A Short Note On Novelty Murders

I've been watching Life, and I spotted an element that I think is getting increasingly common in modern one-hour dramas.

I've explained why one-hour dramas are dead to me in predictably self-indulgent detail, but, of course, networks know what we want has changed (and television writers do watch HBO). Result: network one-hour dramas have picked up some elements of three-season story arc shows like The Wire.

Watch a one-hour network or basic cable drama and you'll get two stories. You'll get the one-hour story (novelty murder, altruistic cloak and dagger, novelty cloak and dagger), but you'll also get an installment of the multi-season story (thin blue line conspiracy, thin red line conspiracy, and conspiracy contained within the protagonist's brain, respectively).

Maybe I'm just seeing again what's always been there, but I think these multi-season stories are taking a bolder place next to their one-hour counterparts. In, say, Quantum Leap (to take a nostalgic example) you wouldn't see Sam wrestle with getting back to his old body every week. Things got started in the pilot and then each new episode dealt with whatever came up in the one-hour story.

These stronger multi-season story arcs can makes for more compelling drama. Burn Notice makes a habit of pitting Michael's this-hour objectives against his this-season objectives, even in simple ways (whenever two people want Michael to be in different places at the same time, drink).

God I love Burn Notice. Any trope that even indirectly taught me how to hide things in my walls? Totally worth it.