(*) My favorite example of this: “Red Team/Blue Team,” from late in the fourth season of The Good Wife. What some modern viewers dismiss as “filler” episodes often turned out to be the most fun and/or important ones(*). And it let both the audience and the creative team develop a deeper understanding of the characters, which often led to surprising new directions. The 22-episode approach allowed story and character arcs to play out more gradually, so that the payoffs would feel more satisfying.
And there are other incredibly thin installments that may as well open with one of the producers directly addressing the audience to say, “Look, we’re running out of ideas this year, but we had to come up with something, so … enjoy these fairy tales coming to life!” But the pros far outweighed the cons.
As we near the midpoint of DS9, we’ve begun to just skip over all the episodes about the cartoonishly greedy Ferengi, for instance. Unevenness was inevitable when producing that much content each season. There were definitely downsides to the old system.
In addition to the underrated spinoff’s individual merits, it’s striking to be reminded of the differences between the era where every successful show made 20-plus episodes a year, and this current one, where 10 episodes per season is the most given to almost everybody, including modern-day Trek shows like Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. We’ve been bingeing Star Trek: Deep Space Ninein my house lately.
0 kommentar(er)
