The Story So Far
Rapid-fire recaps of TV plotlines have become their own art form.
TV dramas are getting more complicated all the time. Even if you're a regular viewer, labyrinthine shows like Lost and Prison Break require full concentration and are best consumed in marathon viewing sessions aided by TiVo or DVD. But you can still drop in on complex dramas midseason - just make sure you catch the "previously on..." recaps before each episode. These mini montages have become a captivating subgenre for both regulars and channel surfers. Back in the early days of narrative dramas, in the '70s and '80s, bare-bones recaps for serials like St. Elsewhere rarely topped 30 seconds. Fast-forward to Lost or Prison Break, and recaps of a minute or more are common, with some lead-ins for season openers or finales taking nearly two minutes to bring viewers up to speed - and bear in mind that each shot in those recaps now lasts less than two seconds on average. Sometimes editors rescue scenes from the cutting-room floor, if those bits tell the story in a tidier form. It's a new kind of TV serial, distinct from both the hour-long episode and the season-long arc.
- Sonia Zjawinski
Capsule TV
An ESPN honcho explains which plays and scores make SportsCenter's highlights reel.
OK sports fans: Even if you have 75 televisions and a satellite dish that gets every game, you can't watch them all. In our highlights reels, we try to present to you what is most interesting or most entertaining or most important.
On a typical Saturday during college football season, you might see highlights of 35 games. All of our shows have a limited amount of time, so we constantly face tough decisions in terms of what plays to leave in and leave out. We look at each play a number of times to determine an appropriate course of action. Can we add certain elements that help explain to the viewer why a play happened?
Most important, we want to be accurate. But we also want to provide entertainment value - we want to distinguish our highlights from the ones you see on your local news or other networks. I think part of the way ESPN distinguishes its highlights is by being analytical. That's an overarching goal we have for any highlight.
- Mark Brady, ESPN director of highlights
Sitcom to Bitcom
Fox's tragic loss is the Web's major gain. Former Arrested Development star Michael Cera - arguably the funniest 18-year-old in the world - and his actor-buddy Clark Duke have inked a deal with CBS' new broadband channel, Innertube. The duo will write, produce, direct, and act in their own short-form comedy series called, succinctly, Clark and Michael. To speed up our interview, we've deleted the questions. (Think of it like the grown-ups on Peanuts.)
WIRED:...?
DUKE: It's about two guys who think they have this great idea for a TV show. But they're so wrapped up in acting like Hollywood hotshots that they're sort of oblivious to the fact that their project is going down the tubes.
WIRED:...?
CERA: We sort of modeled it after the stuff we enjoy on Adult Swim - especially shows like Tom Goes to the Mayor, which are really great at getting in a lot of jokes in a relatively small amount of time.
WIRED:...?
DUKE: Since we're producing for the Web, where you can't always expect people to stick around for an hour or even half an hour, 11-minute episodes seemed to make a lot of sense. Our budget is obviously a lot smaller than it would be if we were making the show for TV. But I think that will turn out to be a good thing, because we ended up hiring friends to operate cameras and do the lighting and stuff, which means we're working with people we really like.
CERA: Also, we traded in a larger budget for the ability to be a little more offbeat. We have the freedom to attract a different audience than CBS usually goes for. If the network can build a big business around selling ads on smaller, weirder projects, that will be pretty awesome.
WIRED: !!!
CERA: Yeah! We're the Web's great hope.
- Eric Steuer
Let's Do Snacks
A veteran film producer on why Hollywood must adapt to the short-form age.
They say movies are dead. Movies aren't dead. People are seeing more movies than ever before - they're just seeing them in new and different ways. It's not written in the Bible, "A movie shall be two hours." Somebody made that up to sell theater tickets.
With technology, the very definition of a story has changed. It used to mean an actor and a script. Now a story is a 15second, no-dialog clip of somebody running across the street. An artist used to be the person who could get the studio to finance, manufacture, and distribute a story. Today an artist is somebody sitting in Des Moines in front of his computer - and his audience isn't a million folks at once, but one person a million times over. I now look to GoFish and YouTube to get ideas, to see what's going on. They show me not only what people are posting, but also what people like. It's a much better metric than a Nielsen rating system.
We are all scrambling to construct a new model to profit from these bits and pieces, but there's so much out there, it's like trying to harness a tornado and getting spat out the top. I definitely don't have the answer yet. I don't even understand all the questions. But if people are thinking this is the end of Hollywood, they're wrong. This is a whole new beginning.
- Peter Guber, CEO and chair of Mandalay Entertainment Group and host of AMC's Sunday Morning Shootout
Is Eight Enough?
If one TV show is good, eight TV shows is better.
Back in the olden days, our ancestors thought that Bloomberg Television's splintered screen - with a stock ticker and a news crawl across the bottom - seemed like information overload. Nowadays that's commonplace, and DirecTV's News Mix makes it seem positively quaint. You can watch eight news channels at once, plus a bonus news crawl at the bottom of the screen. Just think of all the multiscreen bloviation during Sunday morning pundit fests.
- Chris Baker
Snack Attack!
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