It’s 10pm on a Sunday.
I’m debating whether to watch another episode of House of Cards on Netflix or call it a night. I have to get up for work the following morning. However, the last episode ended on an irritating cliff-hanger. I do want to find out what happens next to Francis Underwood, played amiably by Kevin Spacey.
Do I watch one more episode or go to bed? Such are the quandaries and hardships of modern living.
Ten years ago, this choice wouldn’t have been available. When the current episode had concluded, I would’ve had to wait a whole week to find out what happens next. Imagine that. A whole week. The universe was created in this time (except it wasn’t).
Luckily, modern TV has evolved to fulfil the typical fickle viewer’s changing attention span. Thanks to video on demand (VOD) and catch-up services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, iPlayer, ITV player, 4OD and NOW TV, viewers can choose what they want to watch, and most importantly, when they want to watch it. There are even rumours that the BBC are set to join forces with ITV to launch a new streaming service to rival to Netflix, which will mainly consist of archive programming. All this goes to show that we are no longer at the mercy of syndication timetables and advert breaks. Rather, syndication timetables and advert breaks are at our mercy.
Let’s rewind to 1836.
An ambitious 24 year old Victorian writer named Charles John Huffam Dickens publishes his new novel The Pickwick Papers by Chapman & Hall. The publication method however eschewed the traditional holistic version of printing pioneered 396 years earlier by Johannes Guttenberg, by stretching out the narrative over 19 issues in the following 20 months. People were reading serials in cafes, bars and playhouses. You would hear “Have you read the latest chapter of Oliver Twist?” or “What happened to Nicholas Nickleby?” muttered by strangers on the next table at the local pub. Avoiding a minefield of Dickensian spoilers would have been as strenuous and exhausting as it is trying to block out that stranger in Sainsbury’s talking about the latest development in Game of Thrones. The wild success of this publication format was widely considered to have established the commercial viability and mainstream appeal of the serialised novel format within modern literature. Every one of Charles Dickens’s novels, from Great Expectations to A Tale of Two Cities was published serially.
France was quick to catch on. Alexandre Dumas and Eugène Sue were masters of the serialised genre. Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo was stretched out to 139 installments. Production in book form soon followed and serialisation was one of the main reasons that nineteenth-century novels were so long. Authors and publishers kept the story going if it was successful since authors were paid by line and by episode.
At the time, newspapers published novels with one chapter appearing every month. To ensure continued interest in the story, many authors employed techniques appropriate to that medium by leaving tense cliff-hangers that would be resolved in the following edition, thus ensuring readers would buy further copies. An economically sound and sustainable business model was born.
With the rise of broadcast radio and television series in the first half of the 20th century, printed periodical fiction began a slow decline as newspapers and magazines shifted their focus from entertainment to information and news. However, some serialisation of novels in periodicals continued, with mixed success.
During the 1990s, with the rise of crime procedural drama like The X-Files, Due South, and Murder She Wrote, the serialised format began to fade away as each episode would reject a series long story arc and opt for a more atomistic and self-contained structure to each episode. These episodes are frequently repeated on network channels, their accessibility contingent on the fact that each episode could be viewed as its own storyline, as opposed to being a piece of a much large story arc.
During the late 20th century, the emergence of the World Wide Web prompted several established authors to attempt a serialised format in digitised form. Stephen King experimented with this format with The Plant (2000), and Michel Faber allowed The Guardian to serialise his novel The Crimson Petal and the White. In 2005, Orson Scott Card serialised his out-of-print novel Hot Sleep in the first issue of his online magazine, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show.
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Fast-forward to January 10th 1999. A cable TV show about a waste disposal manager/mobster attending weekly psychiatry sessions debuts on American premium cable and satellite television network HBO. The show, titled The Sopranos is an instant hit with audiences and television critics worldwide. In stark contrast to the tiresome and repetitive narrative of 90s cop shows, The Sopranos eschewed traditional televisual conventions opting to create storylines that developed and gestated over multiple episodes, challenging the attention span of its viewers and their taste for violence, sexuality and yet more violence. The decade’s most acclaimed TV shows like The Wire, Mad Men, Dexter, Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones may have never seen the light without David Chase’s mob show paving the way.
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The rise of Scandi-noir has largely contributed to the popularity of binge-watching. Shows like The Killing, The Bridge and the excellent Borgen, broadcast on the BBC, have not only challenged gender and genre conventions, but utilised the concept of single story arcs across single seasons. These shows have consistently performed well in the ratings, leaving many to wonder why viewers were seeking imported entertainment over home-grown products.
Broadcasters began to take note.
Broadchurch, broadcast on ITV, focused on the death of an 11-year-old boy and the impact of grief, mutual suspicion, and media attention on the town. Many critics were quick to point out the influence of Scandi-noir in the series’ grim depiction of a community grieving from the death of an 11-year-old boy.
Continuing the tradition in Wales, Hinterland, is a noir police detective drama series broadcast on S4C in Welsh with parts in English. The main character, DCI Tom Mathias, is played by Welsh actor Richard Harrington. When it was aired on the BBC in 2014, it was the first BBC television drama with dialogue in both English and Welsh. There is also a third series of the show on the way, which began filming in January of this year.
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The show was filmed on a tight budget, taking roughly two and a half years to raise the funds, the total production cost amounting to £4.2 million. The programme, which was mainly filmed in Aberystwyth and other parts of Ceredigion on the west coast of Wales in 2013, received £215,000 in repayable business funding from the Welsh Government. The show was filmed in both Welsh and English, with the location-based production offices contained within the former Ceredigion Council offices Swyddfa’r Sir, which also acts as the external scene of the show’s police station.
Hinterland and Broadchurch were a much needed wake up call to British television. The exile of viewers from homegrown shows to imported drama from Sweden, Denmark, France, Italy and the US is emblematic of the lack of stylistic diversity and narrative bravura in recent British programming. BBC2’s adrenaline-fuelled period drama Peaky Blinders served as a trans-Atlantic retort to HBO and Martin Scorsese’s epic prohibition era drama Boardwalk Empire. The show covers the brutal and tempestuous exploits of the Peaky Blinders gang, operating in Birmingham, England during the aftermath of World War I. Whilst the similarities between the two shows are unmistakable, the show’s deliberate use of anachronistic music and contemporary visual style has been a hit with viewers.
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Who knows what the future will hold for television? With a VR revolution looking to be just around the corner, perhaps our viewing experience will move from the sofa, the train, and the cafeteria to the sets of our favourite TV shows; cooking meth with Walter White, wielding a sword in Game of Thrones or dining with Frank and Claire Underwood in an over-privileged district in Washington.
What is fascinating is how our relationship with entertainment as an audience doesn’t follow a linear path of evolution. We have a tendency to revert to previous traditions, such as serialised digestion of popular culture. Before the dawn of the home television system, post-war families would gather in the living room to hear the latest broadcast of The Archers to discover the resolution of last week’s tense cliffhanger. This is not so radically different to how we congregate weekly to watch the latest episode of Broadchurch.
The clock hits 10:30. Finally, I decide to call it a night. I’m tired. Francis Underwood can wait. Sleep can’t.
words DALEY NIXON