Serials

I have in my drafts folders a long post about the rise, fall and rise again of serial storytelling.

The thesis was basically this: About 130 years ago--give or take twenty years--serialized fiction reached its creative peak. And then for a long time, serials were a storytelling form limited to the lowest culture products--soap operas, comic books, movie shorts. But lately, in the last ten years or so, there has been an explosion of high-quality serial narrative mostly on, but not limited to, television.

Many Victorian writers--like Charles Dickens, George Eliot, William Thackeray, Anthony Trollope and Henry James--wrote their best novels in serialized form. And then, in the early 20^th Century, the interest in serialization declined. (For a comprehensive explanation of why this happened, read Shawn Crawford's excellent essay No time to be idle: the serial novel and popular imagination.)

Anyway. Henry Jenkins suggests that fan culture, so central to soap operas and comic books and wrestling and other low serials, is responsible for part of the rebound:

My work on Twin Peaks fans was showing that online communities would support much greater narrative complexity than current television was offering... It has taken a while for the rest of the viewing audience to catch up with where the fan community was at more than fifteen years ago but fan culture in the late 1980s looks very much like the television culture of today.

Today Jenkins posted an interview with Brad Meltzer that talks about why comics today are so much better than before:

There are several reasons why writing in comics is so good right now but one of them is what DC President Paul Levitz described to me in an interview as the "permeable membrane" that exists between comics and other media sectors in the midst of an increasingly transmedia culture. Some of the most exciting writers in comics today come from other media -- look at Joss Whedon over at Astonishing X-Men or J. Michael Straczinski or the occassional forrays of Kevin Smith into comics writing.

In putting together my thoughts on serials I compiled a list of comics writers who also work in TV (or more accurately, work on the TV shows I like). They include:

• Jeph Loeb was a producer on Lost and now works on Heroes.
• Joss Whedon created and wrote the hit TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer (plus Angel, Firefly, etc.) and also writes comics.
• Lost executive producer Damon Lindelof moonlights for Marvel.
• Allan Heinberg, who also pens books for Marvel, has written for Sex in the City, The O.C. and now Grey's Anatomy.
• Mark Verheiden, who wrote for DC, now writes Battlestar Galactica (considered by many, and me, to be the best show on TV)

What's generally interesting to me, though, is how this permeable membrane between TV, games, comics and other media (and fans, too) is increasing the complexity and quality of the stories told in serial form. That is, it's not just that TV writers are now writing comics, but that good writers are getting to write in many media (which is something that Meltzer mentions in his interview).

(Ironic: My original draft was so long that I could've serialized it, but instead I opted for this one-shot.)