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Theorizing the Television Episode Kathryn VanArendonk

Narrative, Volume 27, Number 1, January 2019, pp. 65-82 (Article)

Published by The Ohio State University Press

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/712871

Access provided by Ebsco Publishing (4 Jan 2019 09:21 GMT)

Kathryn VanArendonk

Teorizing the Television Episode

ABSTR ACT: Television storytelling is one of the most vibrant, dominant fctional modes of the twentieth and twenty-frst centuries, and yet its foundational structure, the episode, has been undertheorized. All television stories deploy the episode in some way, and its formal and fctional contours are both inescapable and distinct from exist- ing narrative theories of other serial forms. Tis essay is an attempt to provide a nar- rative theory of the television episode as a form, one that accounts for plot-based epi- sodic storytelling as well as episodes built around a thematic structure, and it outlines a common framework for all fctional episodic expression on television. To do this, the essay considers several key texts, including Mad Men, House, and Friends, and explores the episode in contrast to the theories of narrative parts and wholes provided by works like Barthes’s “Structural Analysis.” Te essay also gestures towards a longer history of episodic storytelling in television through shows like I Love Lucy and Twilight Zone, and also notes more recent developments in streaming television storytelling, where the episode’s diminishing formal weight is growing more palpable.

KEYWORDS: episode, television, seriality, twentieth century, twenty-frst century, form, Mad Men

SINCE AB OUT 2015, as streaming platforms have started pumping out ever-increas- ing numbers of serialized television stories with whole seasons appearing in front of the audience all at once, the familiar, ubiquitous weight of the TV episode as a defning form has started to shif a little. On network television, in shows still watched by the plurality of the TV audience, the TV episode pulses along as usual. But in some new series on Netfix and Amazon Prime, the episode as a meaningful formal device—the episode as something that seeps into the pores of every moment of a television show, something that operates as a driving inescapable pressure on its form and the story-

Kathryn VanArendonk is a staf writer for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, where she writes about and reviews television. She has a PhD in English from Stanford University and wrote her dissertation on the formal modes of serial storytelling, focusing on the singular role of television’s episodic structure.

NARRATIVE, Vol. 27, No. 1 (January 2019) Copyright © 2019 by Te Ohio State University

66 Kathryn VanArendonk

telling—has begun to look less insistent and less essential. Tat waning infuence is most apparent in the context of series that appear in massive multi-episode chunks all at once, like Jessica Jones or Godless, but it’s also visible in a series like Game of Trones, where bits of various plots can appear almost at random throughout an hour, and could just as easily have been scenes from the previous episode or the next. In shows like this, the episode has become, if not a completely invisible force, then something with much less power than it used to have.

But that change is arriving on the TV landscape slowly and unevenly, and for de- cades before this moment, the episode has been nestled deep in the most fundamental structure of how a TV show works and what makes it distinct from other forms of fction. And even as it’s slowly begun to erode as a driving force in narrative con- struction, for some newer series, the potency of the episode—the opportunities and fexibility it afords—has become even clearer. Tis essay will explore the television episode as a narrative structure, arguing that its structure marks television seriality as distinct from seriality in the novel, or anywhere else. I’ll consider what defnes the episode, how its central features have enabled formal experimentation and become a unit of meaning even in long-running stories, and how the episode’s possibility as an optional deviation from the norm has allowed it to survive even afer strict, time-lim- ited programming grids have started to fall by the wayside.

Te Episode as “Te One”

Te crucial diference between the television episode and other units of narrative di- vision can be pretty well understood through the naming conventions of episode titles for the sitcom Friends. On Friends, a classic sitcom format usually following an A, B, C plot structure where a main story dominates, a second story is woven throughout, and a third story provides color, each episode gets a fll-in-the-blank title: “Te One with the Monkey,” “Te One Where Ross and Rachel Take a Break,” “Te One in Vegas.” Tere are a few exceptions over the course of the show’s ten seasons (“Te One Hundredth,” “Te Last One”), but by and large, the names of Friends episodes take one plot point as a description for the whole piece. Te convention is winkingly, self-consciously reductive because it can be—there are other plot lines in “Te One with the Holiday Armadillo,” but the armadillo is introduced, given a confict, and re- solved within that episode’s twenty-one minute runtime, and he will not be returning in the next episode (he is, afer all, a holiday armadillo, and there’s not much point in keeping him around afer December). In cases where the titular event does leech across episode boundaries and returns as an issue in the subsequent week (Rachel’s baby does not disappear afer “Te One Where Rachel Has a Baby”), the episode’s title is a marker of monumentality. Long-term plot development that builds slowly for many weeks eventually reaches some crisis point, and in the case of these episodes, the title represents a milestone event in the lives of Friends characters.

Te real utility of the Friends episode titles for thinking about the episode’s form has less to do with the title’s fll-in-the-blank section and more to do with its opening words. Each episode of Friends is “the one .  .  .  ,” a formulation that marks both the

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episode’s singularity and its position as one of many. It is a form predicated on its potentially absolute independence from the rest of a television show’s narrative, and its existence relies on its status as an incomplete piece of a larger whole. Te conven- tion of “the one” also distinguishes the television episode from potentially analogous forms in other long narratives. On Friends and elsewhere, this “one” is functionally identical to that “one.” Where episodes in other forms (for instance, the novel) are defned solely by their fctional content, the television episode is defned by both its fctional and formal elements. A television episode is one half-hour of Friends, but it is also one complete, self-contained narrative. As a result, a chain of episodes run back to back can follow a continuing, developing storyline where Chandler and Monica’s London hook-up eventually leads to their engagement and marriage, but these episodes are also uniform blocks of plot with the same size and shape that retain individual identities.

