Getting serial

You know what I'm getting really tired of? Modern TV series. Why, do you ask? Well, it's more because in the age of bingeable streaming TV, every TV series has now aligned themselves with having an overarching story-line which some would argue doesn't have a pay-off until the final episode. And herein lies the problem. In a not-so distant past, we had TV series which had self-contained episodes ... and, for those which were worth their salt, an overarching story and world-building. Notable examples were X-Files (For the first few seasons at least), Firefly, Star Trek (pre-Discovery).

What made them great was that you could watch an episode without having to know the backstory for the entire series. Each episode was a self-contained entity, with a beginning and an end. Perhaps not all plot devices were sorted out at the end (e.g. unrequited love) but you had your pay-off. Nowadays, you don't have that. Each episode plays out like merely a step towards the final resolution or, even more dastardly, season cliffhanger.

Which takes me elegantly onto the agenda of today's post: The Feed. This is another series brought to you by the Bezosian Amazon (um, wot? $35 billion pay-out - for a divorce?). It follows a halcyon/Orwellian future where most of the world have cerebral implants connecting them to basically the internet. I felt like it had smatterings of influence from Ghost in the Shell and Black Mirror, which is a good start, but in the end I couldn't finish the series. The first two-to-three episodes had a nice bit of world-building and a few (already covered by Black Mirror) technological/philosophical conundrums - but that was about the time the series ran out of steam.

In a nutshell the story revolves around The Feed which connects people and allows the sharing of experiences, social networking and making video/augmented reality calls. The system starts to fall apart when certain individuals are 'jacked' and forced to murder people. The rest of the series revolves around a baby with a non-invasive Feed integration (transferred through the blood supply, apparently), the philosophical implications of The Feed governing what you see, the moral privacy implications of being able to monitor feed users ... and that's about it. Most of this is covered in the first four episodes - but unfortunately the series still has six remaining episodes to fill. This meant that there was a whole lot of treading water required while the writers tried their best to wrap up a series about characters that we don't care about nor a story with a well-defined stance on whether The Feed is truly bad or not. Needless to say, there are a lot of slow pans, slow establishing shots, people staring off into the distance and swelling chords while absolutely nothing happens.

If we contrast this with the ill-fated Firefly series, it had distinct characters, very interesting world-building, distinct episodes (but an overarching story) and a relatively clearly-defined stance on good and bad - even if our heroes weren't nearly as black and white. Each episode could quite happily be watched out-of-order (as Fox did, for some reason) and you, as the viewer, would get their pay-off by the end of the episode. Having said that, not every episode was amazing (e.g. Jaynestown) but even that episode provided some nuance to what had initially been a one-note character.

And so, to summarise, I am not a fan of the current trend for series treating their episodes as merely stepping stones toward the final pay-off. I would argue that if a series only gets good in the final episode, is it actually a good series? Just like with life, you need to enjoy the journey - not just the final destination. At this stage I would much rather watch an episode of Murder, She Wrote than sit through another episode of The Feed.