If you don’t read “The Bitter Script Reader” you’re missing one of the most perceptive writers about the subject of television ever to pick up an angry pen and let the media have it. (Okay, so he doesn’t use a pen, and he clearly loves TV, still…well, check it out:
by The Bitter Script Reader
TV shows evolve over time. Certainly if you were to watch the first couple episodes of Seinfeld, you’d find them to be strange, slightly stilted and slow affairs, lacking the complex structure and quotable dialogue that made the show one of the last true mega-hits of the TV boom. And yet, you can still see the germs of genius, the voice that was unlike anything else on TV at the time. It’s not honed or polished yet, but it is distinct.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is another show that took a season and a half to evolve into its ideal form. The moment “shit got real” is when Buffy lost her virginity to Angel, triggering his reversion to his evil personality and completely upending any sense of safety within the show. For that matter, the spinoff show starring Angel himself took at least 11 episodes to truly find its footing. It needed that time before its voice emerged and it found where it was going to fit into the Buffy-verse. Still, I’d argue that if you watch the first season of Buffy, it might be a little campier, cheaper and less ambitious than what followed, it still is distinct and unique in a way that draws you in. Joss Whedon’s voice is there – he’s just still finding his best keys.
One of my problems with the way network TV is run today is that programmers seem to have itchy trigger fingers. A new series could find itself canceled after two or three airings, which hardly seems like a fair amount of data on which to judge a series. Of course, it’s important to realize that by the time most network shows have had their premiere, the series has probably shot six or seven episodes and may be working on the script for the 9th or 10th episode. At that point, the studio and the network have a pretty good sense of what they’ve got creatively, and if that’s not working for them, a limp debut isn’t going to convince them to throw good money after bad. (Though streaming figures and the Live+3 and Live+7 viewing numbers can end up extending a show’s life just by virtue of the fact they take longer to compile.)