Have you tried to initiate someone into ""Lost"" over the last two seasons? I attempted to explain to a few friends how time travel, the freighter and Charles Widmore related to being stranded on a desert island; needless to say, their heads exploded, and now I'm down two good friends.
Despite the massive quality boost in TV over the last 10 years or so, a side effect has been writers' increasing reliance on the serial format. We see more and more shows structured as a continuous narrative broken into hour-long segments. TV writers now plan out intricate schemes of how each episode will link up its plot, themes, characters and obscure pop-culture references to the rest of the series.
The result? Story-driven television, especially in tense dramatic shows like ""Lost"" and ""24,"" has become unwatchable for the casual viewer. Missing an episode could make the rest of a season completely nonsensical, and beginning a series partway through is unacceptable.
If you watch TV occasionally for a 30-minute escape from reality, your options are getting slimmer and slimmer. ""Manswers"" is not exactly a good use of 30 minutes, unless you want a countdown of the five best countries to get a blowjob in. Even reality TV demands that you never miss an episode. Addiction seems to have become a requirement to fully enjoy the good things happening on TV.
For those of you with social lives, consider making a larger commitment to shows that make good use of the serial format. You can be picky if you're short on time —a five-season story arc doesn't substitute for solid acting and writing minute-to-minute, not season-to-season.
Look at ""Heroes,"" NBC's drama that was once powered by character-driven stories about real people with superpowers. Seasons two and three rested heavily on the idea that the characters needed to be caught up in giant conspiracies and elaborate plots that traced back hundreds of years. Without its emphasis on characters, ""Heroes"" became a nearly unwatchable spectacle of poorly written dialogue qualified as ""leading to something bigger."" If you can't deliver on the basics, you can't save it with a twisting, complex plot.
Compelling TV, as with film and literature, has to be about characters. Take AMC's ""Mad Men"" for instance. Sunday's episode, ""Souvenir,"" was a discrete story of Don Draper and his wife Betty going on a business trip to Rome, giving the battered couple a vignette of romance that we haven't seen from them in a long time. It was a testament to how great TV serials need to be written: like a short story, delivering a story for an hour, but adding characterization and plot hooks for future episodes to reference.
If you insist on living a life in spite of a new episode of ""Lost"" being on, invest in TiVo (or Google ""BitTorrent""). We live in a time when watching garbage TV doesn't make sense when we have 50 other ways to watch quality television on our own terms. Serialized shows may require a deeper commitment than whatever Spike TV is running, but the payoff is a lot greater.
Mark would prefer you don't ask him about the circumstances that led to him watching an entire episode of ""Manswers."" It involves insomnia and shame. E-mail him about more honorable pursuits at mriechers@wisc.edu.
