o we watch these SF shows, whether on the networks or on the netlets, or on cable or sometimes even on airplanes. Star Trek. X-Files. Farscape. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We see that some are set on starships and others in the suburbs. Some have recognizable human characters, others deal with aliens. Some have expensive special effects; others look as though they got them left over from Battlestar Galactica.
Whatever their surface differences, we think of them as the same type of program, the same way to tell a story.
Not quite. Not remotely.
Some shows are actually serials, like soap operas, in which each episode is merely a chapter in a longer story. That is, the events in, say, episode B build on or follow from episode A. Buffy is a serial series.
At the other extreme you have what the famed SF writer and critic James Blish called the template series, in which each episode is interchangeable.
Throw six of them up in the air, pick any one off the floor and air it. No one will be the wiser. The original Star Trek was a template series.
Then there are those in-between models, what I would call the modified template series, like The X-Files, in which episodes usually stand alone within a season; it's the big year-end cliff-hanger that brings the changes.
(There is also the genuine mini-series, one long story with a definite beginning and end, planned so from the start. Babylon 5 is the best example I can think of, though circumstances forced creator Joe Straczynski to alter his vision a bit. The SCI FI Channel's forthcoming Dune is another.
All in all, though, relatively few SF miniseries have been produced, and even fewer are worth remembering.)
Here's the trap for the lucky producer who sells her first SF series: everybody wants to do serials. Serials have prestige. NYPD Blue and ER are serials, and they win Emmys.
There is also the artistic satisfaction of telling stories about characters that change and grow. To a viewer, serials certainly feel more like life. And isn't that what we want from our entertainment? Stories about other lives that seem real? Why aren't all shows told this way? Why do so many serials fail so early?
The Trap
The potential for failure strikes early, when the first "pattern" episode needs to be filmed. You realize, of course, that pilots for television series are filmed on more generous budgets and schedules than later episodes, typically twice per hour what the pattern for a single one will be. This is because, among other things, you are building sets for the first time (which you hope to amortize over 12 or 20 or 60 later episodes) and taking more time learning how to light your leading man or woman and finding out whether that alien appliance that looked so good in the office actually works when it's on some actor's head on a rainy location. And so on.
To pick figures out of the air, let's say you had $3 million and an 18-day schedule to do your SF pilot.
Now you've got to do the same thing in seven days with $1.4 million.
Not only that, it's a good bet you aren't in the same studio, locations, or even the same country, meaning you don't have the same crew.
And you must produce an hour of television that looks and feels like that expensive pilot.
I've never seen or heard of a first "pattern" episode that came in on-time and on-budget that made anybody happy. They usually need work. New scenes, extra shooting, re-casting, whatever.
Which you often don't know until you are well into production of the third episode and prepping the fourth. Where are you going to find the time to fix number one? Especially with air dates looming. And SF shows, because of their intensive demands for visual effects, need every day of post-production they can get.
What you would like to do is put that second pattern episode on the air first. But, since you're doing a serial series, and that first episode is actually Part II of your pilot, you can't.
In today's hyper-competitive market, one bad episode in the first four can kill you. It hasn't happened to an SF show lately, but look at what happened to ABC's Wonderland just last month.
In today's fragmented market, it's also silly to be putting your characters through "realistic" life events in the second or fifth episodes, because chances are that very few people are watching, and those that are have had no time to get to know them.
The Escape
The cunning strategy, then, is to write and produce cookie cutter versions of the pilot over and over again for at least a dozen episodes, maybe for a whole first season.
Maybe longer. (Has any SF series really found an audience until it's reached a second season?)
Hence the appeal of the template series as a strategy for helping your characters survive long enough to find an audience.
Writers grit their teeth when they have to do this, and tell themselves that this sort of storytelling (an original story followed by one or a bazillion additional episodes featuring the same set of characters) has an honored equivalent in literature. Huckleberry Finn was a sequel. Look at the Sherlock Holmes stories. Heck, the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament is generally thought to be a sequel to the Gospel of Luke.
Increasingly we read SF series, too. The first genre SF novel to make the hardcover best-seller lists was Frank Herbert's Children of Dune, the second sequel to the classic. The first novel by Isaac Asimov to make the lists was his fourth Foundation novel. Robert A. Heinlein re-visited earlier characters in his later, bigger-selling novels. Anne McCaffrey and Orson Scott Card are talented SF writers whose book series out-perform their single works.
I'm tempted to formulate Cassutt's Law of Popular Fiction, styled after the famous Gresham's Law of Money: templates drive out stand-alone stories.
Voices and faces
There may be a darker reason for this.
I have heard some scary true things in my 18 years as a television writer, but the scariest true thing is this: television is company.
Not art. Not even entertainment. Company. Voices and faces to fill our homes or apartments.
It has to do with the nature of television viewing, as opposed to film.
With film you are in a dark place looking at a screen which is much bigger than you are: it dominates you and commands your total attention. With television you are in a noisy, illuminated den or living room, distracted by the telephone or your significant other. A television show can never command you the way a movie can.
It can only be ... company.
Template stories make better company. "Realistic" serial episodes demand too much attention, like talkative strangers who insist on telling you their problems. Cookie cutter adventures are easier to grasp, given how we watch television. Let's see, there's this starship and its crew ... now, they're with the Federation? No, that was another show. They're running from bad guys. Right.
And so it goes, until mid-way through the second season, about the 30th episode, when the creators have found an audience--then they can start to serialize.
Meanwhile, should your favorite promising new series go off the air (a phrase that's actually obsolete: let's say, when your series ceases production), ask yourself if the creators made the wrong choice between a serial and a template.
You won't like it any better, but you'll understand more.
Michael Cassutt has been a writer and/or producer for a
number of SF and fantasy television series, from The Twilight Zone and Max Headroom through Eerie, Indiana, The Outer Limits and, most recently, Seven Days. He is also the author of a number of books on space flight, two dozen science fiction short stories and, most recently, a novel about NASA titled Missing Man (paperback from Tor, March 2000).
