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Law & Order, The X-Files, ER and Buffy the Vampire Slayer all use this type of formatting. Kirk, Spock and the Enterprise crew are presented with a new intergalactic situation in a short teaser, then face complications in acts one, two and three and some kind of resolution in act four on Star Trek.Īdding a teaser to the four act structure became especially fashionable in the 1990s and early 2000s. In fact, right before the closing commercial, the show leaves the viewer with the evidence presented to a jury, but the viewer must return after the commercial to learn the jury’s final verdict. Dragnet predates formal act structure, but the scripts do specify three commercial breaks. Each episode finds Detective Joe Friday chasing down a new perp and using lots of technical police jargon along the way. Airing on TV, its format didn’t change much. Dragnet is an early and prominent example.īeginning as a radio show in 1949, Dragnet became so successful it was developed into a TV series in 1951. professions which operate on a “case-by-case” basis.Įpisodic drama on television has origins in police procedurals, which are an offshoot of radio detective shows. They’re about detectives, doctors, lawyers, vigilantes, ghostbusters….

For this reason, these shows tend to do well in syndication.īecause they require a new case, situation, or monster each week, episodic dramas tend to be workplace shows. Whether comedy or drama, each installment of an episodic show uses the same characters, yet is self-contained. without having seen the previous episodes. Serialized TV is made for bingeing because the spectator simply hops to the next part of the big, season-long story.īy contrast, a viewer can understand an episode of Star Trek, Law & Order, Seinfeld (and the comedies we discussed in last week’s post about multi-cam sitcoms) etc. Each episode builds upon the previous one and is a slice of a much larger story (think: LOST, Game of Thrones, Stranger Things… even the Marvel Cinematic Universe, etc.). The recent decline in episodic drama series can be tied to the rise of streaming platforms where episodes tend to drop all at once rather than airing week-to-week.Įpisodes of serialized television are more like chapters in a book.

When we talk about episodic television, we refer to shows like Scooby-Doo, where a character or group of characters is presented with (and fully solves) a new case in each episode. Over the years, television has evolved to be more serialized than episodic, but it’s helpful to understand both types of storytelling.

Welcome back to TV Formatting Fundamentals – the blog series where we take a deep dive into the evolution and act structure of various TV formats.

The closet actor who plays progressive monster