Tag Archives: Narrative

May 26, 2017 · 4:22 pm

The Dangling Carrot: Skam Season 4, Episode 6

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Season 4, Episode 6

May 26, 2017

In a post last week, I explored the somewhat unclear approach that Skam has taken to its hiatuses in the past three seasons. Some have argued that time passes in the show as it did in real life during these breaks, but others have suggested the gap in time is simply ignored. There is no definitive answer to speak of here, and so the conclusion is that it has been left ambiguous: you can either read the missing time into the narrative or you can presume the show is picking up more or less where it left off. (I’ve seen both positions defended very aggressively).

However, regardless, it is safe to say that viewers had to wait a week between episodes, and spent that week pondering the events from the karaoke party. What happened with the fight? How did Noora and Yousef end up hooking up? What’s the full story behind the Pepsi Max girls’ efforts to push Sana out of the bus? The hiatus forced us to sit with these questions, think about our own reactions to them, and wonder how Sana would react when the show returned.

And then the show returned, and it spent an entire week on Sana sitting with these questions, thinking about her reactions to them, and then deciding how to react.

The result is an episode that is well executed in the abstract, but seems poorly calibrated to the reality of the preceding hiatus.

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May 18, 2017 · 8:12 am

Hiatus Hangups: The Uncertainty of Skam’s Midseason Breaks

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The Uncertainty of Skam‘s Midseason Breaks

May 18, 2017

When I wrote my first reflective piece about catching up with Skam, I noted that it was a fundamentally different experience: not only was I watching a deeply specific Norwegian series from the perspective of a North American viewer, but I was also missing out on the real-time elements that are central to the show’s narrative.

This was a blanket acknowledgment that by binging the first three seasons, I wasn’t getting the full Skam experience, which covered me for my relative ignorance to the different social elements being posted to the show’s website. However, when I wrote this, I had no idea that there was a key element to the series that I had been entirely ignorant to: the midseason hiatus.

It’s logical: making Skam has to be an all-encompassing job, between production, post-production, and the transmedia elements being posted throughout the week. The hiatus gives all involved a chance to take a breather, and potentially even make some course corrections on the plans for the rest of the season. Ranging from ten days to two and a half weeks, these breaks seem like they’re probably primarily there to serve the logistics of production, but they also have an undeniable impact on the audience. Suddenly, after being sucked into the ongoing drama and awaiting each day’s content with baited breath, Skam’s audience is forced to sit with the characters’ predicaments for a longer period, and await resolution when the series resumes.

I was warned about the likelihood of a hiatus earlier this season, so this week’s delay didn’t come as a surprise: indeed, as I wrote in my review, I actually presumed there was a hiatus based on the cliffhangers in the episode before I came back online and confirmed my suspicions. But what was interesting to me was that I suddenly realized how weird it was that I had never noticed any of the previous hiatuses. Given the the show retains its real time structure after its hiatus, there is—I presumed—a significant chunk of time missing from each season that I never registered. Shouldn’t I have realized that there was a two-week gap? Or was I wrong in my presumption, and there was no gap at all?

And as I’ve followed some of the online discussion during this season’s hiatus, I realized I wasn’t the only one who was a little confused about how hiatuses work, which inspired me to revisit past seasons to discover just how these hiatuses engage with the show’s narrative in advance of discovering how season four will handle its hiatus beginning on Monday.

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April 17, 2017 · 7:53 am

Putting Skam into perspective: Narrative focus and Skam’s growing fandom

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This is not a “What is Skam?” article.

The internet was recently flooded with these: although the show started spreading globally in the fall with the release of season three (for reasons I will get into), the past few weeks have seen an uptick of online awareness, albeit still far from the mainstream—this is why some of you might be reading this asking yourself the question I’m saying I’m not going to answer. But if you want to understand why people around the world are seeking out a Norwegian teen web drama, you have pieces from Buzzfeed, Elite Daily, Den of Geek, and even a front lines report from Norway at FADER. The internet is now full up on “What is Skam?” articles (although I’m still waiting for the Vox explainer).

