Episodes

Jaime Weinman on the struggle of classic episodes to live up to their reputation

One theme I return to a lot is how episode length shapes the TV episodes we see: half-hour storytelling is different with 21 minutes or 24 or 29. A sub-theme is that whereas episodes today tend to run long, and need to be cut down to get them to length, TV episodes in the Old Days used to have the opposite problem, running short and needing to be padded out. This was especially true with hour-long single-camera dramas, where footage is expensive to shoot and staying on budget often means shooting less than 47 minutes’ worth of story. But it could also depend on production methods. On The Simpsons, every episode produced for the fourth season ran short and had to be padded with extra-long couch gags, footage lifted from previous episodes, the “rake scene,” etc. When new showrunners took over, though the running time was the same, they created extra-long episodes with lots of deleted footage.

A follow-up to my last post: there are some TV episodes that don’t have an “aftermath” scene, a scene where the pressure is lessened and we get either a light or reflective moment. I’m not talking so much about episodes that end with cliffhangers (in many of these shows, if you break down the structure, there actually is some kind of breather in between the climax and the cliffhanger) as episodes that end with the climactic scene — as soon as the story is resolved, we fade out or freeze-frame.

The saga of Dollhouse‘s 13th episode is one of the more amusing TV-scheduling issues of recent months. According to the schedule, Fox only needs 12 episodes of the show before the season ends. But the deal between the production company and the network — that is, between one division of Newscorp and another — was for 13 episodes, and the original pilot doesn’t count because it never became a completed episode. (After the network rejected it, scenes from the original pilot were used in subsequent episodes.) So they wound up shooting an extra, half-budget episode that could be a selling point for the DVD/Blu-Ray release:

B.J. Novak (Ryan) isn’t officially leaving The Office, but he’s taking a “leave of absence” while he does a Quentin Tarantino movie, and it’s entirely possible that he might not come back at all. (Novak’s character isn’t all that essential any more, but he’s one of the best writers on the show.)

Denis McGrath notes that tonight’s (McGrath-scripted) episode of The Border was intended as “to see if the show could stretch enough to not take itself too seriously.,” though reviews didn’t necessarily pick up on that. (It’s about the return of an FLQ bomber, a plot that has echoes of the old standby story about the Japanese soldier who doesn’t know the war is over.) I haven’t seen the episode yet — I will tonight — but the description intrigues me, because I like change-of-pace episodes.