This Was Just Supposed To Be Nostalgia, But I Accidentally Ended Up Presenting A Thesis.
I started watching Pokémon at the age of about ten, and I think it's the first show I ever watched with a real sense of progression across episodes.
I was used to episodic cartoons in which the status quo rarely changed: Tom and Jerry, Looney Tunes, Dexter's Lab. Pokémon was completely different. It had story arcs! The characters were on a journey! Sometimes they'd catch or release or evolve a Pokémon, and later episodes would take that into account; if Ash caught a Bulbasaur, he'd be able to use it in battles later!
I wonder if that's part of why I found Pokémon so much more engaging than anything else I'd ever watched. If you'd asked me at the time what set it apart, I doubt I'd have been able to articulate it. But events progressed meaningfully across episodes, and I didn't know television could do that.
This might be why 'Bye Bye Butterfree' was such a hard-hitting episode for me and, I suspect, for a lot of other kids. In a way, Butterfree leaving was a soft introduction to the concept of character death. Ash had caught Caterpie in the second episode, we'd watched it grow up and evolve, and now, twenty episodes later, it was leaving; this character we'd come to know wasn't going to be in the story any more. I hadn't seen anything like it before; it's not as if The Powerpuff Girls was ever going to have an episode called 'Bye Bye Buttercup'.
It still manages to be hard-hitting in the film retelling, it turns out. I watched Pokémon the Movie: I Choose You! in the cinema, next to a small boy, who ended up crying uncontrollably into his mother's side when Butterfree left. I've been there, kid.
It's strange to think about this in an age when episodic television has become much rarer. When I was a kid, 'this episodic show also has an overarching plot' was mindblowing! Now that I'm an adult, shows focus on the overarching plot to such an extent that I find myself thinking longingly of episode-by-episode stories.
My housemates and I were discussing this a few days ago. With the shift in expectations from 'you'll watch one episode of this a week' to 'a batch of episodes will come out simultaneously and you'll watch them in quick succession', episodes have started to feel like segments of a long film, or like chapters in a book.
In many modern streaming-era shows, episodes don't have a self-contained story of their own; they only focus on progressing the overarching plot. Whereas you could watch an episode of the pre-streaming House and come away satisfied, having experienced a complete story, you'll often have to watch an entire season of a modern show to experience any narrative payoff, or even the entirety of the show. If it's cancelled, you might not get any payoff at all. Streaming services don't want you to go 'okay, that was a satisfying episode, I'm going to bed'; they want you to watch the next episode right now.
I love Sense8 and Arcane and Severance, all of which are streaming-era shows, but I'd give you such a confused look if you asked me to name my favourite episode. I can't tell you what happens in any one episode of those shows, because all the episodes blend into a single mass. If you gave me the title of pretty much any episode from the first three seasons of Supernatural, though, I'd be able to tell you roughly what that episode is about.
This modern focus on the overarching plot and only the overarching plot also means that there's no space for the characters to breathe and do other things. In older shows, there would be 'filler' episodes, which weren't plot-essential but allowed the viewer to spend more time getting to know the characters. In modern shows, as Tem points out, it's more common for the runtime to be expanded by throwing obstacles into the main storyline, which can make the plot feel padded and overstretched.
Television shows are structurally unique. It's hard to think of another medium in which it's common to see a series of short, largely self-contained stories about a consistent set of characters; the closest equivalent I can think of is serialised comics. The longer, continuous stories of novels or films or videogames are also valuable, of course! But it's sort of a shame to see television losing one of the things that makes it stand out.
I was used to episodic cartoons in which the status quo rarely changed: Tom and Jerry, Looney Tunes, Dexter's Lab. Pokémon was completely different. It had story arcs! The characters were on a journey! Sometimes they'd catch or release or evolve a Pokémon, and later episodes would take that into account; if Ash caught a Bulbasaur, he'd be able to use it in battles later!
I wonder if that's part of why I found Pokémon so much more engaging than anything else I'd ever watched. If you'd asked me at the time what set it apart, I doubt I'd have been able to articulate it. But events progressed meaningfully across episodes, and I didn't know television could do that.
This might be why 'Bye Bye Butterfree' was such a hard-hitting episode for me and, I suspect, for a lot of other kids. In a way, Butterfree leaving was a soft introduction to the concept of character death. Ash had caught Caterpie in the second episode, we'd watched it grow up and evolve, and now, twenty episodes later, it was leaving; this character we'd come to know wasn't going to be in the story any more. I hadn't seen anything like it before; it's not as if The Powerpuff Girls was ever going to have an episode called 'Bye Bye Buttercup'.
It still manages to be hard-hitting in the film retelling, it turns out. I watched Pokémon the Movie: I Choose You! in the cinema, next to a small boy, who ended up crying uncontrollably into his mother's side when Butterfree left. I've been there, kid.
It's strange to think about this in an age when episodic television has become much rarer. When I was a kid, 'this episodic show also has an overarching plot' was mindblowing! Now that I'm an adult, shows focus on the overarching plot to such an extent that I find myself thinking longingly of episode-by-episode stories.
My housemates and I were discussing this a few days ago. With the shift in expectations from 'you'll watch one episode of this a week' to 'a batch of episodes will come out simultaneously and you'll watch them in quick succession', episodes have started to feel like segments of a long film, or like chapters in a book.
In many modern streaming-era shows, episodes don't have a self-contained story of their own; they only focus on progressing the overarching plot. Whereas you could watch an episode of the pre-streaming House and come away satisfied, having experienced a complete story, you'll often have to watch an entire season of a modern show to experience any narrative payoff, or even the entirety of the show. If it's cancelled, you might not get any payoff at all. Streaming services don't want you to go 'okay, that was a satisfying episode, I'm going to bed'; they want you to watch the next episode right now.
I love Sense8 and Arcane and Severance, all of which are streaming-era shows, but I'd give you such a confused look if you asked me to name my favourite episode. I can't tell you what happens in any one episode of those shows, because all the episodes blend into a single mass. If you gave me the title of pretty much any episode from the first three seasons of Supernatural, though, I'd be able to tell you roughly what that episode is about.
This modern focus on the overarching plot and only the overarching plot also means that there's no space for the characters to breathe and do other things. In older shows, there would be 'filler' episodes, which weren't plot-essential but allowed the viewer to spend more time getting to know the characters. In modern shows, as Tem points out, it's more common for the runtime to be expanded by throwing obstacles into the main storyline, which can make the plot feel padded and overstretched.
Television shows are structurally unique. It's hard to think of another medium in which it's common to see a series of short, largely self-contained stories about a consistent set of characters; the closest equivalent I can think of is serialised comics. The longer, continuous stories of novels or films or videogames are also valuable, of course! But it's sort of a shame to see television losing one of the things that makes it stand out.