There are similar stories about Babylon 5 (envisioned as a 5 year cohesive story arc; lots of changes to the plot happened over the years of production)
This really shouldn't be too surprising to anyone who has worked on a creative project over an extended period of time. Heck, NaNoWriMo has you write a novel in a single month and I doubt many people have the novel hit exactly all the plot points they had originally thought up. How much more should we expect plans to change over many years (and with external constraints).
> It's also coherent in between seasons, since it was pre-planned as a 5-season show spanning exactly 5 years on the Babylon 5 station.
Though the 5th season is weak, because the show was threatened with cancellation. IIRC, each season had an "major plot" and a "minor plot." To adapt to the cancellation threat, they crammed the season 4 and 5 "major plots" into season 4 (IIRC defeat the Shadows, liberate Earth), leaving season 5 with two "minor plots." The season 5 finale was originally shot as part of season 4, but delayed when the show was renewed.
This way of writing, at least the overall arc, really shows. Ideally, writers know when to stop. The Revenge had such an ending, it was Season 3 if I remember well, before it turned into yet another soap opera. Babylon 5 on the other hand was a great example of having the whole 5 seasons basically written before they started production.
It's really odd to see someone rebooting their own story. Either he'll make changes for change sake to make it fresh or the show may be boring since we'll know what happens.
(JMS will hopefully still be good at writing Babylon 5 but he wrote some really crummy comic books over the years, and one of his last Babylon 5 project was an awful "A ripoff of the Movie The Exorcist but in SPACE!" episode which hopefully isn't a sample of what we can expect from here on.)
Babylon 5 accounted for this in the first three seasons by making them start out episodic and switch to serialized over the course of the season, since by that time most would have settled into routines and watch the same shows each week.
Seasons 4 and 5 probably would have been the same except due to fears of cancelation they took the primary plots of both seasons and stuffed them into just season 4.
> firm, 5 (or multi-year) arc planned out in detail years
If you read the books, you'll learn the truth is much more interesting than that. While JMS absolutely had a large number of ideas, and an overall arc, it was far from firm. Every character had trapdoors built in in the event that the actor left the show (e.g. Andrea Thompson/Michael O'Hare).
It’s not about how long a show was on the air, it has more to do with how interconnected the episodes are and whether the work has a story arc that was planned in advance. In a purely episodic work, you can experience the episodes in any order and have the same enjoyment. In a purely serial work, the order of the episodes (or should we call them installments?) matters a lot.
Star Trek was episodic. No matter what happens in one episode, most things remained status quo for the next. There were some slow changes to the cast, but for the most part you could watch the episodes in any order.
TNG was book–ended by their dealings with Q, but that story had no closure and only took up about four or five episodes out of 7 years. There were some other stories like that as well, stories that were longer than an episode but much shorter than the show as a whole.
On the other hand, Deep Space Nine was closer to a single story with a beginning, middle, and end. There were still plenty of episodes that would still make sense if you moved them to a different season, but it was much less episodic than the previous shows.
Voyager was billed as a serial work, but was so badly written that most episodes could be moved around at will with no harm to the storyline.
Babylon 5, in contrast, gave every episode some link to the overarching plot, even if it was just hints. (Especially in the first season, when the main antagonists were still hidden and all we had were hints.)
It’s easy for episodic shows to be written at the same pace that they are filmed. With serial shows, you have to know in advance where the story is going to go even if you still write most of the dialog at the pace of filming. I didn’t watch much of Lost, but I got the impression that while it was a serial, the writers had no real plan from the start and that everything was made up as they went along. The result is that the story is incoherent. I’ve never watched any soap operas either, but I gather that they try to arrange for frequent cliffhangers and dramatic changes (making the story more serial), but that there is never a planned end to the story; they’re perpetually in the middle. The result is a work with constant churn and no resolution.
I can think of a number of novels where it's obvious some scenes got moved around for plot reasons, and their were continuity errors or other ways in which the seams showed.
But novelists only have to deal with that for maybe a year or so; programmers have to deal with this problem for potentially decades, and at that point it's a completely different problem just because the scale is different.
That’s interesting. And probably astute. One off movies not part of a larger series have significantly shorter periods of relevance. It doesn’t make sense to spread it out over 5 years at all.
Well, it is one of the most highly regarded series in history by critics, so some people thought the explanations were sufficient at least. Abrams and the writers were planning from the outset to do that many seasons and wrote a story bible outlining all the lore and mythology referenced throughout the writing. Having story arcs over the course of years was intentional and a novel idea at the time when most TV series plots were written on a per episode basis.
