fans. It was fascinating to hear both of them talk about the differences between making movies and making television, and to hear Joss Whedon say that although movies are hugely satisfying because they have firm and final endings, he feels that long form storytelling is more rewarding and much harder. The moderator, Doc Jensen, also asked about serialization on television, and both men admitted to understanding the financial motivation for non-serialized shows but having absolutely no creative interest in them. “Stories imply time,” said JJ Abrams. “Stories imply inevitability and some kind of progress.” “I don’t think the networks will ever, ever ask for that,” added Whedon. “The networks will never admit that people want that, because they do see the cash cow of ‘The Mentalist! Let’s all do The Mentalist!’ And when Lost first hit and was blowing up huge…they were still like, ‘We don’t want that. That successful, Emmy-winning thing? No, we don’t want that.’…And it’s very weird, because ultimately, the serial is always going to be the thing people remember. What do they remember about Cheers? It’s Sam and Diane, not a great joke from Cheers.”

What came out of their discussion of serialization, including Joss Whedon’s trials with the cancellations of Firefly and Dollhouse and the unrepeatable structure of a show like Lost, is a huge disconnect between the stories people like Abrams and Whedon want to tell on TV and the capacity for network television to produce those shows. Recently, Abrams has been more successful than Whedon in creating television for the networks, but as he mentions in his descriptions of both Fringe and his new show UnderCovers, it’s because he’s been careful to balance the standalone aspect of an episode and his own dominant interest in longer story arcs. One of the most interesting moments for me was when Joss Whedon admitted that in making Dollhouse, he just had not realized how much the networks have changed, and had not come to terms with the idea that he has a cable rather than network mentality. “I definitely was trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.”

Whedon did talk about preparing to do The Avengers, and insisted on describing to JJ how fully he loved Star Trek. “I have had actual moments of sheer fucking panic because I love Star Trek so much.” In turn, Abrams talked about the process of rewriting, and when Whedon mentioned that he doesn’t really write second drafts, Abrams shot back “You bastard!” But however much fun they had joking around and teasing each other, it was hard not to come away with a sense of how tricky the television landscape is right now, and how swiftly the networks are changing. I can only hope that when Joss Whedon is done with that silly Avengers movie project, there will be a new Whedon show on cable.

I can also hope that next year, after we figuring out some of the basic Comic-Con ins and outs this time around, we get to attend more panels like this one.

I’m almost caught up on Breaking Bad – I’ve watched all except last week’s episode, but I wanted to write about the episode that aired two weeks ago, at the same time as the Lost finale. It was one of those scenarios where I watched all of twitter get really excited about that night’s Breaking Bad episode, and I thought “Huh – I wonder if I’m going to remember that there’s some supposedly astounding episode in season three by the time I actually catch up.” There was no question. “Fly” stands out from Breaking Bad in the same way that “Pine Barrens” seems distinct in The Sopranos, “Exposé” is a separate thing from the rest of Lost, or “The Body” is markedly different from the rest of Buffy. I love this about television, and I think it’s something unique to the form – the strength of the episode structure means that each episode always has the potential to be very, very different than what’s come before. It doesn’t happen often, and many of the more sophisticated, narratively interesting shows attempt to undermine the episode as a structural force, so that one episode flows into another with very little resistance. Deadwood used this technique to an extreme, often beginning episodes exactly where the last one left off. Some of this fluidity is undoubtedly underlying the concept of the television series as being “novelistic,” as a weaker episode structure more resembles the role held by chapters of a novel. But even in those cases, the residual force of the episode as a unit combines with the reality of producing television (each episode may have a different set of writers or a different director; each episode has its own budget for guest stars, special effects) to make it perpetually possible that any given episode might be something completely weird and different.

