Nothing Ever Happens on a Wednesday
I've heard in the past from some people who watched five-days-a-week soap operas that you can skip some of the shows in the middle of the week, especially Wednesday, because the writers concentrate on this story pattern:
When a couple successful SF/fantasy TV shows like Buffy and The X-Files were successful because they used long plot arcs alongside greater development of characters and their interactions with each other, some critics commented that geeks now liked soap operas. In a sense, this is correct... but unfortunately, some producers, thinking "I need to make a sci-fi/fantasy show that's like a soap opera," decided that what they needed to copy was the technique of delaying important events, the way a five-day-a-week soap will delay the big stuff for the weekend. Buffy and The X-Files weren't popular because they included episodes where nothing happened; no one-day-a-week show could survive with that kind of pacing. And yet, sometimes, producers insist on doing this. I think this is why some episodes of Heroes and later episodes of the new BSG felt bad (particularly, the all-boxing episode,) and also why some episodes of Lost get panned; they feel like place-holders, Wednesday episodes.
Now, a couple Wednesday episodes might be forgivable if your show has a strong start and continues to have mostly good episodes. I'm liking the current season of Lost, even though there were some episodes last season that felt like they meant nothing. But I've figured out that my feelings towards this new Caprica series are so lukewarm because it has a strong feeling of Wednesday throughout. Pretty much every other episode is a Wednesday episode, and the pacing is kind of slow even in the episodes where stuff happens. They've got some decent material, they're just padding it out until it's almost unbearable.
Please, if anyone reading this blog ever becomes a big TV producer: stop making Wednesday episodes. They make sense for shows that are on every day throughout the entire year, but are worthless outside of that context.
- foreshadow important events on Thursday
- build a couple plot threads to a cliffhanger on Friday
- resolve these threads on Monday
- characters talk about what happened and how they feel about it on Tuesday and Wednesday
When a couple successful SF/fantasy TV shows like Buffy and The X-Files were successful because they used long plot arcs alongside greater development of characters and their interactions with each other, some critics commented that geeks now liked soap operas. In a sense, this is correct... but unfortunately, some producers, thinking "I need to make a sci-fi/fantasy show that's like a soap opera," decided that what they needed to copy was the technique of delaying important events, the way a five-day-a-week soap will delay the big stuff for the weekend. Buffy and The X-Files weren't popular because they included episodes where nothing happened; no one-day-a-week show could survive with that kind of pacing. And yet, sometimes, producers insist on doing this. I think this is why some episodes of Heroes and later episodes of the new BSG felt bad (particularly, the all-boxing episode,) and also why some episodes of Lost get panned; they feel like place-holders, Wednesday episodes.
Now, a couple Wednesday episodes might be forgivable if your show has a strong start and continues to have mostly good episodes. I'm liking the current season of Lost, even though there were some episodes last season that felt like they meant nothing. But I've figured out that my feelings towards this new Caprica series are so lukewarm because it has a strong feeling of Wednesday throughout. Pretty much every other episode is a Wednesday episode, and the pacing is kind of slow even in the episodes where stuff happens. They've got some decent material, they're just padding it out until it's almost unbearable.
Please, if anyone reading this blog ever becomes a big TV producer: stop making Wednesday episodes. They make sense for shows that are on every day throughout the entire year, but are worthless outside of that context.