Sure, the holidays are a time for family, but they're also a fine time for binge-watching TV. This year we've been watching a couple of spooky series that show just how much TV programming has changed over the decades.
We keep being told that we live in a golden age of television, blessed by offerings like Deadwood, Mad Men, The West Wing, Breaking Bad, and on and on. In the last year or two a lot of well-received material has been originated by Netflix. Just before Christmas, it dropped (with little fanfare) a sci-fi/fantasy series called The OA, co-written by and starring Brit Marling. Without spoiling it for anyone who hasn't seen it yet, I can safely reveal that the principal focus is near-death experiences and the people who survive them.
Like the other series I've listed, The OA unspools at a measured pace, with eight episodes of varying lengths. There's lots of flashing back and forward in time, a large cast of characters and plenty of unexpected twists and turns. And, like so many other such series, it doesn't actually reach a conclusion: the ending is ambiguous to say the least, and sure enough, a quick Google search reveals that Ms Marling and her co-auteur, the marvellously named Zal Batmanglij, are hoping to secure funding for another series, or two, or even three!
What ever happened to telling a story economically? The creators of Breaking Bad will freely admit that the story took on a life of its own: for example, the character of Jesse Pinkman was supposed to be written out at the end of the first series, but ended up as a mainstay of the entire six-year run. Marling and Batman say they have a complete story arc for The OA that can unfold over several seasons, but it's very likely that the tale will evolve in the writing.
You couldn't find a sharper contrast for this style of story-telling than The Twilight Zone, which is now available in a 25-disc complete set, and which found its way under our Christmas tree this year. Each episode runs for less than 30 minutes, yet manages to create from scratch a coherent scenario in which the action takes place. The stories don't always reach a clear conclusion -- indeed, that's often the point -- but each episode is entirely self-contained. The show's creator, Rod Serling, gave himself absolutely no wiggle room -- at the conclusion of each week's show, he would briefly appears on screen to offer a teaser about the following week's entirely different episode.
I'm not suggesting that even Rod Serling, genius that he was, could have told a complex story like that of The OA in less than half-an-hour. However, there are times, watching The OA or even much superior shows like Breaking Bad, when you wish the writers could have reined in their self-indulgence a bit and just got on with the story.
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