Te NBC sitcom Community represents a diferent version of the same episodic phenomenon. Internally, each episode of Friends can appear relatively fragmentary, as each thread of the multiple braided plots diverge from each other and the episode bounces back and forth between separate character groups. Te episode is most vis- ible as a coherent, self-contained unit when viewed in the deluge of dozens of other Friends episodes, so that the plot patterning emerges as formula rather than fragment and the insistent drumbeat of the episodes’ titling convention makes its message clear. Te reverse is true for Community. When viewed on the scale of a season or series, Community looks nearly schizophrenic, with styles and structures as aggressively di- vergent from each other as possible. Two episodes of Community may resemble each other as closely as a Vermeer resembles a Rothko; one week Community proceeds as if it were a blockbuster Hollywood action flm, one week it is an 8-bit video game, one week a Ken Burns documentary, a My Dinner With Andre spoof, a police procedural, a conspiracy thriller, a claymation holiday special, or a musical. And yet Community and Friends are operating on precisely the same foundational features of the televi- sion episode, which allow them both to treat each episode as a separate unit entirely distinct from what came before or what comes next. In doing so, these two shows use that structure for opposing ends—on Friends, each episode is individual and yet nearly indistinguishable from any other episode, and on Community, every episode throws out the rules and rewrites them from scratch.

As a unit, the television episode is a container for plot as well as a formal structure that guides reception. For television shows that deviate from the cookie-cutter sitcom or procedural style of episodic boundaries, the episode retains an authority to shape its contents into a meaningful, singular whole. An episode’s constituent pieces have the power to speak more meaningfully to each other than they do to continuing plotlines in subsequent weeks; even in the most “serialized” shows where plots stretch across months and years, many episodes could still be given Friends-style titles: “Te One in Rome” (Mad Men’s “Souvenir”), “Te One with the Atomic Bomb” (Twin Peaks: Te Return’s “Part 8”), “Te One with the Lion Sex Boat” (Te Lefovers’ “It’s a Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt World”). Just as in the case of the Friends episodes, there are other plots and other touchstones in each of these examples, but the titles are still accurate. “Part 8” of Twin Peaks: Te Return is essentially illegible when viewed outside the context

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of the whole season—Lynch has been one of the many showrunners in recent years to insist that his TV season is less a TV show and more a cinematic construction. And yet in more than one instance over that season, he uses the TV episode in precisely this way, as a formal boundary and a unit of narrative meaning.

Tere are other complications, and particularly with the advent of streaming TV narratives, the episode’s formal restrictions vary in force from series to series. But in a nutshell, these are the elements of the episode that underlie its rigidity and astounding range as a narrative structure. An episode can stand by itself but cannot exist alone; it is a unit defned by its content as well as its organizing frames; it is a form that produces objects that can appear both formulaically identical and entirely dissimilar.

I’ve defned the episode in terms of a series of combinations and contradictions, a defnition that comes out of my sense that the episode is indeed the product of tensions that pull in opposite directions. More important than these tensions, though, is the understanding that the TV episode is a product, a carefully designed and rule- bound entity, and not the mere invisible, inevitable result of televised narrative or serialized storytelling. Even in series that no longer appear within the framework of a restrictive schedule-driven setting, where the episode has become something of a vestigial formal organ, the echoes of its past and its utility as a storytelling tool remain.

Procedural Storytelling and Episodic Logic

For many television shows, especially those that still dominate the bread-and-but- ter weekly network schedule in 2018, the episode’s serial boundaries are delineations of plot. Te resulting pattern of weekly confict and resolution, victim and criminal, challenge and winner, or dilemma and solution clearly outline the beginnings and ends of each episode, even without contextual or formal markers of division. We have become so accustomed to this form that its underlying concept seems to fade into a background of inevitability, but this premise is actually incredibly weird. Take, for in- stance, the medical drama House. On House, the standard episode follows the prickly, brilliant eponymous doctor and his medical student lackeys as they diagnose and treat patients with rare illnesses. Tese episodes follow a regular, easily predictable pattern: afer a mysterious collapse, a patient arrives at Princeton Plainsboro Hospital. Cur- mudgeonly as ever, Dr. House refuses to meet the patient and instead sends his interns to complete a battery of expensive, invasive, and physically grueling tests; when these tests only deepen the mystery, Dr. House begins to take a more personal interest in the case. Afer insisting on a course of treatment likely to kill, maim, or sterilize the patient if his diagnosis is incorrect, House must appeal to the hospital’s sexy admin- istrator for approval. At the last moment, just as the surgeons begin to remove the leg that will forever render the patient incapable of realizing her Olympic gymnastic dreams, House halts the surgery to reveal that in fact, the patient is sufering from a diferent, easily treatable but shockingly rare disorder.

For many series, a protagonist’s changelessness—or change on such an incremen- tal level as to be more of a blip than a design—can feel like a larger driving force of episodic delineation than plot. It doesn’t particularly matter what the gang from

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Seinfeld is getting up to, nor are the specifc store shenanigans the most memorable thing about an episode of Superstore. Plot setups exist as a showcase for character, letting the audience spend more time with familiar, remarkable individuals. And in many cases, a signifcant moment of characterization is the most notable thing about any particular installment—less “Te One With the Holiday Armadillo” and more “Te One Where Ross Tries to Be A Good Dad.” But Ross tries to be a good dad (and fails) in many Friends episodes, just as Seinfeld nitpicks about a mundane annoyance and House is abusive to his employees. Tese revelations of character may be the point of an episode, but they’re not clearly and regularly mapped onto an episode’s shape. Particularly for crime procedurals or sitcoms, plot is the foremost driver of how an episode begins and ends; it is the thing that allows for the signifcant moments of character revelation, and it is the force that pulls those character revelations to some kind of closure. Te pleasure may be in watching the Cheers cast be friends, but there’s no episodic rhythm to their friendship without individual plot-based premises for each episode. Particularly in the case of highly amnesiac television storytelling—most predominantly, sitcoms and crime procedurals—character becomes subordinate to plot as a driver of episodic form.