Such was the case for “Fly,” an episode that abandoned every cast member except for the two leads, and stuck them in an underground lab while they tried to kill a fly for nearly the whole hour. Alan Sepinwall writes that episodes like these are called “bottle episodes”: episodes produced with the goal of costing as little as possible in order to reserve money for guest appearances or awesome explosions in the season finale. “Fly” uses only two of the show’s actors, and it takes place entirely on sets already built for the show almost all of which are indoors, which cuts out the expense of shooting on location. It would make sense for an episode like this to be a departure from the show’s typical tone or style of storytelling, and in some ways that was the case. There were no gorgeous wide shots of the desert or sudden gross-out images of a decapitated head attached to a turtle. It was not a depiction of Walt being torn between two different lives, as so much of Breaking Bad has been – none of the usual scenes where a cell phone call interrupts an important life event, or Walt is called away from his meth deal by a family emergency. Still, “Fly” was overwhelmingly invested in many of the things most characteristic to Breaking Bad. It was an episode that allowed both Walt and Jesse ample time to consider the narratives they have constructed about their lives and to think back through their past actions and work out what went wrong. And somehow, even in the restrictive space of the lab, “Fly” manages to ratchet the tension so effectively that by the end, I was actually covering my eyes while Jesse teetered on the unstable top step of a ladder.

“Fly” is like nothing so much as a Beckett play, and so it’s no wonder many people hated it. There’s no action, nothing happens, why is he so obsessed with that stupid fly, what are they even talking about right now, etc. etc. etc. Episodes like these, those that stand out from the rest of a show, tend to be controversial. (Think of how many people hated “Exposé,” myself included). In many instances, it’s because an audience member may not care for whatever it is that specific episode is doing – if you really hate Beckett, you probably hated “Fly,” and that’s okay. If you cannot stand musicals, then Buffy’s musical episode will leave you cold, and nothing Joss Whedon did would ever make you feel otherwise. I do think, though, that there’s something deeper happening when an audience resists one particularly unusual episode of a television show. Those episodes can feel a little like a violation, or a betrayal of a contract. We know by now that an episode of Buffy is supposed to look and sound like one thing in particular, and we’ve been watching for the past six seasons because we like whatever that is. The idea that any random episode could just go off the rails from what we anticipate is unnerving, because it upsets the norm and hints at an instability we didn’t previously realize existed.

This is exactly the reason that shows can jump the shark, but it’s also the reason that television can be so fascinating over the long term. Even the shows most inextricably rooted to a formula have the potential for a single episode to derail the status quo. In any week, the show you’ve been loving as Happy Days may choose to send the Cunninghams to Hollywood, thereby giving Fonzi a chance to waterski over a marine predator. But on the other hand, every new episode is also an opportunity to be a costume drama, or a farce, or some bizarre metafictional exploration of minor characters. Or a Beckett play – but just for an hour.

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.

Charles Dickens, 1859

So Friday’s blog post was not a List of Giant Things entry in the sense that I’ve usually been doing them, but it was a collection of quotes on an issue that’s closely related to that list. The quotes deserve a little additional commentary, which I was going to do yesterday, but Treme interfered. For now, then, back to Charles Dickens, Father of TV.

As I indicated in a comment on that post, one of the most important things to think about that little collection is how many of those quotes misread Dickens, or use him in an extremely limited way. I have a list here that covers some of the primary contexts in which Dickens appears when related to television, but there’s a lot about his work that does not have much impact on the commentary. (For instance: his frustratingly narrow depiction of most of his female characters, his astonishing prolificacy, his presence as a public performer, his role as an editor, his impact on social reform, etc. etc.)

This ended up being sort of absurdly long, so it’s going after a break. Join me for some TV-pertinent iterations of Charles Dickens:

read more…

“One of the things that we talked about early on when doing a big saga was Charles Dickens. Most of his novels were written in one-chapter segments from the newspaper, so that’s why they have that big serialized feel to them. He never knew quite where they were going. He was just writing them one chapter at a time. We’re doing obviously the same thing here, so the art of the coincidence becomes a big part of the show, how people cross, how people’s lives come together, and it’s a very fun way to tell stories”

- Tim Kring, creator of Heroes

Carlton Cuse: [Dickens]’s getting a lot of play on Lost, isn’t he?

Damon Lindelof: He is indeed. He’s a favorite writer of ours. He wrote serialized stories just like we did. He was accused of making it up as he went along, just like we are.

Cuse: That’s right…he didn’t even have a word processor.

***

Cuse: And Charles Dickens was also a wonderful inspiration, because here he was, writing these great, wonderful, sprawling, serialized books…

Lindelof: Also, Dickens, the master of coincidence. Y’know… his stories always hinged on the idea of interconnectedness… in a very strange an inexplicable way.

