DRAGGING IT OUT

Because I've got my finger on the pulse about all things youthful, I was watching TV Channel "E4" the other day just to scramble their advertising demographic and confuse their marketing people. Okay, that's not strictly true. I was watching it because I actually quite like "The Big Bang Theory" (The US Comedy Show which started off being about misfit science geeks but which seems to have transformed itself into something more hopeful), and still tune in to the repeats even though we've seen most of them a fair few times now.

Well, it keeps us occupied whilst we're reheating our evening meal, and, presumably, really annoys those people trying to position the channel squarely in the "Youth TV" market and who wish that the old folk would just go away. Not unlike, I imagine, that chap who runs Radio One seemed to imply a few months ago when he suggested that he didn't want us oldies listening to his "hip and happening" (you can tell how old I am...) radio station because he wanted to keep it special for him and his mates.

"S'not fair! You grown-ups spoil EVERYTHING! Buying the same clothes as us, using the same websites... Why don't you just GO AWAY to places where old people hang out...?"

This, incidentally, may be one reason why FizzBok is apparently losing users hand over fist, by the way... It's started to be perceived as a place your mum might go for a bit of a chat. I can still remember the mind-crashing tedium of having to go with my mum to the shops when I was a small person and having to listen to her drone on and on when she stopped to chat to someone she knew who she'd just happened to bump into...

"GOD!!!"

And FizzBok is just like that...

Anyway, the point that I was going to make was that I saw a trailer for a melodramatic TV series called "Revenge" which looks godawful, and not the sort of thing that I would ever waste my time with at all, but which was about to return for its third series, presumably because one lot of revenge is never quite enough.

Now I'm sure that, for its target audience, "Revenge" hits all of the right notes, and its plots are all suitably convoluted and soap-operatic, and that its plot reveals and cliffhangers are suitably astonishing. I'm also quite certain that the massively over-acted "evil voice" scenes played by impossibly glamorous young actors all reach just the right pitch of absurdity. I'm not going to criticise any TV show for successfully entertaining its audience no matter how stupid I might personally find it. 

After all, my generation had "Dynasty" and there was seldom anything logical about its plot development, and even that, apparently, was relatively sane when compared to some of the Daytime soaps...

But...

"Revenge" strikes me as being one of those rather strange shows where an exciting-sounding idea gets pitched and the pilot is made and a full season gets commissioned and, because of the fickle nature of American television, an entire story gets told across that season to a fairly satisfactory conclusion. Then it becomes moderately successful and, because the show doesn't get cancelled, someone has to then extrapolate further not dissimilar stories to the point of absurdity to stretch the idea into a second year and beyond.

It has to be similar because you have to keep giving the audience the thing which they quite liked and which drew them to the show in the first place. Equally, it has to be different enough to keep them guessing and coming back for more right up until the repetition and ridiculousness gets so far beyond absurdity that even the most die-hard fans are saying that it is no longer the series it once was.

Book series writers can struggle with the same problem, especially if they kill off a much-loved character far too soon, and before they realise quite how popular they've become. Also, perhaps another lesson to be learned here, is that it's probably best not to pick a title like say "Escape" from somewhere if you don't want to spend the rest of your writing life working on escape stories or trying to find reasons for your now much-loved characters to keep getting locked up...

Incidentally, like during the first year of "24", sometimes the story has to be wound up after only half a season so it can still be sold even if it gets cancelled, and then another story has to be kick-started by the first, in the whole "hedging your bets over possible failure" way which can stifle or stimulate American screenwriters in almost equal measure.

The whole thing gets resolved around about episode twelve, or, if renewed, twenty-two and then there just has to be a "shocking" reveal during the season finale which either shows that "all bets are off", is a "game-changer", or rather just proves that all of the efforts of the entire season were pretty pointless after all.

A similar problem is faced with a one-idea title like "Prison Break..." You spend an entire season achieving the breakout mentioned in the title, but what do you do once you've achieved that breakout and you've got another year to fill...?

But that, I suppose, is another story.