With a few variations and a few brief departures, House’s repeating, amnesiac storytelling, commonly referred to as a procedural format, was repeated on a highly rated, incredibly popular network television show about twenty times a year for eight years.1 In spite of his remarkable record for last-minute saves, House must still ask permission to violate hospital policy when his treatments seem out of line. Addition- ally, House’s personal failings continue to be a cause of concern for his employers and employees, even though his pattern of addiction and rehabilitation is as regular and predictable as his patients’ rate of rare-disease acquisition. Te glow of success from a previous week’s case rarely if ever enters into the tension of the current medical mys- tery. House and other television dramas that operate on this formula are perpetually in the moment, with no echoes from the past or concerns for the future entering into the confict at hand. How strange to return to the same characters again and again with no expectation that their circumstances will ever change.

Tis strangeness is entirely enabled by a function of the television episode’s narra- tive form. On House and on similar programs (more recently, Te Good Doctor, 9–1-1, Blue Bloods, Seal Team, S. W. A. T., etc.) the episode is a reductive force. Its boundaries are an inward-moving pressure, neatly and relentlessly encapsulating everything es- sential about a television show within its forty-three-minute run time. Few episodes of House go without a reference to the main character’s unstable mental state, his astonishing Holmesian powers of reasoning, and a patient’s unlikely-and-deadly trop- ical parasite, because each episode is a relatively equal, equally representative piece of House. Te episode enables this kind of reductively repetitive logic because it comes with a built-in, implicit reset button. Diferent genres take advantage of this element in a variety of ways, and some never use it at all. But somewhere within the promise of any episode is its potential to be a beginning (even if it’s the fourth episode, or the fortieth). Te episode’s capacity for re-beginning is instantly apparent in the structure of a show like House, where its patient-of-the-week mechanism builds a new intro- duction into each episode, but its formulaic patterns of confict and resolution beyond

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the patient are equally important products of this episodic feature. House’s adversarial relationship with the hospital administration is repeated so frequently, and with so lit- tle meaningful development, that the only way to make sense of the show’s regularity (aside from a belief that the entire cast ironically sufers from a rare disease causing weekly amnesia), is that on some level, the show starts all over again each week. What came before may not be erased or entirely forgotten, but it could be, particularly if it’s an element of the show that afects its episodic formula.2 Te episode’s automatic reset feature also explains the necessity for each episode to be equally representative of the show at large—in a series where every episode is a do-over, every episode is equally responsible for carrying the burden of the show’s identity.3 Like a cell that carries a complete DNA sequence, each typical episode of House contains the raw information necessary to reconstruct the entire series.

Even for many series where the central premise does not require elaborate narra- tive machinations in order to continue making sense each week, the episode’s implicit capacity for re-beginning shapes weekly plotting. Nothing about the logic of I Love Lucy insists that there be sudden gaps in narrative, that cause and efect have dimin- ished impact, or that episodes necessarily start a new story from scratch. Unlike House, the characters and plots of I Love Lucy do not rely upon a set of dramatic tropes that somehow must be repeated ad infnitum; as the episode titles suggest, much of the show is built on everyday material. “Ricky Asks for a Raise,” “Men Are Messy,” “Ethel’s Birthday,” “Lucy Learns to Drive”—why would a story need a structure allowing it to return to status quo when it’s hardly lef? And yet, the episode operates within I Love Lucy just as it does on House four decades later. Televisual episodic form permits endless repetition (how else could a fction sustain not one but four episodes where Lucy wants to redecorate?4), and the episode’s capacity to start all over again—and in so doing, forget much of what has come before—informs each of the many Lucy episodes which end with Lucy mid-crisis, hilariously caught in yet another seemingly inextricable conundrum. “Lucy Does a TV Commercial” may be the funniest of these, and the episode closes with Lucy staggering drunkenly onto Ricky’s television show as he sings live on camera. Te episode’s conclusion signals I Love Lucy’s release from the probable implications of this scenario, making it clear that Ricky will not have to deal with the fallout from this event, nor will Lucy’s dramatic failure prevent her from attempting a television career in the future. Five decades before the frst episode of House is released, I Love Lucy uses the same televisual episodic form, in spite of the series’ diferences in premise, in genre, in flming style, and in runtime.

Te Television Episode’s Serial Antecedents

Te kind of storytelling I’m describing here is most commonly associated with televi- sion, but it also bears a strong resemblance to some earlier serial forms.5 I’ve already described House as Holmesian, and indeed, the storytelling form that pulses under- neath House’s constant, scarcely wavering formula looks a lot like the narrative devices that shape Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories, or any number of mystery novel series from the twentieth and twenty-frst centuries. And many of them are the same—the serial

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unit as a container for plot, the repetition, the presence of a detective fgure whose mere existence promises the eventual solution of the mystery. Te diference is in the part’s assumed relationship with a larger whole. A television episode is more beholden to its accompanying cohort of episodes—television episodes necessarily exist as one of many, in a way that was not integral to the earliest Holmes stories and is not func- tionally defning for many mystery novels. My particular favorites, Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter series, do not use the inter-book breaks in any regular way, nor does each book maintain a steady relationship to their role as a serial. Beyond a certain point in the series, the protagonist isn’t really Lord Peter anymore; Have His Carcase is told from the perspective of Harriet Vane, Lord Peter doesn’t even arrive in Gaudy Night until the halfway point, and the fnal two novels are more about processing Peter and Harriet’s trauma than they are about mystery and resolution. Te mystery novel series, like the novel itself, is a looser, baggier beast.

