Modularity
Originally published at rspaulette.com. Please leave any comments there.
Over the holiday break, I’ve been spending a lot of time at home with the Fam. Been pretty good, having lots of fun. Part of the fun, though, is coercing convincing members of the family to watch certain shows which I own on DVD. Nancy finally succumbed to my insistence she watch Battlestar Galactica (see, Kristy, I am watching! We really do need to catch up!); my father’s been slowly making his way through all five seasons of 24, thanks to a Target sale; and I’m making progress on Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, a vice I’ve largely ignored because I eventually knew I would probably like it (and I’m roughly halfway through season 6, if anyone’s curious).
All of this - combined with the ever-continuing discussion in comic-booky circles about accesibility with every issue - has me thinking about narrative modularity. Each of these shows feature a very strong, very definitive arc per season, and this arc works best when viewed as a novel, and watched in sequential order. Probably why I love shows like this.
However.
I also realized that a) each of these shows can easily hook you at any point along that narrative line; and b) you’ll get sucked in if you get sucked in, and if you won’t, you won’t. It sounds like a simple principle, but it’s deceptively so - the argument, in the comic book circles, is that the more complicated you make it, the less inviting it is for the new reader. However, I remember jumping into stuff like X-Men hip-deep, and at its worst and most complicated. I found it intriguing. I stuck around.
I’m not 100% sure what I’m driving at, other than to praise modularity, and to hold, at the least, these three shows up as examples of ways that modularity can work correctly. And, to top it all off, ponder the interesting aspect of viewing that has happened to me - having already seen the episodes of the various shows that various members of my family are currently watching - and how interesting it is to step into a narrative at a late point in the game, to know what came before and what came after, but to not have a clear and distinct memory of the sequence of events. I ask Nancy or my father caged questions - trying not to spoil major events, but trying to hint around them so that if they’ve already seen those episodes, they can share the joy of talking about them with me.
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