The Sleeper Effect

Fascinating article in the New York Times by Steven Johnson, about the narrative complexity of modern television. For instance, talking about an episode of 24:

Nine primary narrative threads wind their way through those 44 minutes, each drawing extensively upon events and information revealed in earlier episodes. Draw a map of all those intersecting plots and personalities, and you get structure that -- where formal complexity is concerned -- more closely resembles ''Middlemarch'' than a hit TV drama of years past like ''Bonanza.''

Maybe he's exaggerating, but he's got pretty charts to illustrate his point, and who doesn't like pretty charts?

He points out correctly, though, that the threaded, tapestry-style drama, having originated with Hill Street Blues, is now by far the dominant form (in US television at least, although maybe less within sf tv?), and goes on to say that

The total number of active threads equals the multiple plots of ''Hill Street,'' but here each thread is more substantial. The show doesn't offer a clear distinction between dominant and minor plots; each story line carries its weight in the mix. The episode also displays a chordal mode of storytelling entirely absent from ''Hill Street'': a single scene in ''The Sopranos'' will often connect to three different threads at the same time, layering one plot atop another. And every single thread in this ''Sopranos'' episode builds on events from previous episodes and continues on through the rest of the season and beyond.

I really like the idea of chordal storytelling; strikes me as a very useful concept.

The crux of the argument is that this increase in complexity is market-driven, and good for us.

Of course, the entertainment industry isn't increasing the cognitive complexity of its products for charitable reasons. The Sleeper Curve exists because there's money to be made by making culture smarter. The economics of television syndication and DVD sales mean that there's a tremendous financial pressure to make programs that can be watched multiple times, revealing new nuances and shadings on the third viewing. Meanwhile, the Web has created a forum for annotation and commentary that allows more complicated shows to prosper, thanks to the fan sites where each episode of shows like ''Lost'' or ''Alias'' is dissected with an intensity usually reserved for Talmud scholars.

[...]

But this demographic blur has a commendable side that we don't acknowledge enough. The kids are forced to think like grown-ups: analyzing complex social networks, managing resources, tracking subtle narrative intertwinings, recognizing long-term patterns. The grown-ups, in turn, get to learn from the kids: decoding each new technological wave, parsing the interfaces and discovering the intellectual rewards of play. Parents should see this as an opportunity, not a crisis. Smart culture is no longer something you force your kids to ingest, like green vegetables. It's something you share.

Certainly it makes sense that as TV becomes more fractured and niche-driven that intelligent and complex drama shows would develop to fill their particular ecological niche, but he even argues that reality shows are more sophisticated than their equivalents of thirty years ago, and that they're beneficial as well.

It's a good read. I don't have any immediate detailed responses or obvious nits to pick, but reading it I couldn't help thinking of karentraviss' posts about picking up storytelling from film and tv (not that I can find any of those posts now, of course) as well as greengolux' recent post about what tv is and is not good at.