Part of the diference is in the implied multiplicity of the part. One episode of House is representative of House, but as a series, House is defned by being the um- brella of numerous episodic installments. Tere’s no such thing as a television series consisting of only one episode.6 For however much weight a single episode of House can carry, the identity of House as a series is also defned by how it uses episodes, the way it repeats, the things that do carry over from one week to the next (generally who his interns are sleeping with), and the things that somehow do not carry over (the consequences for House’s perpetual misbehavior). Tis is not integral to the identity of the Holmes canon, where the relationship between one part and the next is noto- riously ad hoc—some serial “parts” are novels; others are short stories. Some operate with a long memory of the fctional past; some ignore it entirely. Te Holmes texts lack the regularity and drumbeat sameness of their mystery-solving counterparts on television. Tat same relative fuidity is also a marker for the mystery novel series more generally—while one series may use each novel in a way that looks quite a lot like a group of television episodes (Sue Grafon’s Alphabet series, for instance, or Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct group), another may use each novel in a much less regular, less structured way (e.g., the aforementioned Sayers books). A crucial part of the televi- sion episode’s identity is its inescapability: with the exception of a very few of the most recent streaming shows, the episode is an absolutely unvarying, obligatory force in TV storytelling. For Holmes stories and mystery novel series, there’s no such required rigidity, and there’s no implicit assumption of a part being one of many.

Episodic Structure beyond the Procedural

Although it’s a well-represented and commercially successful variety of television sto- rytelling, the House-style drama is not the only option for TV fction,7 and a formulaic approach to weekly serial plotting is not an inevitable result of episodic structure. House’s perpetual state of rinse and repeat is a narrative avenue made possible by the underlying features of the episode as a device, but it is also only the most extreme ver- sion of this form of episodic storytelling. Tis is already apparent in House and I Love Lucy themselves—each of these series relies on amnesiac breaks between episodes as a

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default, but each series also writes across those boundaries at some point in their run. For I Love Lucy, the episodic walls are breached when Lucille Ball’s real-life pregnancy becomes a fctional plot in Lucy Ricardo’s life. Many series fall in something like an interim space, with some episodes operating as extremely plot-bounded stories and others relying more on linear storytelling across installments—for a show like Bones, the standard episode is wholly self-contained and the rare linear episodes are those that suddenly pick up a linear romance plot to boost ratings for the Nielsen sweeps. For a show like Justifed, which has fewer episodes per season and isn’t harnessed to a major network’s ratings calendar, the balance is reversed: most episodes are a part of the season’s broader linear arc, but a signifcant handful are self-contained stories. Te episode is equally present in each installment; any episode has the potential to be self-contained.

But in these short runs of a strictly linear story, or on a series where every ep- isode is unquestionably bound inside an ordered narrative, the episode ofen shifs into a slightly diferent expression of the form. Tis may be best represented by a show like AMC’s drama Mad Men. Te season 2 episode “Maidenform” is a useful example—while every episode of Mad Men plays with this structure to some de- gree, “Maidenform” is an unusually adept demonstration of the form. Unlike a pro- cedural House-esque television series, Mad Men’s plotlines meander across episode boundaries, developing slowly over the course of several weeks, and this episode is a typical example. All of the season’s plotlines are in play here—protagonist Don Draper is struggling with a failing marriage and his stolen identity, copywriter Peggy Olson is searching for professional and personal fulfllment, the ad agency Sterling Cooper is increasingly unstable—but none of these plots have come to a full boil, and none are either introduced or resolved. Instead, “Maidenform” is full of various minor events, each of them so ordinary and apparently insignifcant that they hardly qualify as “eventful.” Don and his wife Betty attend a fashion show at their country club. Uncharacteristically, Peggy shows up at the stylish strip show where her colleagues are entertaining a client. Don continues his afair with a client’s wife. Te ad agency works on a new campaign. Te episode is nearly humdrum in its lack of narrative momentum. Furthermore, the absence of any signifcant crises seems to suggest that this is a very diferent type of episodic plotting than the self-contained, solved-in-an- hour structure of a show like Law & Order or House. Almost everything that happens in “Maidenform” either continues what came before or moves things into place for later—and if that’s the case, what is this episode’s purpose? Is it even an episode, in the same sense that an installment of House is an episode? How does a serial installment like “Maidenform” in any way resemble the internal coherence and inward-looking reductive pressure that seems to be a key feature of episodic structure on other tele- vision shows?

As it happens, “Maidenform” and many other Mad Men episodes do include at least a small element of procedural episodic plotting. In “Maidenform,” Don and his creative team develop a new ad campaign for the lingerie company Playtex, and like the plot-of-the-week structure in a procedural, the ad campaign has something of an episodic arc. But Mad Men’s strategy is still quite diferent from a standard procedural episode. For one, the Playtex plotline is a tiny piece of the larger episode—it takes

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up approximately ten percent of the episode’s total run time, while a classic House episode would reverse this balance, with the patient plotline covering ninety percent of the episode.8 More importantly, though, Mad Men mines its episode-length plot for its thematic suggestions. Te Playtex story raises questions about female beauty, cos- tumes, and body images, and even though this plot covers a small piece of the over- all episode, its related associations and queries bleed into the surrounding material, as various female characters are shamed or rejoined about their clothing.9 Even the episode’s title cues its thematic cohesion: Sterling Cooper is working on the Playtex campaign, but the title comes from the much more literal name of Playtex’s competing lingerie brand.

