 Previously on the Future of Storytelling Unit 2.1 Weekly Formants on Serial TV The serial tells an ongoing story episode by episode. Let's dig a bit deeper and look at how writers create a mystery. A procedural is in its core a series of standalone episodes that is premised on a so-called case of the week. Keep that in mind. So let's look at how these differences between procedurals and serials show in the way procedurals or serials are written today. If you take a show like CSI, maybe as an example, which would be one of the most successful procedural shows worldwide, stories there start in very different places. So one of the biggest questions that a writer's room will start with every episode is, where does the murder happen? Because where the murder happens will dictate a huge amount of how the story evolves and how the information that we give to the audience is discovered because it's all got to tie in in some way with what's going on. So the actual arena the story takes place in becomes hugely important and they actually can't move into actually breaking the story itself until they actually figure that out and figure out what they call the clue path. In each act of the episode, we need to reveal a new piece of information which takes us in the direction of solving the crime by the end of the episode. These are obviously not the first questions that begin in a writer's room that's dealing with an ongoing serialized drama. The guys in Breaking Bad are not sitting down in the room going, okay, we're in a meth lab. What happens to the person who dies? How does that tie into it? So there are quite specific differences. That means the writers of a procedural have to deal with a case, for example the murder, first when panning down an episode. To be able to plot the whole episode, including the clue path, it's equally important to set an arena, a place for such murder. The clue path in this case means the path to the truth, the resolution of the mystery. With all its right and wrong traces in between, the wrong clues sometimes called a red herring, for example. But why do the writers have to design this arena, this mystery, and its setting first? Because it, for example, matters whether our investigator has to solve the crime of a dead mafia henchman found stabbed in the Dodgy Harbor area, or maybe the suspicious looking drug-related death of the president's niece in her high society loft. These decisions will very much influence the story and the secondary episode characters that one needs to develop to tell this story, this case. In contrast to that, in a serial drama like Breaking Bad, The Tudors or Game of Thrones, a murder happens due to the developments of the story, not in the beginning. The place and the time, not being the incentive for the episode story arc, but part of it, and its characters' behaviorisms. Can we really always divide between procedural and serial drama, looking at current TV shows? There are people who tried to meld the two worlds, some very successfully. Bones is a procedural, but it's also an ongoing drama to a certain extent, same with The Good Wife. There are people who have been less successful. I don't know if you're familiar with Kyle Killen, who is a writer, creator, showrunner. He did Lone Star and he did Awake, and Awake is a very interesting case study. I went to a talk that he gave in LA, which I just found really fascinating, because he was very honest about all the reasons why Awake didn't work at all. So basically what he did was, he had a pilot, which I don't know if people are familiar, I don't know if the show earned in Germany enough, but basically Jason Isaacs is a police detective who's involved in a car crash, and his wife and child are in the car with him. And his life splits into two alternate realities, one in which his wife survives and one in which his son survives. And he's not sure what reality is anymore. What Kyle thought he could do with that show was get a writing room that was kind of split 50-50. Let's bring in a number of writers who have experienced doing a whole lot of police procedurals, and let's bring in a whole lot of drama writers, and we'll let these guys sort out the police story that we need to solve each week. And we'll let these guys write the drama, and then we'll just blend it at the end of it. Six episodes in, they had to shut down production, because this was a fundamentally flawed approach to trying to do this. It just wasn't working, because the demands of what the procedural required versus the demands of what the drama story required were just becoming overwhelmingly complicated to try and make those things work. And I think that's an example of how fundamentally different those two things are in terms of story structure, and the way you go about producing them. A couple of years ago, it was all about episodes, providing storytelling that you can watch whenever, and you can tune in, and it's like bones and CSI, and if you missed 50 episodes and still get in, maybe it's different phases, but it's pretty much the same thing. You get a dead body and you have to solve it, did it? But looking at that, I think that has changed over the last few years. The way you also watch, because a lot of people watch, don't watch it on TV anymore, they buy the season, and they watch them a whole Saturday, a whole Sunday, and then they've seen like 22 episodes. So that allows you to watch completely differently. So I say the trend has moved from episodeal stories towards a more arc driven, more horizontal storytelling. To answer the question of whether the two narrative storytelling structures of procedurals and serials can be easily separated in today's TV? No. At least if we believe Rebecca and Des. Veronica Maas and the mentalist visualise what Des calls the melting of both worlds, a trend in TV series right now. The mixture of classic procedural parts, like the episodic case of the week narration, with the characteristic of a serial, the ongoing story arcs, like in the case of the mentalist, protagonist's Patrick Jane's search for Rajon, the killer of his wife and child. With Rob Thomas' teen detective series, Veronica Maas, to come back to that, we can find a similar base with the weekly self-detective cases versus the season case arcs and interpersonal relations, e.g. between Veronica and antagonist, or love interest respectively, Logan Eccles. Although it doesn't seem possible to explicitly classify many series, having in mind those two models is important when trying to analyse and differentiate between series formats or creating new ones. Why? Because models are the human minds way of understanding complex and diverse processes by classifying and simplifying them. If we look at film genres, for example, like the western, the romantic comedy or the musicals, the same process applies. David Baudwell and others have already researched in the 1970s. Genres are just categories created by producers, marketing managers and critics based on similarities in visuals, narratives, characters and even more. This doesn't mean nothing else is possible apart from that or done. Just that those hybrid formats are more difficult to grab and therefore sell to a viewer or to a broadcaster. In case of teen detective series Veronica Maas, which shows elements of film noir, crime procedurals, serial mystery arcs and high school drama and also comedy, this might have led to an early death of the show on TV after three seasons. It, however, notably made it so special that a movie is in the making, sponsored by the well-documented Kickstarter campaign by fans. That means whether you create a story based on a well-known structure or decide to remix models, structures and tropes in a new way, both can be done really well and successfully. Yet it's really good to know your ingredients to the mix first.