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I think an element of continuity is essential for any ongoing drama series, whatever medium it's presented in. Without it you immediately hamper your chances of building a bond between the characters and audience. That's a central part of an ongoing series - the audience have to care enough about the characters to come back for the next installment, they have to want to know how these people are coping, how their lives are going. Look at soap operas and tell me I'm wrong. It has to be backed up with good writing, but I'll come back to that in a minute.
If you're going to produce a series that has no continuity, you may as well do it as a number of one-offs.
This seems to me to be the point. Continuity is entirely dependant on the type of entertainment you're aiming to produce. Series like Buffy exist because of their continuing narratives - it's a fundamental part of them. Yes, a great deal of the episodes work on their own, but each also includes a nod at the very least to the basic, more important stroyline running through the series, even if this link is only provided by one or two lines of dialogue. This, possibly, is the main fault with X-Files - there is a single story threaded through the series, but it's so loose, inconsistent and rarely acknowledged that it's nigh on pointless it being there at all. Better in this case, surely, to make the programme as a number of individual episodes, a la The Fugitive.
Here we have Richard Kimble, sentenced for murdering his wife, on the run from the law. That's it as far as continuity goes - you take that basic premise and see what you can make of it for the next 50 minutes. Next week you satrt over again - Richard Kimble, sentenced for murdering his wife, on the run from the law. There's plenty of series' that follow the same plan - the original Star Trek, Night Rider, Charlie's Angels. It's like giving ten writers the same first sentence and asking them to each spin a story from it - other than that first sentence, each story will be independent of the others.
As for Star Trek, the attempt at an ongoing narrative there has always struck me as being somewhat half-arsed. Other than the reliability of certain characters there's little continuity involved, and when it pops up it appears to be tacked on as an afterthought (or a cheap plot device). If you're going down the continuity route, you need a solid foundation to build from, and you need to reference past storylines and develop past themes to a greater degree than any of the ST series have done. This is where continuity becomes A Bad Thing. If you can't think of anything for next week's episode, hey, fuck it, put the Borg back in. The week after, we'll forget that any of it happened, but no doubt the Borg'll come back at some stage. Only to be forgotten about again, etc etc etc. In the wrong hands, in the wrong series, continuity is simply used to cover over the cracks in writing ability.
Urk. Big post. Hope some of it makes sense. |
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