Starter Wife 1x04, "Mollywood", or "Get Out, Dumb Whore"
In one of the major threads, Molly gets invited to pitch her idea to the super-agent husband of one of the other parents in her school. She pitches her life, essentially the concept for the show.
Super-agent says that she should be a private investigator, and that there should be someone going missing every week. And then he switches to a bounty hunter. Basically, that's what makes the show episodic.
The first pass for this concept was a miniseries. The series plays much more like a miniseries than a series. Let's compare with other shows on USA. Monk and Psych are almost purely episodic, mystery-of-the-week shows. Burn Notice is evenly divided between the crook-of-the-week and the overarching Big Bad who burned Michael. Starter Wife is the story of a mom trying to become a writer, her friend who is becoming sober and her other friend who is looking for a nice man in L.A. It is all arc.
The point to *OTW shows is that you can show them in any order once you have enough episodes to have a marathon on a holiday weekend. For The Fugitive, for example, the only two episodes that have a specific place are the first and the last. Otherwise it's random access.
But there's not personifiable Big Bad. The horrible and vain people in Molly's circle are ultimately the horrible and vain people whose approval Molly seems to want. Michael Corleone seems honorable only when compared to the other families in the world of Organized Crime, and because we're seeing the events through his eyes, and Molly, Joan and Rodney are horrible gossipy people who are surrounded by people who waste the air they breathe, like Molly's ex-husband Kenny.
I'd say it's a funny nighttime soap, but I'm not familiar enough with soap operas to really commit to it. The funny thing is, when it's all arc, the worst thing that can happen is a big advancement in the arc. If Molly ever became truly happy, that'd wreck the show.
Super-agent says that she should be a private investigator, and that there should be someone going missing every week. And then he switches to a bounty hunter. Basically, that's what makes the show episodic.
The first pass for this concept was a miniseries. The series plays much more like a miniseries than a series. Let's compare with other shows on USA. Monk and Psych are almost purely episodic, mystery-of-the-week shows. Burn Notice is evenly divided between the crook-of-the-week and the overarching Big Bad who burned Michael. Starter Wife is the story of a mom trying to become a writer, her friend who is becoming sober and her other friend who is looking for a nice man in L.A. It is all arc.
The point to *OTW shows is that you can show them in any order once you have enough episodes to have a marathon on a holiday weekend. For The Fugitive, for example, the only two episodes that have a specific place are the first and the last. Otherwise it's random access.
But there's not personifiable Big Bad. The horrible and vain people in Molly's circle are ultimately the horrible and vain people whose approval Molly seems to want. Michael Corleone seems honorable only when compared to the other families in the world of Organized Crime, and because we're seeing the events through his eyes, and Molly, Joan and Rodney are horrible gossipy people who are surrounded by people who waste the air they breathe, like Molly's ex-husband Kenny.
I'd say it's a funny nighttime soap, but I'm not familiar enough with soap operas to really commit to it. The funny thing is, when it's all arc, the worst thing that can happen is a big advancement in the arc. If Molly ever became truly happy, that'd wreck the show.