Struck Sure

Changing structure of…structure.

*note to self: come up with better title before upload time. don't look like a FOOL again!

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And now…this:



I was chatting with El Presidente ozoneocean the other day. We were talking about the changing face of TV over the decades, and how the structures that have dictated these stories are, maybe, beginning to change.

For most of the existence of TV shows, they've been structured according to commercial breaks. A TV writer's room doesn't structure an episode with Act 1, 2 and 3 (although they might think that way in a sense). They are building their stories according to: Cold open/teaser (if the show has that) and then acts 1 through 5 or six, depending on how many commercials fall in the hour or half hour.

Because that's how the audience is actually experiencing the show.

Just like B, C and D plots, as we discussed on the last podcast, the commercial break is a built-in cliffhanger for the audience – and that's part of how the story is structured: the final moments before the show cuts to a commercial hopefully leaves the audience on the hook and not clicking away to another channel.

It's the TV version of the end-of-page in a comic book or "exciting cliffhanger" in an old serial or newspaper strip. It hopefully makes people want to tune in to the next strip, or seek out the next serial, or tune in to the next exciting radio broadcast, or in a comic, to turn the page or click to the next page.

Okay, I wandered off a bit. The point is supposed to be structure - the TV structure of commercials and time limits is changing with the advent of streaming, and before that, premium TV channels like HBO that air commercial-free episodes. Even regular cable now frequently have extended episodes of shows. Episodes are regularly five, ten, fifteen minutes longer than their normal.

This is mirrored in comics online - many of us stick to a print-sized page, roughly at least, but plenty of webcomic creators play with page sizes and formats that make more sense for the way the comic is being read.

I know that some TV writers still write with those act breaks in mind, even though the episodes might be seen without commercials. A story still needs some kind of shape to it.

I have seen older shows that used to have strict episode time limits come back to streaming and kind of fall apart, though - shows that used to be tight and jam-packed with story and seemed to race by now being free to extend their scenes and shows and become very draggy and a slog to get through as a viewer. This is not good obviously!

What's the point of all this? Not sure; maybe it's that structures can change as technology changes. This is not a bad thing - it's a necessity! But I do think that some kind of structure can be helpful to put free floating story ideas into some kind of shape and form that will be digestible and enjoyable by people.

I think of the rhyming, repeating patterns of poems or songs, or the four-panel structure of cartoon strips. The structure itself can have an appeal to the audience.

Even though we have much more freedom to make our own structures, SOME kind of structure is helpful to think about when making our stuff.


Okay, see you next time!

-Banes


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