What I’m interested in is how the actual narrative of Skam functions within this globalized distribution environment. Skam’s narrative structure is certainly part of these stories, but their focus is largely in selling Skam as an experience, rather than digging into its narrative on a critical level. I have very much enjoyed Skam, and am suitably glued to the fourth season as it’s entering its second week, but the way its narrative functions has consequences for how its stories get told, and the way the internet has rallied around one of its seasons in particular has created an intriguing question of how the show’s anthology structure balances itself in a final season in the weeks to come.

[Spoiler Alert: So, I’m going to discuss the basic narrative of Skam in this post. In truth, most of the “What is Skam?” posts probably reveal as much as I’m going to, but if you really want to go in fresh (and I recommend this) then you may want to come back once you’ve found a way to watch the episodes.]

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July 14, 2014 · 2:12 pm

NBC at TCA: Searching for the Nuts and Bolts of A to Z

AToZOf NBC’s comedy pilots, A to Z feels the most complete. This isn’t to say that none of their other comedy pilots were good—I liked Marry Me, for example—but rather that A to Z has a clear premise and announces its intentions in very plain terms. It is the story of a relationship between two characters, told from A to Z, that will span a set amount of time and reach a meaningful point of conclusion by the end of its first season.

For some pilots, press tour is about critics looking for answers because the show is purposefully vague, or because—as discussed in a separate piece—there are changes going on behind-the-scenes. In the case of A to Z, though, the critics in the room have questions about details that are offered by the pilot, which is structured to the point where critics have enough information to have specific lines of inquiry that the pilot itself forces into the conversation.

While both Cristin Milioti and Ben Feldman got questions about their chemistry as the romantic couple at the heart of the series, as well as questions about their notable fates in their previous projects (How I Met Your Mother and Mad Men, respectively), a lot of questions were directed to creator Ben Queen and producers Rashida Jones and Will McCormack. How will the show balance its “relationship comedy”—they avoided “romantic comedy” as a term—with its workplace structure? How will the season be structured relative to their relationship? And how do you intend to have a series run for multiple seasons if you’re setting such a clear timeframe for the story of this relationship to unfold in? (I should admit at this point that two of these questions were mine, so it’s possible I’m more invested in the structure of the series than your average person.)

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June 24, 2013 · 2:08 pm

Mad Men – “In Care Of” and the Narrative Engine of Place in Season 6

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“In Care Of” and the Narrative Engine of Place in Season 6

June 24th, 2013

“This is where everything is.”

Mad Men began with a spatial divide. In the series’ pilot, we are introduced to Don Draper in Manhattan but only get the full picture when we follow him onto the train to the suburbs, and to the family life he leaves behind every day he travels into the city. The show was invested in exploring the distinct ebbs and flows of those two spaces, and on Don’s ability to travel between them. While we would come to learn that Don had been living a double life for most of adulthood, initially we watched a man live two lives separated by the train ride between them.

The show evolved beyond its urban/suburban divide, adding enough complexity to both Don’s family life and Sterling Cooper as a setting that it would seem reductive to boil the show down to this dichotomy. And yet although Don was no longer traveling to the suburbs since separating from Betty, the spatial divide stuck around thanks to characters like Pete, who began the season in his city apartment that would become his primary residence after he proved less agile in his duplicity than Don was. And as Betty explored the life of young runaways or as Peggy let Abe talk her into living in a nascent neighborhood, New York City was no longer confined to the offices of Sterling Cooper, gaining diversity and perspective as the turmoil of 1968 played out over the course of the season.