By linking its brief, symbolic episode-length plot to a broader thematic concept, Mad Men substitutes episodic reduction on the level of plot with an episodic explo- ration of theme—where a sitcom may have had one particular plot to organize reve- lations of character, Mad Men spins its characters around episodic axes of thematic boundaries. Te driving question is not, how does Don Draper make the Maidenform campaign and how does that plot resolve, but rather, how is Draper’s character ex- posed through explorations of self-refection and character binaries? And of course, this too is a form of reduction. Mad Men’s aesthetic and its highly stylized dialogue make ambiguity, vagueness, and the disconnect between beautiful surfaces and dam- aged interiors the series’ bread and butter. It’s a show that pretends to be difcult. Matt Zoller Seitz writes that Mad Men’s characters are “random, inscrutable, and mysteri- ous,” and its “explanatory speeches and dream sequences tend to muddy motivation rather than clarify it,” and in the New York Review of Books Daniel Mendelsohn muses about why “so much of Mad Men is curiously opaque, all inexplicable exteriors and posturing.” It’s not, though. Te desired result of Mad Men’s apparent inaccessibility is not to be actually inaccessible—its every mystifying shot of Don examining a fy caught in the ceiling light and each obfuscating line of dialogue about misrepresented desire is instead an open invitation for interpretation.10

So far from endlessly muddled vagueness, Mad Men basically begs its audience to search for meaning and thematic resonance. One need look no further to judge the success of Mad Men’s request than the endless day-afer blog posts attempting to piece apart an episode’s every cultural reference and long, suggestive glance for a deeper understanding of the show’s meaning. Whether we land on a “correct” reading is beside the point. Te show that appears to be shrouded in mystery and replete with unplumbable emotional depths nevertheless succeeds in instigating what amounts to a show versus audience game of hide and seek, which we play happily in spite of the program’s apparent impenetrability. Te explanation for this disconnect between Mad Men’s supposed difculty and its audience’s cheerful, productive search for mean- ing comes from the reductive capability of the episode as a form. Against the slowly developing plots and casually dropped references to Frank O’Hara collections, Mad Men uses the episode to build a digestible unit out of an otherwise intimidatingly expansive narrative.

Te episode is the narrative container that allows Mad Men to explore weekly variations on a theme, but the substitution of theme for plot does not mean that Mad Men’s episodes also lack internal fctional structure. For the purposes of understand-

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ing the episode’s resiliency even in these highly serialized television dramas, the ques- tion of what any specifc episode means is less interesting than the question of how that episode gets an audience to ask, “what did that episode mean?” in the frst place.11 In the case of “Maidenform,” the frst technique is to set aside this one episode as a readable, interpretable unit even though its major plot developments are inextricable from the surrounding episodes. Te Playtex campaign does some of the work here, but it’s not the only piece of episodic structure. “Maidenform” is recognizable as a single, completed unit thanks in part to its structural bookends, which cue a sense of beginning and ending, even though the episode lacks a strong, dominant internal plot arc. It begins with an opening montage sequence, in which Betty, Peggy and Joan get dressed in the morning. Tis opening sequence gets its parallel closing moment in the penultimate scene of the show, when Peggy arrives at the strip club. Afer the viewer watches Betty, Peggy, and Joan dressing in the show’s beginning, the end of the episode turns on the spectacle of a woman undressing. None of the show’s storylines start or fnish in this episode, but these scenes create a beginning and ending all the same; day and night, dressing and undressing, introduction and conclusion.

It’s clear that Mad Men retains the television episode as a narrative device in spite of its move away from episodic plotting. But the more signifcant issue here is that this is not a peculiarity of this one episode or of this one television show. Tis kind of narrative technique—in which one piece of a big text is built as a whole, self-con- tained unit even though it’s also a subordinate piece of a longer work—is a charac- teristic of the television episode across genre and platform, and until the most recent developments in TV storytelling, was absolutely ubiquitous. Not all episodes look like “Maidenform,” but even in those that don’t, the episode has always been represented somehow, in some combination of a formal, thematic, or plot-based technique. What the episode means, in this respect, is that television seriality does not work like seri- ality in the novel, or seriality anywhere else—in this sense, for this form, the whole is something less than the sum of its parts. Perhaps it’s because television series can be so inordinately long, or because they’re ofen entities that exist outside of any single creative mind and are instead the product of multiple producers, writers, or showrunners. Or perhaps it’s because television has fgured out how to do seriality diferently—how to make the serial part an end in and of itself and not just a means to something bigger.

It also makes the more recent decline of episodic rigidity unsurprising, as it’s come at a time when so much new television storytelling is serial on the level of a “season” (i.e., a group of maybe six or twelve episodes) but not on the level of an episode. A TV episode no longer has to represent the whole series, and no longer needs to produce meaning for an audience in each episode, because the audience has access to so much more of the series at once. Not coincidentally, this move away from episodic absolutism has come hand in hand with a rise in the number of television series that displace the “complete unit” pressure onto the television season as a frame; since 2010, the “anthology” series has become increasingly popular. For shows like American Crime Story, True Detective, and Fargo, shifing the opportunity for a new beginning onto the seasonal structure is a middle road between reductive episodic limits and an audience’s desire for defnitive endings.

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In one light, the current move toward making the episode an opt-in structure in contexts where television is no longer a weekly serial is a relief from the burden of regular rhythmic intensity. If one episode is mostly about place-setting for what comes next, a viewer has immediate access to the afermath. Tere’s no need for every episode to fulfll the same role of individuality and meaning-making, and for those that don’t, the episode becomes something more like a gesture, a pause—a convention fulflled. But the episode as opt-in structure can also be a way of perpetually kicking the narrative can down the episodic road, in a way that many popular critics have come to note is ofen to the detriment of a series’ narrative drive.12 Te loss of the episode in some streaming platforms can mean more freedom for writers, but on a granular level, it can also mean looser, emptier storytelling. In this context the epi- sode’s opt-in iteration impoverishes the series.