-       Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, producers of Lost

I found it kind of ironic that in season 5 there are a few really great scenes where you’re mocking the editors of newspapers who are asking for a Dickensian vibe, and then a lot of critics and writers compared The Wire to Dickens.
It was fun goofing on the Dickens comparison because I understood what they meant by Dickensian when they said it. You get this sort of scope of society through the classes, the way Dickens would play with that in his novels. But that’s true of Tolstoy’s Moscow. That’s true of Balzac’s Paris. It’s been done a lot in a lot of different places by a lot of writers. And I’m not the one doing the comparing. I’m just saying if you use those tropes you can go to a lot of places other than Dickens. The thing that made me laugh about it with Dickens was that Dickens is famous for being passionate about showing you the fault lines of industrial England and where money and power route themselves away from the poor. He would make the case for a much better social compact than existed in Victorian England, but then his verdict would always be, “But thank God a nice old uncle or this heroic lawyer is going to make things better.” In the end, the guy would punk out.

Now that doesn’t mean he wasn’t a great writer and they’re not great stories. They are. But The Wire was actually making a different argument than Dickens, and the comparison, while flattering, sort of fell badly on us.

- Vice interview with David Simon, creator of The Wire

It’s a leap of faith doing any serialised storytelling. We had an idea early on, but certain things we thought would work well didn’t. We couldn’t have told you which characters would be in which seasons. We couldn’t tell you who would even survive…You feel that electricity. It’s almost like live TV. We don’t quite know what might happen. I’m sure when Charles Dickens was writing, he had a sense of where he was going – but he would make adjustments as he went along. You jump into it, knowing there’s something great out there to find.”

- J.J. Abrams, creator of Alias, Lost, Fringe

“[Shows like Damages are] like Dickens for the 21^st century.”

- Glenn Close, actress on Damages

“[The Sopranos] has a novelistic sweep… Each character is defined multidimensionally. Instead of going back to drama’s theater roots, as TV did in the 1950s, it employs many of the techniques of, say, Charles Dickens and revitalizes them. This has been an interior journey from the beginning. Viewers took that trip with a bona fide sociopath, defying television’s time-honored prohibition against unlikable protagonists. In that regard, (creator/executive producer David Chase) created perhaps the darkest series of all time.”

-  Ron Simon, curator of the Paley Center for Media

Several critics have commented on The Wire’s “literary” quality. In particular, The Wire has echoes of the Victorian social panorama of Charles Dickens (who gets a mention this season, as an obscene anatomical reference). The drama repeatedly cuts from the top of Baltimore’s social structure to its bottom, from political fund-raisers in the white suburbs to the subterranean squat of a homeless junkie. As with Dickens, the excitement builds as the densely woven plot unfolds in addicting installments. The deeper connection to Dickens’ London is the program’s animating fury at the way a society robs children of their childhood. In our civilized age, we do not send 12-year-olds to work in blacking factories as the Victorians did. Today’s David Copperfield is instead warehoused at a dysfunctional school until he’s ready to sling drugs on the corner, where his odds of survival are even slimmer.

- Slate’s Jacob Weisberg

Driver: [as the coach races down the road after the hearse] Everything in order, Mr. Dickens?
Charles Dickens: No it is not!
The Doctor: What did he say?
Charles Dickens: Let me say this first. I’m not without a sense of humor…
The Doctor: Dickens?
Charles Dickens: Yes?
The Doctor: Charles Dickens?
Charles Dickens: Yes.
The Doctor: The Charles Dickens?
Driver: Shall I remove the gentleman, Sir?
The Doctor: Charles Dickens. You’re brilliant you are! Completely one hundred per cent brilliant. I’ve read them all. “Great Expectations”, “Oliver Twist”, and whats the other one? The one with the ghost?
Charles Dickens: “A Christmas Carol”?
The Doctor: No, no, no. The one with the trains. “The Signalman”. That’s it. Terrifying, The best short story ever written! You’re a genius!
Driver: You want me to get rid of him, Sir?
Charles Dickens: No, I think he can stay.

- Doctor Who, “The Unquiet Dead”

Master Sergeant: Set of keys; one pocket watch, gold plated; one photograph; one book, Our Mutual Friend. Why didn’t you bring that inside?

Desmond: To avoid temptation, brother. I’ve read everything Mr. Charles Dickens has ever written – every wonderful word. Every book except this one. I’m saving it so it will be the last thing I ever read before I die.

- Lost, “Live Together, Die Alone”

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.”