I mean, it is heavily dependent on the type of story you're telling or narrative you're constructing? The episodic style only works for specific types of shows, ie if you tried to do that with ASoIaF, or most any book to TV adaptations, then you end up forcing arcs to be more contained. On the other hand, it worked well for HIMYM, partly because it was a comedy and had nonrepeating episodes. But with JJ, I'm not sure if treating it as a more contained story would've been better? The entire season was focused on mostly two things (Jessica plus other people, to a lesser extent, dealing with their trauma, and coming to terms with Kilgrave). Which is a longer arc to tackle, so it wouldn't be better to fraction it off into neater portions when everything is bleeding into the other. Maybe if there had been something else going on parallel or alongside it, but almost everything circled back to those two points.
Even if you have a larger, overall arc I'm less than certain that it's any better from a narrative standpoint? Like yes, it is neater in that it goes 'here is the start, here is the middle, and here is the end'. It's very story shaped, and lets you get the resolution at the end. But even then, a lot of shows that do that risk being repetitive to the point of formulaic- it's not that they might be bad, but that they're so predictable that I might as well skip ahead to the relevant episodes. Obviously, you can have a middle ground where you have an episodic style show that all drive or tie back into the central story, which is sort of what Agent Carter or Hannibal ended up with, but that's much easier said than done.
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rosecarmine
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Date: 2016-01-05 10:53 pm (UTC)Even if you have a larger, overall arc I'm less than certain that it's any better from a narrative standpoint? Like yes, it is neater in that it goes 'here is the start, here is the middle, and here is the end'. It's very story shaped, and lets you get the resolution at the end. But even then, a lot of shows that do that risk being repetitive to the point of formulaic- it's not that they might be bad, but that they're so predictable that I might as well skip ahead to the relevant episodes. Obviously, you can have a middle ground where you have an episodic style show that all drive or tie back into the central story, which is sort of what Agent Carter or Hannibal ended up with, but that's much easier said than done.