Toward a Taxonomy of Episodic Expressions

Te type of episode I’ve described in Mad Men’s “Maidenform” is just that—a type of episode, which in some crucial and useful ways is a clearly and substantially diferent structure from that which drives a show like House or Friends. It is, perhaps, a the- matic episode, recognizable for the way in which its boundaries and internal logic are defned by a central thematic concern that creates an episodic framework for long-arc plotlines. Mad Men is not alone in the use of thematic episodes, nor is it the frst. Primetime soaps like Dallas and thirtysomething also deployed this version of episodic form, and it’s equally visible on shows like Veronica Mars (a neo-noir), Transparent (a genre-busting half-hour series), and Jane the Virgin (a telenovela).

My distinction between the plot-delimited episodes of House and I Love Lucy and the thematic episode typifed by Mad Men is an efort to chart two expressions of episodic form, but of course they’re not the only iterations of episodic structure on television, nor is the spectrum on which I’ve located them (defned by the use of either plot or theme as a primary marker) the only tool available to defne episodic models. Tere are ample, continually proliferating versions and varieties of episodic structures on television. One could set aside, for instance, network TV season fnales as a defn- able set, or Te Good Place’s careful combination of comedic arcs with a closing twist as a distinctive genre-bending blend, or one could group together shows like Game of Trones and Jessica Jones that seem to abjure the episode’s utility in the boggy mid- dles of their seasons and then return to thematic episodic rhythms by the end. All of which is to say that this argument about episodic form on television is not intended to exclude the identifcation and examination of particular instantiations of the episode. Tese are necessary and valuable lenses through which to understand the way tele- vision narrative functions. Robin Nelson’s work on fexi-narratives, for instance, ex- plores a particular episodic form that is the result of “institutional constraints” which privileges prolifcacy over “dramatic quality more traditionally viewed” (42). Rather, my aim here is to identify and examine the underlying episodic engine that drives each of these types equally, and in so doing, to recognize the foundational structure of the television episode as a singular form.

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Previous Narrative Teories and the Standalone Episode

Tis understanding of the television episode’s role does not ft comfortably into the major theories of narrative form. Critical work on the television episode’s narrative structure has tended to focus on its erasability in the broader context of a whole series. Centering her argument on the audiences of soap operas, Jennifer Hayward suggests that “each serial episode means little in isolation from its long history and contextu- alizing narrative fow; each modifes the previous installment while simultaneously tilting forward to the next, reaching out of the last frame to grab a hint of the one to come” (136). Hayward’s analysis expresses an important point about the episode’s ul- timate relationship to its broader serial contexts, but in so doing, doesn’t spend much time on the role of form and coherence within the episode itself. In a similar vein, Jason Jacobs asks, “how do we know when to halt our judgment, since the boundaries of the episode take us beyond and before it? To what extent does the critical concen- tration focused within an episode push us outside it for answers?” (444). Particularly for television series with long-running plots, or indeed any series where characters have the capacity to develop from one week to the next, a critical focus beyond the self-contained context of a single episode is a fruitful and indispensable level of ex- amination. But exploration outside of a single episode’s limits does not exclude an appreciation for the role and structure of episodic form, which aside from enforcing self-containment, also provides a signifcant critical lever with which to understand how plot and character move within the season and the series.

Few theories of literary narrative say much about episodic structure, but those that do tend to consider the episode as a more granular unit than anything compara- ble to the television episode. David Miall’s work, which elaborates on Reformatsky’s contribution in Russian Formalism, defnes the episode as “a number of sentences taking up half a page or a page, usually demarcated by a coherence in the temporal or spatial setting . . . [which] ofers a thematically distinctive topic requiring a shif in the reader’s understanding” (112). Miall’s insistence on the small-scale level of episodic form here might be better aligned with a television episode’s scene or “beat,” but it is incongruous with the episode’s much larger relative position within the narrative. Te same objection of scale is true for Umberto Eco’s “discursive structures,” though Eco’s account is even further from the comparable television structure due to its total reliance on the reader’s recognition of these structures rather than any regularized formal feature of the text (31).

Of the available theoretical accounts of episodic form, Barthes’s “Structural Analysis of Narrative,” which conceives of pieces (functional units, catalysts, indi- ces, etc.) in a hierarchal relationship with the total text, may be the closest. Barthes’s description of the narrative unit relies on the concept that these sequences move in “counterpoint,” creating a narrative with a “fugued structure,” so that sequences in- evitably overlap, precluding any moment where the narrative is interrupted. “Within the single work,” Barthes writes, “the imbrication of sequences can indeed only be allowed to come to a halt within a radical break if the sealed-of blocks which then compose it are in some sort recuperated at the higher level of .  .  . the characters” (103–4). Tis description leaves no place for the extreme procedural form of the tele-

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vision episode, where the intervening space between episodes, the “radical break,” is less a “break” than a reset function. For this type of television narrative, the connec- tion between sequences on the episode-level cannot be “recuperated” by an “actantial relation” because the characters that do cross episode boundaries retain little more than their names and basic introductory qualities. Formula in television storytelling is only possible because of its repudiation of “actantial relations.”

But there’s a critical, defning feature of the episode that precludes it from coexis- tence with Barthes’s “Structural Analysis”: the episode’s potential—even now, in an era of the streaming behemoth—to be completely separate from the rest of a series. Epi- sodes that follow this model tend to rely on one or more major changes from a series’ typical narrative, stylistic, or structural modus operandi—these episodes take place in an alternate reality, they are told from the viewpoint of a minor character, they entail a sudden, striking departure from the show’s familiar stylistic tropes (the noir episode, the musical episode), or any number of other dramatic changes.13 Tis curi- osity of television narrative, the standalone, deviant episode, is frequently the focus of both critical acclaim (for episodes like Breaking Bad’s “Hermanos,” Homicide: Life on the Street’s “Tree Men and Adena,” BoJack Horseman’s “Fish Out of Water”) and disparagement (Happy Days’ Hollywood three-part episode, Te West Wing’s “Isaac and Ishmael,” the live episode of ER). Tere is no guarantee, in other words, that these episode-long experiments in narrative play will be successful. And yet, in spite of the mixed results and mixed responses, the deviant episode is a widespread and surpris- ingly common phenomenon.14

