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Narrative Time
Feb. 28th, 2010 11:30 amRachel and I have been watching Castle, Nathan Fillion's new show, on DVD and enjoying it quite a bit. It has the romantic mystery vibe of Moonlighting or Remington Steele down pat, with a very likable cast of characters played by engaging actors. One thing I noticed is how tight the show is, short scenes and no wasted moments, which made me double check and learn that an episode is a mere 40 minutes long. There is quite literally no time to waste!
We had recently tried to watch Moonlighting and Remington Steele, aslo available on DVD, but found them less than engaging. Part of this is the social norms that drive the comedic aspects have changed some in the last 20+ years, but also the shows felt slow. I don't have numbers to hand, but I suspect they had an extra 8 minutes per episode at least than Castle (a guess, but the 90's Buffy ran 44 minutes, while the 1960's Mission: Impossible ran 50), but looking them now they didn't know how to use that time - they had extended opening bits showing you the victim before the crime (whereas Castle gives you a roughly 6 second viewing of the corpse at the start of the episode before jumping to something else) scenes that were meant to evoke tension but just felt slow.
Interestingly (to me, at least) is that I also got the first disk of the first season of Six Feet Under out of the library. Being on HBO it doesn't have the commercial break driven time restrictions, and if memory served it ran about 56 minutes per episode. I was stunned by how much narrative they were able to pack into the first episode, and how tightly it was handled and how well it worked. The other two on the disk however, kept the same tightness of narrative but added an unneeded plot thread to full out the extra time. The show, being billed as en ensemble, tried to give each of the four family members an arc in each episode, but in each case one of the four plots felt extraneous, contrived or cramped - that it should have been the A plot of another episode.
Would Castle be as much fun, be so sleekly streamlined, if the writers had another 8 minutes? Or would it bloat? Would Six Feet Under have been better with less time? Is this streamlining really an improvement, or have we been trained over the last 20 years to expect less time and breathing space in the medium? More to my current needs, would a 40 minute Mission: Impossible have felt more tense than the 50 minute one? The original show used a lot of cuts to establish time passing to increase tension that now feel a little contrived, but with too little time they would never have developed the gloriously convoluted plots that they did.
I'm thinking about this in part because next months' A&E has an Ignorable Theme on per-session pacing and I think the TV show parallels are helpful. I have a big advantage over the writers of shows don't, which is that I have have a session run a little long or end up to an hour early without complaint (as long as it ends an hour early on a suitable resolution). Alan Moore comments that one liberating aspect in writing From Hell, which was initially serialized in Steven Bissette's Taboo was that the chapters did not all have to be the same length, a restriction he had always labored under in the mainline comics format. At the gaming table I don't have that restriction, but I do have to pay attention to moving the narrative forward, slowing it down to get some character detail, adding complications to keep the session from ending too soon and other issues. Thinking about how GMs do these things, and do them without affecting the players sense of immersion, is harder than it appears, so analyzing other serial fiction will hopefully help.
Sorry for the lack of conclusion - obviously I'm interested in anyone else's thoughts on pacing in either TV dramas or Gaming.
We had recently tried to watch Moonlighting and Remington Steele, aslo available on DVD, but found them less than engaging. Part of this is the social norms that drive the comedic aspects have changed some in the last 20+ years, but also the shows felt slow. I don't have numbers to hand, but I suspect they had an extra 8 minutes per episode at least than Castle (a guess, but the 90's Buffy ran 44 minutes, while the 1960's Mission: Impossible ran 50), but looking them now they didn't know how to use that time - they had extended opening bits showing you the victim before the crime (whereas Castle gives you a roughly 6 second viewing of the corpse at the start of the episode before jumping to something else) scenes that were meant to evoke tension but just felt slow.
Interestingly (to me, at least) is that I also got the first disk of the first season of Six Feet Under out of the library. Being on HBO it doesn't have the commercial break driven time restrictions, and if memory served it ran about 56 minutes per episode. I was stunned by how much narrative they were able to pack into the first episode, and how tightly it was handled and how well it worked. The other two on the disk however, kept the same tightness of narrative but added an unneeded plot thread to full out the extra time. The show, being billed as en ensemble, tried to give each of the four family members an arc in each episode, but in each case one of the four plots felt extraneous, contrived or cramped - that it should have been the A plot of another episode.
Would Castle be as much fun, be so sleekly streamlined, if the writers had another 8 minutes? Or would it bloat? Would Six Feet Under have been better with less time? Is this streamlining really an improvement, or have we been trained over the last 20 years to expect less time and breathing space in the medium? More to my current needs, would a 40 minute Mission: Impossible have felt more tense than the 50 minute one? The original show used a lot of cuts to establish time passing to increase tension that now feel a little contrived, but with too little time they would never have developed the gloriously convoluted plots that they did.
I'm thinking about this in part because next months' A&E has an Ignorable Theme on per-session pacing and I think the TV show parallels are helpful. I have a big advantage over the writers of shows don't, which is that I have have a session run a little long or end up to an hour early without complaint (as long as it ends an hour early on a suitable resolution). Alan Moore comments that one liberating aspect in writing From Hell, which was initially serialized in Steven Bissette's Taboo was that the chapters did not all have to be the same length, a restriction he had always labored under in the mainline comics format. At the gaming table I don't have that restriction, but I do have to pay attention to moving the narrative forward, slowing it down to get some character detail, adding complications to keep the session from ending too soon and other issues. Thinking about how GMs do these things, and do them without affecting the players sense of immersion, is harder than it appears, so analyzing other serial fiction will hopefully help.
Sorry for the lack of conclusion - obviously I'm interested in anyone else's thoughts on pacing in either TV dramas or Gaming.
