So um, yes, about television. I've always been one of those people, you know, those people who say that they prefer series television as opposed to serial - that long plot arcs tend to bore them and break their concentration and limit their enjoyment. In a lot of ways that is true. I am really not a fan of Lost, which is a show which can be almost incomprehensible if you skip three episodes and yet continues to have a plot where nothing really happens (and for some reason I'm still watching it, and that can't just be out of loyalty to Daniel Dae Kim and Michael Giacchino), and the same thing happened with me for the later seasons of Buffy, where there was more emphasis placed on the whole story as opposed to the individual narratives and I got very whiny and started watching my old DVDs lamenting the loss of Joss. So yes, this isn't a complete lie. In a lot of ways, when I say this, this is true.
But it's also not true. Because my two very favourite shows at the moment are serials. You have to see every episode or they make little sense, and the point is in how the finer details relate to the larger details. These shows are fundamentally completely different. One is a Canadian theatre-centric comedy, and the other is indefinable but combines elements of sci-fi and buddy cop show, drama and humour - plus it's English, which is completely a whole new saucepan of tomato sauce and pasta. Of course, something in common between these shows is the length of the plot-arc. Slings and Arrows has 3 seasons which are six episodes each. 6 episodes per arc, 18 episodes per the long arc. It's not that much time, really. And Life on Mars has a first series which is 8 episodes, and to be honest I don't actually know for sure, but I believe the second series is 8 episodes long as well. Which would make the entire series 16 episodes long, since they're not planning on doing another series, unless they've been lying to me. This is also not much time.
I think it all comes down to my concentration span, which I think we can all agree isn't exactly long. I sometimes start sentences and have no idea how to finish them, and mostly I just don't enjoy doing one thing for an overly long period of time because I always start thinking about the other things I should be doing. Short series which employ long plot arcs are okay because I can consume and digest them in a small amount of time, but those long series which just go on and on with one unifying story make me want to tear out my hair.
And now I need to be away because Bleak House starts soon and I still have a lot of Dylan Moran to watch, and I still have to write about racial constructs as it pertains to my education degree and really I just want icecream.