Te classic example of the one-of episode, the deviant departure from a show’s norm, is an episode from the sixth season of Bufy the Vampire Slayer, the musical ep- isode “Once More, With Feeling.” Like other long-running shows (and like other sci- ence-fction or fantasy series which tend to include more of these playful, stylistically anomalous episodes), “Once More, With Feeling” is one of several unusual episodes that appear throughout Bufy’s seven-season run. As with earlier examples of stylistic departure, “Once More, With Feeling” contains a diegetic explanation for the show’s extra-diegetic stylistic divergence: a demon, part of Bufy’s standard weekly-issued confict, has appeared and changed everyone’s behavior. In season four’s “Hush,” the monster-of-the-week prevents anyone from speaking, leading to an episode almost entirely without dialogue; later in that same season, a demon who tries to kill the cast in their sleep leads to an entire episode of dream sequences (“Restless”). Te same is true for “Once More, With Feeling,” where a mysterious source (as it happens, a demon) causes everyone in Sunnyvale to occasionally break into spontaneous, Hol- lywood-musical-style, highly choreographed singing and dancing routines. Tis is an episode of Bufy the Vampire Slayer, but it is also is own discrete text; it is somehow both a constituent feature of the series, and, at the very best, loosely related to the larger project of the show without being at all representative, or even akin to the rest of the series.

Tis is the curious position of the deviating episode, and its existence is entirely a product of the television episode as a form. Te boundaries between one episode and the next are strict, perhaps more strict than any other unit of narrative division—even on Netfix or Hulu, where a viewer watching on auto-play can easily slide between

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installments without even clicking “next,” there’s still no question of where the border is between episodes. Te implication remains: this piece of this fction will end, and afer a period of time, another will begin. Whatever the internal fctional content of this unit may be, the unit’s boundaries (and the existence of the unit itself ) are beyond question. Because of the strict borders of the serialized television episode—because the rules of its relationship with the rest of the text are so incontrovertible—each episode contains within it the potential, ofen unrealized, to suspend the previously established narrative norms, to veer of into experimental and strange territory, to be entirely diferent than what has come before. And, just as importantly, these deviant episodes can suspend the rules of a series without threatening them wholesale. Tere’s never any danger that the montage scenes from the standalone musical episode seven will now be standard narrative procedure, or that episode eight will now necessarily include song and dance numbers. Te same features that make the television episode a more stable, cohesive and complete structure than the season or the series (or the novelistic serial part) also make the episode prime material for the kind of dramatic departure that results in a single serial installment in the style of a Hollywood musi- cal.15 It is entirely logical that a system that makes the subordinate part more powerful than the organizing whole would result in parts which occasionally swerve of in an unanticipated direction.

Te sense that the episodic part has more power than the whole may well be fading from some branches of television storytelling. But this iteration of episodic form—episode as optional opportunity, as unevenly activated potential—has never- theless made the leap into a landscape of streaming series and shows written to exist outside a scheduled programming grid. Shows like Transparent, Stranger Tings, and Te Handmaid’s Tale have deployed the deviating episode structure even inside sea- sons of television that might otherwise be described as only occasionally episodic: Transparent uses standalone episodes to jump backwards in time and Stranger Tings 2 inserts a spin-ofy hour set in Chicago into the fnal third of a season otherwise carefully limited to the small town of Hawkins. Even in a streaming show as brief as I Love Dick, one of the only eight episodes is a complete departure from the series status quo, adopting a mosaic point-of-view structure that’s entirely separate from the rest of the series. It’s as if these new series’ shared memory of televisual episodic logic allows for the potential of a brief resurrection of episodic thinking, even when it seems to be otherwise forgotten. Tat idea of a new episode as a potential, a new episode that might throw out all the rules and look like something else entirely, a new episode that might be the start of an entirely new story, a new episode that might be a self-contained experiment—that idea still exists.

Tis isn’t the only way that television series from streaming outlets have taken advantage of episodic form in recent years, either; just as the episode seems to be a waning feature in some television series, it’s also returned as a force in the new bubble of popular episodic anthology shows. Once a dominant genre of TV (Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, Alfred Hitchcock Presents), the episodic anthology has started to make a comeback. Te best known of these is Black Mirror, but there are now a hearty hand- ful of others, including Black Mirror-inspired Electric Dreams, the modern life short story series Easy, and HBO’s Room 104, which lets a single hotel room become a unit

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in a way that cleverly mirrors its episodic form.16 Even Mad Men’s creator, Matthew Weiner, has embraced the form; his series Te Romanofs is a collection of loosely connected standalone stories with no continuing plots.

Tere’s one additional sense in which the episode as a singular unit of storytelling continues to hold sway, even in the context of all-at-once television season releases and binge-viewing paradigms: criticism and reception. Without a time-limited serial frame to organize viewer responses and critical analysis, the episode has become the defning feature around which to drive viewer engagement with new series—Netfix may release all of a new season of Mindhunter in one fell swoop, but popular criticism websites still produce episodic recaps or reviews for each installment of the series. In the process of writing those reviews, critics (including myself ) are careful to watch only one episode at a time before writing each response, a method that carefully repli- cates and reinforces a serialized scafold for receiving the series even if the series itself is scarcely serial. In part, that method is driven by the economics of digital publishing: one post per episode means more opportunities for advertising dollars. But it’s also because audiences recreate serial experiences on their own schedules. Some viewers do watch all of a new season at once, but audience engagement trafc data for episodic recaps indicates that many more viewers watch a few episodes at a time, stretching the experience over a week or more. Tey check in with critical assessments as they go, and whether by audience preference or simple necessity of time, many streaming series attain ad-hoc seriality, regardless of their release schedules. Most importantly for the purposes of storytelling form and critical assessments, the boundaries of those serial units are still the episode. Regardless of whether a television creator treats the episode as a potential standalone unit, the audience still relies on the potential to receive it that way.

