The show that started it all

“One more episode, or bed?â€? It’s a dilemma that nags at us all sooner or later. Regardless of good our intentions were, how early our night was intended to be, or how innocently we slipped in that first disc we’d been recommended. It’s the question that everyone has asked themselves, and subsequently answered, by way of a lost a night’s sleep, bank holiday weekend, or, in cases of serious televisual addiction – an entire Christmas.

Journalist and film critic Andrew Collins argued in his blog that “One episode is never enough in one sitting. Always the mark of a truly magnificent drama.� However, the addictive hold these T.V shows have over us isn’t necessarily as much to do with the quality of the programme, as it is the way our T.V watching habits have changed over the last ten years.

In the late nineties (and early noughties), the televisual landscape was very different. Tentpole shows of the nineties like the various incarnations of Star Trek and early West Wing episodes were confined to their once weekly schedules, and by and large, adhered to self contained plots that began and ended within the run time of a single episode. The dreaded panic of a cliffhanger ending was usually reserved for season finales (the only point of real drama – when actors’ contracts were up in the air for renewal), or very occasionally, in mid season ‘specials’ to renew waning interest.

However, all that changed towards the end of the nineties, with the development of shows like Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Charmed and especially 24. These represented the first of a new breed  – shows which scrapped self contained plots for continuous ‘story arcs’ which spread over an entire series, and forced us to completely new viewing habits – pushing us out of our comfort zones, as our favourite characters remained frozen in peril at the end of every episode.

The sedate drip feed of circular television became a crippling addiction overnight, as show runners transformed a casual relationship with television into a fixation. In answer to this new style of television 20^th Century Fox realised that a new way of consuming that television was required, and released the very first non comedy T.V series box set – 24 series one, a six VHS behemoth that enabled us to gorge ourselves on our favourite programme in one giant eighteen hour fix.

The public addiction to modern T.V storytelling, coupled with our terrible patience, has necessitated entire leaps in

Were you looking at me, or the woman in the red dress?

technology in order for us to curb our vast appetites. Today, the T.V schedulers have been stripped of their power over us, thanks to the rise of BBC iplayer, illegal filesharing and of course, box sets of virtually every broadcast programme that allow us to watch as much, as often as we want.

But if a change in television has created a change in our viewing habits, our viewing habits have also generated a change in the kind of television we’re being offered. Shows like Lost, Battlestar Galactica and Heroes are children of the boxed set age. The sale of multipack television has given producers of such shows the ability to create a generation television programmes so complex that they simply couldn’t work solely on a week-by-week basis. Instead, they’ve been designed with the ultimate aim of DVD, where viewers can patiently slog through over a hundred hours of bafflingly intricate storytelling in quick succession – which is now the only way to comprehend the huge vision of these modern television shows.

If the birth of the boxed set has created the modern era of television watching, it’s also shaped the things we watch and the way we watch it. However, its unparalleled success has also meant that our weekends, evenings and bank holidays will never be the same again.

Philip Reynolds