The Limitations of the Limited Series

One industry trend at the moment is the “limited series.”  Limited series are, basically, miniseries:  self-enclosed stories designed to travel a complete arc in a limited number of episodes—generally somewhere between three and fourteen--but (at least as they're being done lately) with the possibility of being renewed for further series.  I can see the appeal:  networks have gaps to fill in their regular season, and considering the rise of the DVR and various non-network entertainment delivery mechanisms, they aren’t seeing the same results with reruns that they used to.  So they find limited series to fill the gaps between seasons, and if the limited series are successful enough, they renew them into the next gap, or a full season.  They can get bigger stars (and often bigger production values) because they don’t have to commit to longer runs.  They can market them as “events” that draw in viewers.  Perhaps the biggest success in this vein lately was Under the Dome, which got renewed to series.  The Following is another that got renewed.  I believe Sleepy Hollow was also conceived as a limited series, which helps explain why it started with such ridiculously high stakes:  It didn’t leave room to build because it didn’t anticipate building.  Once Upon A Time In Wonderland has aired during the regular season, but it's basically a limited series as well.

But while I see the appeal, I’m also disappointed by the trend. Limited series undermine much of what I find compelling about television as a genre:  the fact that because television is open-ended, it needs to incorporate overlapping story arcs of varying sizes, and and the fact that its characters can grow into lives and complexities that start to approach those of real people.  These are among the key advantages of television over feature film as a storytelling medium, and when a show is designed to be self-contained as a limited series is, even if it retains the option of expanding into that sort of storytelling, it still gives up something.  I’m not saying that limited series – or miniseries, for that matter – can’t be wonderful stories with complex characters.  Many are.  But I’d hate to see them become the way we conceive of television.

The Paradise (PBS, British, new to U.S.. Costume drama.)

Watched: entire first season

Premise:  In 1870s England, a country girl moves to the city and gets a job at an extravagant department store.

Promise:  I believe this is one of those shows that started as a limited series and has been renewed for a second run, but only the first series has aired.  The show is based on, and as far as I can tell hews quite closely to, the arc of the Emile Zola novel Au Bonheur des Dames.  Like many other British costume dramas, it’s very, very pretty.  And it follows a recent trend in British import TV that I find appealing:  it focuses on a collection of women rather than a collection of men.  (See, e.g., Call the Midwife and The Bletchley Circle.) And there is a bit of Call the Midwife in this, although here the women are shopgirls working with the idle rich instead of midwives working with the desperate poor, and instead of being independent women seeking to help other women find independence, the characters here are independent women desperately seeking to relinquish their independence to the men around them.  So…less appealing, at least to my taste.   On the good side, the show does an excellent job of highlighting many of the problems in late-nineteenth-century class and gender dynamics, and centers around a capable, creative, and competent woman; skewers the superficiality of class distinctions; and poignantly portrays how class acts as a cage (albeit a gilded one).  On the bad side, it casts a deeply uncritical eye on the male lead, a manipulative man who believes he can take financial and emotional advantage of women.  This is, I believe, an artifact of Zola’s source material, but considering the liberties that this adaptation has taken with its source (moving it to England from France, for one), I’d have liked to see some of the story’s progressive values incorporated into the romance.  It shouldn’t have been so hard.  That said, the story pushes along engagingly, and I watched the whole thing, so how bad could it be?

Verdict:  Worth Netflixing, if you like costume dramas.

Mob City (TNT, new.  Crime Drama.)

Watched: 2-hour pilot

Premise:  A cop straddles the line between good and bad in Mob-soaked 1947 Los Angeles

Promise:  I really enjoy noir.  Characters in noir follow their fundamental natures down the road to their inevitable doom with a sort of moral relativism that makes even a happy noir ending feel like a trap.  A good noir mystery is a thing of beauty.   This series is clearly steeped in noir conventions, so much so that it’s as much about getting them right as it is about telling its story.  And that’s where it falls short: 

the dialog follows noir cadences so faithfully that it loses its meaning, and the surface of the story is so shiny with noir sheen that it never shows its emotional heart.  And in so doing, it loses one of the best elements of noir.  The best noir isn’t about people who don’t feel—it’s about people who feel too much.  So much that they can’t help but have rough edges.  Here, the characters are trapped in their nourish ruts, but the emotions that got them there, and the rough edges they should catch along the way, are nowhere to be seen.  The result is pretty, but shallow.  It tells the “true” story of Bugsy Siegel and his cohort, based on a nonfiction book by John Buntin.  It’s got no shortage of sly dames and hidden machine guns in and hazy neon signs reflected in the puddles of alleys that are too quiet and too clean.  And the characters are following their fundamental natures into what will surely become their inevitable doom.  But I would like to see it embody noir’s principles with the same emotional dedication as it performs its conventions.

Verdict:  I’m on the fence about whether to watch the rest, but I probably will.  (After all, it’s in my fundamental nature, whether inevitable doom resides there or not.)

On the DVR/Unreviewed:  Lucky 7 (canceled), Sean Saves the World, Witches of East End, Ground Floor, Atlantis, and Kirstie.  There will not--as far as I know--be any new shows airing between now and the start of the new year, but stay tuned to this space for reviews of the remaining Fall/Winter shows, and some discussion of the season in review.