In spite of recent shifs, in other words, episodic structure and episodic reception are still far and away the dominant mode of television storytelling. Even in the context of longform televisual narratives, even within a drastically altered serial paradigm and the immense changes in the way an audience consumes television narrative, the idea of the television episode as always containing a potential to exist as a whole, individ- ual unit, is still alive and well.

Endnotes

1. On this kind of formulaic television, Albert Moran writes, “ . . . from one point of view, a television format is that set of invariable elements in a program out of which the variable elements of an individual episode are produced. . . . Van Manin quotes a television producer who ofers a more colloquial summary . . . : ‘Te “crust” is the same from week to week but the flling changes’” (258).

2. Although ofen connected with procedural storytelling of the type demonstrated by House or by police shows like Law & Order, this variety of intensely self-contained weekly storytelling is also highly associated with the sitcom, and is apparent in series as historically widespread as I Love Lucy, Te Beverly Hillbillies, Te Mary Tyler Moore Show, and Cheers.

3. In the context of patently episodic shows like House, this understanding of how the episode works is well established. One example is Jefrey Sconce’s description of what he calls “episodic series,” which “must feature an appealingly familiar and yet ultimately repetitive foundation of premise

80 Kathryn VanArendonk

and character relations” (100). Sconce contrasts this to “cumulative narratives,” which in his work constitutes a “distinct format” from that of the episodic series (96). Sarah Kozlof describes this phenomenon as the “series format”: “because each show repeats without progression, the viewer fnds surface variability on top of a rigid formula” (91).

4. Season two’s “Redecorating” and “Lucy Wants New Furniture,” season three’s “Redecorating the Mertz’s Apartment,” and season six’s “Lucy Gets Chummy with the Neighbors,” in which new neighbor Betty convinces Lucy to buy new furniture, again.

5. Te closest formal predecessor to the television episode outside of TV is most directly the radio serial, where titles such as Dragnet, Ozzie and Harriet and Te Honeymooners were directly im- ported from radio onto the nascent television programming, with much of the episodic structure intact. Te history of the radio serial belongs to other work, but many of the earliest television writers were hired from radio to work on the new medium, and the general episodic structure of a radio episode of Dragnet bears a strong resemblance to the early Dragnet TV episodes.

6. Tis claim is true in form—no TV series is ever a TV series if it only has one episode. But it’s hilariously untrue in practice; many, many a TV show has been produced with one episode and then not given funding to produce more. Te spirit of the claim remains correct, though. Tese unproduced pilots are not really a series, and even as pilots, they’re written with the understand- ing that the single episode would quickly be one of many.

7. In fact, that House-style drama is not even the only option for House—throughout its run, House makes many attempts to depart from the various circumstances that underlie its central formula, and for brief periods it resembles a completely diferent show. Afer experimenting with a new set of interns or changes in House’s relationship or addiction status, though, the formula eventually reverts to its initial state.

8. Te House version of episodic plotting also requires a single-episode plot, some version of a pa- tient of the week, whereas the episodic ad campaign in Mad Men is optional—many episodes lack “Maidenform”’s arc from client request to concept development to presentation.

9. Don discovers Betty in the kitchen dressed in a skimpy bikini and scolds her for her lack of mod- esty. Joan urges Peggy “stop dressing like a little girl” so that she can be “taken seriously,” and when Peggy later joins her male colleagues at the strip club, she arrives in an uncharacteristically done-up style.

10. Tis discussion of Mad Men’s use of the small episodic plot as a thematic touchstone has relevance beyond just Mad Men. A thematic relationship between an episode-length plot and longer-run- ning character development or seasonal plotlines has been a crucial marker of episodic form in many shows that play with the space between fully episodic or fully serialized plotting. Among these, Grey’s Anatomy has been the most consistent, and is notable for its long-term, soap-operatic inter-character plotting as well as extremely delineated individual episode structures.

11. For a more in-depth consideration of this episode’s political implications, however, see Tonya Krouse’s chapter in the Analyzing Mad Men.

12. See for instance Alan Sepinwall’s “Your TV Show Doesn’t Have to be a Movie: In Defense of the Episode (Again)” or Todd VanDerWerf ’s “Netfix, Amazon, and Hulu get one basic thing about TV very wrong” or my own “In Praise of the Standalone Episode of TV.”

13. Jason Mittell’s “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television” describes a range of deviating episodes through their role as “narrative spectacle,” focusing on the way that these episodes “invite viewers to engage at the level of formal analyst” (36). Trough this lens, Mittell frames the concept of the deviating episode more broadly than I do here; in his terms, this kind of narrative complexity includes episodes which do not wholly deviate from a diegetic norm but which nevertheless exploit and expose the episodic framework in the efort to demonstrate “nar- rational bravado . . . by violating storytelling conventions” (36).

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14. TV Tropes has a huge, if messily compiled, list of candidates for television episodes that deviate; it is more useful as an indication of the popular acceptance of this phenomenon than as a narrative theory (TV Tropes).

15. Tis is the model that Community exploits on a weekly basis, and in doing so ofen mocks the most well-worn and familiar conventions for deviating episodes. In addition to the musical, Com- munity has also done a clip show episode (featuring clips from episodes that never aired), a bottle episode, an alternate reality episode, and numerous episodes in the styles of other genres (a west- ern, a noir, a documentary).

16. Tese anthology series also bolster the sense of plot as a stronger force for episodic shape than character; there are no repeating characters in these, and so each episode becomes the revelation of a new character being thrown against some distinct plot obstacle.

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