Extremely long and incredibly complex
How DVDs are changing the way we experience TV
FIRST WE HAD ''appointment" television. You blocked out your Thursday nights to watch ''Cosby" and ''Cheers," and stayed in reliably every Wednesday for ''Melrose Place." And then, a few years ago,
Time-shifting was supposed to revolutionize the way we watch TV. But while there's an undeniable shift towards more consumer control at work here, time-shifting hasn't changed the overall pattern of viewing TV shows: You still watch a standard rotation of programsyou just get to juggle the rotation to fit your schedule.
But I suspect (from purely anecdotal evidence) that a new pattern of television watching is on the riseone that I call ''extreme time-shifting"made possible now that the entertainment industry has taken to releasing entire seasons of TV shows on DVD, or in some cases via cable ''on demand," several months after they air. Instead of watching an assortment of shows through the week, you watch one show night after night until you've finished the season. So instead of ''West Wing" on Wednesday and ''ER" on Thursday, it's ''Sopranos" from April to mid-May, ''Arrested Development" from June to July, and so on.
My wife and I have been devotees of extreme time-shifting for about two years now, ever since we found ourselves on a continuous jag of ''Six Feet Under" viewing that took us through three whole seasons in the space of about 90 days. When we emerged from that spell, we realized that watching television dramas in this continuous, committed way genuinely changes how you experience the content of the shows. TiVo's time-shifting makes television more convenient, but extreme time-shifting does something more profound: It makes television more meaningfuleven more novelisticby revealing the scale and intricacy of the stories it tells.
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With extreme time-shifting, television goes from being one of the shortest, most abbreviated of storytelling platforms available to one the longest and most ambitious. Television stops being about squeezing a few flashy narratives into 43 minutes of airtime, and becomes something more complex: a platform for telling stories that can unfold over a hundred hours, allowing subtle interconnections to emerge.
In the first season of ''Six Feet Under," for example, one of the most powerful narrative threads involves the slowly evolving friendship between two estranged brothers, brought together to run the family mortuary after their father's death. The shift in their relationship is rarely a dominant plot element of the individual episodes, but when you view the show as a continuous narrative line, their increasing closeness becomes sharply visible, like a stop-action film of a plant exploding into full bloom.
Friends often ask me if it gets repetitive watching the same program every night. ''I like the variety of the traditional TV schedule, the change of pace," they say. ''It seems weird to stick to one program." But most of us don't read six novels at one time, shifting from book to book after each chapter. We prefer to immerse ourselves in a single narrative universe from start to finish, and then move on to the next book. And yet for technological, cultural, and commercial reasons television has never offered that continuous long-format narrative.
The content of today's dramas also lends itself to continuous viewing because the plotting of your average television drama is significantly more complex than shows that aired 30 years ago. Watching nothing but ''Kojak" for two months would grow tiresome after a few episodes, but it's actually easier to watch complex, layered programs like ''The Sopranos" or ''24" continuously, because the plots are so densely interwoven and draw upon informationcharacters, relationships, past eventsthat occurred in previous episodes, sometimes even previous seasons. A notoriously complex show like ''Alias" will reference a 500-year-old Italian document that hasn't been mentioned for two entire seasons, with almost no handholding explanations. If you're watching ''Alias" the traditional way, that means remembering a detail from an episode that aired two years ago. But the extreme time-shifters in the audience will have last seen the document only a few weeks before.
The sheer number of characters involved in today's dramas makes the narrative simplicity of yesterday's programs seem infantile: A single episode of ''24" or ''The Sopranos" will often feature more than two dozen distinct characters, each with a defined background and story arc. That too elevates the television drama to the scale of the novel: comparable, indeed, in narrative complexity to many classic 19th-century novels. All of this complexity is far easier to manage if you're watching a single program night after night, without five other shows competing for your attention.
The comparison to the serial novels of the 19th-century is not a new oneten years ago, Charles McGrath, then editor of The New York Times Book Review, wrote an essay arguing that ''E.R.," ''NYPD Blue," and other innovative dramas of the day were our society's version of the classic Victorian triple-decker. ''There are ways in which TV has actually taken over some of the roles that books used to fill," McGrath wrote. ''A few of the more inventive TV series, for example, have become for our era the equivalent of the serial novel...sweeping all of us up in shared anxiety."
But McGrath worried that TV ''probably isn't capable of successfully dramatizing such large-scale literary creations, at least not in just a few hourly installments." Extreme time-shifting offers a way around those limitations. Dickens wrote in shorter installments, but we now appreciate his narratives in the larger scale of the bound novel. Television seems on the verge of a comparable transition.
The only problem with extreme time-shifting is the cultural lag it requires. You can't watch a continuous season of a show until the season has airedand unless you're illegally downloading episodes online, you have to wait at least several months until the DVD comes out. My wife and I watched three straight seasons of ''24" on DVD, but finally caught up with the current season earlier this year. We watched the old-fashioned way for a few episodestuning in dutifully at 9 p.m. every Monday nightbut then found the whole experience so frustrating that we ended up deciding to wait for the DVD. It seemed perverse to take a show that dramatized 24 continuous ''real-time" hours in a fictional universe and spread it out over five months.
Of course, that means that whenever we hear somebody talking about last night's ''24" we have to cover our ears or leave the room. But as in the 19th century, part of the beauty of today's serial narratives is the shared cultural experience of following the same story with thousands or millions of other people. So some of what we've gained in appreciating the complexity of these 100-hour stories we've partially lost in water-cooler banter. But after living through a few years of extreme time-shifting, that's a sacrifice we think is worth making.
Steven Johnson will be speaking at Harvard Book Store in Cambridge this Wednesday at 6:30 p.m.
Steven Johnson is the author, most recently, of ''Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter" (Riverhead).
© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.
