Springer
Regular
I've been watching Games of Thrones recently - no spoilers please, I've only watched up to the end of the second season so far – and although I'm enjoying it, I can't help but think how the serialised storytelling is slowing the pace of the story down. Case in point: Jon Snow and the rest of the Night Watch have left the Wall and are heading north at the start of the second season. They pitch up at some crazy guy's house for a bit, then bump into some wildlings and Snow manages to get himself caught. What could have been told over a couple of episodes took the entire season to tell! Comic book readers call this 'decompressed' storytelling, or writing for the trade. With serialised TV, it feels they are making it for the DVD boxset, not for the people watching one episode a week on TV. I can't help thinking that I'm starting to miss episodic TV where you could say "this was the episode where..." rather than these drawn out plotlines.
So B5 dabbled with both episodic and serialised story telling, but even then the bulk of its major arc episodes were episodic to a large degree. Do you think 'arc stories' have gone too far down the road of serialisation or should we go back to B5's method of telling an overall story across many individual, episodic stories?
So B5 dabbled with both episodic and serialised story telling, but even then the bulk of its major arc episodes were episodic to a large degree. Do you think 'arc stories' have gone too far down the road of serialisation or should we go back to B5's method of telling an overall story across many individual, episodic stories?