Mad Men’s sixth season was far from the first time the show has become invested in the meaning of space and place, but “In Care Of” highlights how central the idea of “going somewhere else” has been to this season in particular. For a season that began in the escape of Hawaii, and jetted to Los Angeles and Detroit and to upstate New York in a very tiny plane, it ends with multiple characters imagining what life would be like away from New York. In the process, we can imagine a final season spread across the country, even if we can also picture a season that remains tethered to the Manhattan Mad Men has over time embedded into the fabric of its storytelling.

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April 22, 2012 · 10:56 pm

Mad Men – “Far Away Places”

“Far Away Places”

April 22nd, 2012

Given that I still have a half dozen things to finish before my evening comes to an end, I am risking falling into a deep hole responding to this episode of Mad Men immediately after it airs, but there was a point I wanted to make that I decided wouldn’t fit comfortably into even a shorter series of tweets.

Accordingly, presenting this as a “review” of the trippy “Far Away Places” is perhaps a bit disingenuous, but I hope that a few thoughts about the structure of tonight’s episode will be worth your time despite not being surrounded by another two thousand words.

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September 24, 2011 · 1:09 am

Cultural Checkup: Cinemax’s Strike Back

Cultural Checkup: Cinemax’s Strike Back

September 24th, 2011

There are a number of logical parallels between Cinemax’s Strike Back and Starz’s Torchwood: Miracle Day. Not only did they share the same timeslot for a number of weeks this summer, and not only are they both ten-episode “series” which somewhat strangely spin off of a pre-existing franchise, but they’re also both international co-productions in which an American premium cable outlet joined forces with a British broadcaster (Sky1 for Strike Back and the BBC for Torchwood).

However, they’re parallels that most people aren’t making since no one, it seems, has been talking about Strike Back, an action drama being shepherded by a collection of British writers and Frank Spotnitz (best known for his work on The X-Files). Admittedly, this is logical so long as we are speaking comparatively: Torchwood is an established franchise with an extensive fanbase that spawns extensive discussion, whereas Strike Back has fewer generic qualities which would traditionally lend themselves to weekly critical consideration (or even online discussion, in general).

That being said, though, it’s quite likely that there are a large number of critics who have been silently keeping up with Strike Back; indeed, every time I tweet about the show I get a couple of replies from people who started to realize they really liked the show at about the same time as the run-up to the fall premiere season kicked in and their time disappeared. It’s the time of year when catching up on a show is a daunting task, a time of year where it’s easier to erase something from your memory (or your DVR’s memory, at least) than wading in for a closer look.

However, since I’ve been able to lie low (relatively speaking) during premiere week, I’m in a position where I can talk a bit about how a show that goes out of its way to create opportunities for softcore pornography managed to stealthily become one of the most enjoyable drama series of the summer  by developing an intelligent mix of episodic and serialized storytelling that Russell T. Davies might want to study a bit more closely for next time around.

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September 10, 2011 · 12:42 am

Defying Definition: Louie, Finales, and the Pleasure of the Multitudinal

Defying Definition: Louie Season 2

September 10th, 2011

I haven’t written about Louie all season, which makes me one of the only people who hasn’t done so.

Sometimes when this happens I’ll go into the archives and find vast collections of half-written reviews sitting in my “Drafts” section, like all of those failed attempts to discuss How to Make it In America last summer that never got past “Hey, isn’t that theme song awesome?”

However, there are no half-written drafts for Louie, despite the show pretty easily cementing itself as the best comedy of the summer (and probably the second best drama as well), and in tagging this post I discovered I’ve never written a post specifically about Louie. Admittedly, I fell a few weeks behind at least twice over the course of the season, which made the idea of covering it weekly all but impossible (despite the fact that I actually had screeners for the first four episodes). That being said, I do think that this is symptomatic more than it is causal, as I never really felt a particular need to be “caught up.”

While internet chatter created a great deal of temptation, the fact that episodes piled up on my DVR is not a point of disinterest but rather a lack of motivation. Without any sort of serialized element that could be spoiled, and without any continuity that would convince me to catch up on more than one episode on a time, I sort of developed my own pace, stopping and starting wherever I saw fit. Individual episodes proved more engrossing, but immediately turning on the next episode seemed unnecessary. There were logical stopping points, and so I stopped, often for longer than I had initially intended.