The story is split in two and thus far spans some 30 - 40 years, where one part has been able to focus and develop the same characters and themes over that course owing to a quirk in how those characters work into the plot, while the other part has been hurriedly shuffling characters, motivations, and mysteries on and off the stage to keep pace with that same timespan.
I wager its harder for the writers to get the second partition down pat as they're still getting used to adapting a story that has to move quickly owing to the limitations of TV, but its clear they can write good material which the first partition makes clear. I think the first season will be rough for them but a second should be more promising as they should get a handle on working with a plot that spans space and time on a grander scale than Game of Thrones.
I would argue more importantly than you knowing it was single season, the creators knew they wanted one season so the entire season was bundled tightly together.
A longer but similar thing for me was Mr. Robot. Esmail knew he wanted 4-5 seasons when he started, and he got his 4 seasons to the ending he intended to write.
Should shows be planning tighter arcs then we seem to get anymore? Yes. If you need more show finish that entire arc and make a spinoff with the most popular characters in a new story.
I'm hoping that this policy leads to much tighter story arcs which aren't designed to take 5 seasons to come to a conclusion. There's far too much TV that basically only has actual new plot elements in the first and last ten minutes, and then pads everything out to a full episode.
A world in which writers know they have, at best, 24 episodes to tell their story will hopefully result in much more focused story telling, and fewer filler episodes looking into the exciting history of what minor character C did 15 years ago.
I'm not sure there was a need for filler B-plot and C-plot. There's no particular reason it needed to be planned as 5 seasons if there wasn't enough A-plot to fill 5 seasons.
Hell, Severed Dreams felt like a season's worth of plot all on its own, and all the better for it.
Lost and the new BSG are the two prime examples of How Not To Do a long story arc. Both started with the promise of a coherent overarching story, but in reality the writers only had the vaguest idea of where they were going beyond the basic premise. They are the exact opposite of B5. Frak, the very Arc Words of BSG were "…and [the Cylons] have a plan". Well, turns out the writers didn't! They totally made it up as they went along. So perhaps bad execution of long story arcs has ruined TV. But the concept itself certainly hasn't.
Anyway, even B5 had a plenty of "monster of the week" filler episodes as well. They were generally of much lower quality than the plot episodes.
When I was a lad, a story spanned 4 or even 6 episodes so had time to evolve properly, and of course gave the famous cliffhangers at the end of each episode. This mechanism worked really well, even if the writing was often iffy.
The modern scheme of parcelling an entire story in a single extended episode, otoh, hardly ever works, because there just isn't time for the viewer to get invested in what's going on. The New Year's day one, for example, seemed to be entirely resolved in about 10 minutes, which was just flat.
Remember the first season episode of Babylon 5, Signs and Portents, that kicked off the series-long plotlines? In addition to the meddling from the sibling comment, Crusade didn't even get that far before cancelation, its version of that episode was still coming.
Also because of that meddling, episodes aired completely out of order, so a lot of things made no sense. For example, using the nanotech shield before it was invented.
> Abrams and the writers were planning from the outset to do that many seasons and wrote a story bible outlining all the lore and mythology referenced throughout the writing.
Citation? There's a PDF floating around somewhere of the pitch for season one or the pilot; it specifically says that the SHOULD plan the mystery in advance... but then they failed to do that.
It was plotted and written in the era where a plot of the week had to carry an entire episode. Main characters can no longer be allowed to get entangled in a non-critical event for a full episode just to reveal something important about them for later. Writers have to be more clever than that. There's no room for "this time on B5, a rebellion/alien/telepath problem/encounter."
With 22-episode seasons like the original, I bet a good writing team could do something like this:
Season 1: building up the world, revealing the Shadows at the end
Season 2: Shadow war
Season 3: proxy wars
Season 4: Loose ends & Consequences, including Thirdspace and the telepath war. If there's enough material, maybe even move the telepath war to a 5th season. I always wanted to see what happened to the Vorlons' favorite telepath.
There should still be room, in seasons 1 and 2 especially, for some cute but essentially irrelevant subplots like Green vs Purple.
This really shouldn't be too surprising to anyone who has worked on a creative project over an extended period of time. Heck, NaNoWriMo has you write a novel in a single month and I doubt many people have the novel hit exactly all the plot points they had originally thought up. How much more should we expect plans to change over many years (and with external constraints).
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