The Hero’s Journey in Episodic Television – Part 2
by Diana Black
As we established in Part I, ‘normal’ life – taking the kids to school, fixing the plumbing…yet again, or attending/hosting the obligatory ‘Happy’ Holydays – rarely provides an opportunity for heroism or maybe they do; depending on your relatives. Let’s hope we don’t have to put our lives on the line (or the children’s) when we take our beloved little sub-units to school…too horrible to contemplate.
To recap, how can we walk the path of the hero and experience pain and triumph? By proxy – through watching someone else suffer or succeed. Caught up in the narrative, at some subconscious level, we’re still back in that primeval forest, slaying the dragons of uncertainty about ourselves and the world around us – will we survive? In this way we get a ‘survival lesson’ for free.
We’ve already explored this via the big screen, by mapping the journey of Frodo and Sam in The Lord of the Rings, but is the ‘Hero’s journey’ likely to be the same animal via that little box in the corner? Or via other media-viewing platforms; many of them hosting the television program peppered with sponsored advertisements? Hence, the importance of awesome, nail-biting cliff-hangers just prior to Act breaks.