However, I was caught up in time for tonight’s season finale, and I do want to write at least a little bit about the show given that the second season has been pretty tremendous. Specifically, I’m interested in the ways in which the show’s lack of “continuity” creates some particularly interesting questions when it comes to a finale. Within television genres, only sitcoms are really exempt from any form of continuity when it comes to finales, and even they often angle towards ongoing storylines or future developments in a finale in this day and age. Considering the finale raises questions about the generic qualities of the series and the formal debate ongoing regarding its structure, which in turn leads into a comparison of my own and a discussion of comparisons in general, which as a whole represents the collective impact of Louie‘s season and finale: there’s a heck of a lot to talk about.

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August 12, 2011 · 5:07 am

Cultural Checkup: USA’s Suits and White Collar

Cultural Checkup: Suits and White Collar

August 12th, 2011

Although I’ve stopped watching Burn Notice, and ceased my bizarre commitment to the dull Royal Pains this summer, and didn’t bother with Covert Affairs’ second season, and didn’t even bother with Necessary Roughness (which I thought looked terrible), I remain really quite interested with USA as a network. With White Collar, they have a show that I think hits a lot of interesting buttons, and with Suits you have a show that seems to be aiming for the same goal. They’re shows that I like a great deal in particular moments, and that are in two very different stages of development.

However, as I drop in on both shows this week, I’ll admit that I find them a bit frustrating. While Suits has a lot of potential, its youthfulness shows signs of uncertainty in regards to questions of genre and narrative, problems that White Collar continues to carry even as it clearly leads the network’s offerings in terms of quality. I know that the general approach to USA programming is not quite this hyper-critical, but I’ve stored up a few too many things to say about the two shows, so I figured the Cultural Checkup was a good way to get through them.

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August 1, 2011 · 9:00 am

Cultural Catchup Project: A Return, An Adjustment, and the Perils of a Catchup Hiatus

The Perils of a Catchup Hiatus

August 1st, 2011

You can follow along with the Cultural Catchup Project by following me on Twitter (@Memles), by subscribing to the category’s feed, or by bookmarking the Cultural Catchup Project page where I’ll be posting a link to each installment.

I didn’t exactly intend on a near-two-month hiatus in the middle of summer for the Cultural Catchup Project, but here we sit at the beginning of August with very little progress made.

There are a number of reasons the CCP ended up falling off this summer. Last summer was a rare circumstance in which I had no academic commitments, and really no commitments at all, which made it easy to spend time watching/reviewing Buffy and Angel. This summer, meanwhile, was filled with commitments: Only a few were academic, but then you have social commitments, as well as my assignments for The A.V. Club (ranging from reviewing weekly series to dropping in on premieres or filling in for other writers). I could also blame the weather, in that the oppressive Midwestern heat has made drained me of the energy that would be necessary to churn out writing the way I did last summer.

While these might register as excuses, on some level I couldn’t work up the motivation to tackle something, which is how I began to view the CCP as the hiatus wore on. As soon as the project started to feel like work, I became far less likely to dive back in, which is why I had to make one particular adjustment.

Starting now, I’m shifting away from Angel to focus on Buffy’s sixth season. The idea of doing the two shows at the same time was great, but it was only really feasible when I was considerably less busy. While I do intend on getting to Angel eventually, as the project will eventually be completed, the month of August will be spent polishing off the remainder of what seems to be a divisive season.

Now, given where I left off, I expect that the CCP will relaunch in earnest later this week with a certain notable installment of the series. However, to get back into the groove, I wanted to share a few thoughts about “Life Serial” and “All the Way,” in particular how the season’s main themes resonate when you return to the show after a lengthy hiatus.

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