ot that it's that hard to do, but the surest way to trigger that pained, why-did-I-let-this-guy-in-the-door? look on a network executive's face is to tell her that you're pitching an anthology series.
It's not that studios or executives don't like the form: They can appreciate the magic of a story that stands alone—that has the delicious possibility of actually surprising an audience, at least on first run—that has a new look each week ... that you can cast with actors who won't ordinarily do series television.
Oh, no, we all like anthologies. We just can't figure out how to sell them. With a bazillion competing channels, lacking the momentum that comes from a series with continuing characters and situations, they simply cannot be promoted effectively—which is to say, affordably.
The original Twilight Zone had Rod Serling as a weekly face and a voice, and was first aired at the end of the Golden Age of anthology television—
—And it was still ratings-challenged, by the standards of the day, and always on the bubble for renewal.
(This has always been especially frustrating for a sci-fi guy like me, because so much of the vital work in the field is in short story or novelette.)
Nevertheless, broadcast anthologies are, and have been, dead, dead, dead, for at least a decade, if not three.
Or so the conventional wisdom says.
I think they've sneaked back in.
Stand-alone series are Lost
Of course, conventional wisdom ignores the continuing strength of not only the original TZ, but the original Outer Limits, and its very successful revival in the 1990s.
All sorts of anthology series have been attempted—Steven Spielberg did Amazing Stories, Robert Zemeckis and Joel Silver had a nice run with Tales From the Crypt, and there was The Hitchhiker on HBO, and Tales From the Darkside—but the business insists that you still can't make people watch them.
At least, not if you tell people you're doing an anthology.
(This isn't limited to network television. Look at sci-fi and fantasy novels, with endless installments of Dune and Pern, where the six-book "trilogy" is now common. Years ago I formulated Cassutt's Law of Popular Entertainment, based on Gresham's Law in economics: "Series drive out stand-alone works.")
Now, it seems, a wonderful hybrid form has emerged in the past year, combining the magic of an anthology series with the marketing values of a procedural.
My first hint came when The 4400 aired on USA Network this summer. Well, it actually struck me before the series aired, when I first heard the concept: one alien return, with 4,400 different potential characters? Wow! Even if you explored one new character per week, The
4400 could run for decades.
Sure enough, the series dealt with an overarching storyline, but it also took interesting detours into a different character each week.
I don't think it hurt that Ira Behr, show runner for The 4400, had recent experience on UPN's recent revival of TZ, to add to his tenure on series like Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. He had the perfect background to nurture this hybrid.
Then there's ABC's new Wednesday night series, Lost.
I was originally very skeptical about the potential for this. Plane crashes on lost island, group of survivors deal with strange phenomenon and each other—fine, I thought. Good for, what, two weeks? How long before it started to feel like Gilligan's Island?
I probably wouldn't have bothered to tune in at all, except for the pedigree—Lost was created by Damon Lindelof, a veteran of Crossing Jordan, and J.J. Abrams, he of Alias. OK, these are good writers, smart producers. They know the pitfalls better than I do.
It took me until the third week before I caught on: Lost is a hybrid, too. Every episode has an A story that emerges from the situation—Will the survivors find water? What happens if they try to send a signal for help?
But there is another, parallel story that allows you to flash back to before the crash and explore a single character's life. And, naturally, you learn that what you assumed about the Young Woman or the Young Doctor or the Older Man or the Korean Couple isn't necessarily true.
I don't know if Lost can generate a Law & Order-like run. There are, after all, only 48 survivors. (Though who knows what other people live on the island?)
But in today's frantic marketplace, two good seasons will make a network happy. Maybe even one.
Needed: A Bridge to the future
I can think of a literary model for our new hybrid—the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder, a writer best known these days for the play Our Town. Bridge, however, was published in 1927. The inciting event—to use an au-courant term from screenwriting classes—is the collapse of a pedestrian bridge in a
Peruvian village that plunges five people to their deaths.
The novel flashes back to the lives of the victims and the factors that put them on that bridge at that fateful time.
Like Lost and The 4400.
Why are these hybrids significant for sci-fi? Because network television schedules are stuffed to overflowing with pure procedurals: NBC is the network of Law & Order; CBS has three versions of C.S.I. ABC would—until this season—have loved its own franchise; the same with Fox or the WB.
Good as these series are (and I happily watch C.S.I.), they aren't sci-fi. Yes, there have been attempts to meld sci-fi and procedurals: Mercy Point mixed sci-fi and ER, for example. Uber-producer Dick Wolf's sole failure in network television was Mann and Machine, a sci-fi police procedural.
It's almost an impossible challenge. The amount of time required to develop a consistent future or alternate world, then to create believable characters and procedures for it—well, TV development cycles run in months, not years.
Which is why I welcome the hybrids.
Michael Cassutt worked on two anthologies series, the first revival of The Twilight Zone and the Showtime version of The Outer Limits. He is currently writing scripts for Fox Studios and the SCI FI Channel.
