- Ep 1 + 2: The Mystery.
- Ep 3 - 6: Fambly and Crying.
- Ep 6: Mild cliffhanger.
- Ep 7: DEEP FLASHBACK: prequel episode exposits the entire mythology.
- Ep 8: Resolve Ep 6, but set up several more cliffhangers for a Season 2 that's probably not going to happen.
Seriously, it feels like this Episode Seven hack has been in almost every series I've watched in the last several years.
Once you see it, you won't be able to un-see it. I'm sorry.
I think there's a rule at Netflix that they can't greenlight anything where the whole season has been written. The last couple of episodes must be struggling and ultimately end up weak enough for you to question why you watched any of it. Disclaimer: We canceled our Netflix subscription a couple of months ago and haven't missed it yet.
No shame in droppin' a company that supports transphobes.
It's like what they tell golfers. "You can come to the course every day, but I can't move the fuckin' holes."
I hate to be "that guy" but the one thing golf courses do to change it up is move the location of the holes on the green.
One list that's stood the test of time is Van Dine's '20 Rules For Writing Detective Stories' (1928). It's fun to tick them off while watching genre-conformant shows ("the deader the corpse the better"):
Reading that list makes me never want to watch or read anything even remotely related to a "detective" story again. That's just a mad-lib.
That's just the rules for the subgenre that is "for the folks who like to solve mysteries while reading". If you followed that list exactly, then The Big Lebowski wouldn't be a detective film ("[Dude]: Oh, man - my thinking about this case had become very uptight! Yeah! Your father!" and the brother shamus scene)
It's surprising readable considering it's pushing 100 years old, and even more so when learn its heritage (written by an author who had just been bedridden for two years recovering from overwork/cocaine addition, reading hundreds of detective novels out of frustration and boredom during).
And vastly superior to the other, more famous list, Knox's '10 Commandments of Detective Fiction' (1929), by a writer who went on to form a mystery writer's club with the likes of Agatha Christie:
* More positive than it seems - a call to stop using Asian stereotype characters prevalent at the time.
#9 completely ruined Scooby Doo for me. Thanks a lot man!
But seriously my favorite detective series, Vera, violates about half of these rules.
For example, I'd argue that the X-Files was certainly of the detective genre and even just its premise violated items 9, 13, and 14 at minimum. Blade Runner violates items 8 (the Voight-Kampff test, e.g.) and 4 (I'm one of them!). I'm not sure how many of these Memento violates but it's, you know, a lot of them.
That said, I think there's a subset of these that are pretty solidly true of any piece of fiction premised on unraveling a mystery. Number five, in particular, stands out to me (emphasis added):
I'd also argue this is the flaw in Severance. (Noting that our host disagrees with me on this point in characteristically pointed fashion.) The whole thing is predicated as a mystery, namely, What's going on here exactly? Evidence is provided but it doesn't matter, it's all smoke screen, and in the end it will be revealed that nobody knows what's going on here. I'm pretty sure that includes the screen writers.
My personal predicate is that if you're going to tell a story about a mystery, the solution needs to come together in such a way that the viewer/reader can say, "Oh wow! Yeah, ok, I can piece that together!" If you draw someone in with a mystery and then resolve the mystery with something the viewer/reader could never have seen, it's not a mystery.
Wait, what?
Those rules are actually suggestions for how to write genre-twisting detective stories by breaking exactly one of them.
Yep, and if Season 2 does happen it's usually terrible.
In fact Season 2 is the often terrible even if the show didn't follow the formula. I call it Netflixitis.
So many of these ideas would have made good movies instead.
WandaVision was the same, just in the 8th episode instead of the 7th. But it still gets points for execution that most Netflix series don't.
Also: the characters stumble around for the first 6 episodes, acting randomly with no damn good reason for anything. If they acted sensibly, the big conflict would have been resolved by episode 3.
I too used to believe that the stupidity of characters in these fictions was implausible at best, and lazy writing at worst.
Then I saw 2020.
When my brother changed his Netflix password years ago, I had a feeling I wasn't missing out on much anymore. Now I'm sure of it.
And I even saw the shit Quibi had to offer.
There's the occasional episode 7 where the flashback is better than anything in main show, and you wish you'd seen that episode and nothing else. Yes, I'm looking at you Mythic Quest.
Similar for Ted Lasso S2E9 ("Coach Beard goes on a bender")
Is "fambly" just supposed to mean "family" or is there some meme I'm missing?
Tired: Hero’s journey
Wired: Streamer’s Journey
How much has this diverged from "Save the Cat"?
At least these short seasons avoid what I call the Mirror Darkly effect, which is when a series (for example, Enterprise) does something new and different that demonstrates just how much better it could have been if whoever came up with the idea for that episode had been given free rein to do more on the show as a whole. There was a flashback episode on Heroes that had the same effect, and I expect it shows up a lot with flashback episodes but not exclusively.
I read somewhere that if Enterprise hadn't been cancelled, they were considering doing an entire season in the Terran Empire.
In a sense, that's what the back half of S1 of DISCO was, which proved pretty conclusively that it wasn't anywhere near as awesome an idea as the Enterprise episode made it seem.
Why couldn't they have just done the Romulan war like we wanted and avoided the pebble people?
Sorry, I'm currently working through DS9 and enjoying the Dominion War so I'm extra bitter.
Can someone please list the shows? I don't know of any other than "Lost".