The Season Finale

Well, it’s that time of year again: the time when we laugh harder, cry harder, and rush out and buy advertised products harder than we ever have. Or so the networks hope. Yep, it’s finale time.

A season finale is a special type of episode. For most shows, it’s going to be several months before you see a new episode, and they want to make sure that you’re as hooked as possible. After all, you’ll be tempted in the fall by all the new and shiny shows that everyone is rolling out (most of which will be cancelled within the first half of the season anyway). The summer’s a long time and, as previously discussed, there aren’t as many reruns to keep you reminded of what good times you and their show had. What if you get a taste of a new show in the same timeslot and you stop watching theirs? It would be absolutely terrible.

Therefore, finales pull out all the stops. Traditional examples of finale pandering (and I won’t be including episodes/series because there are far too many): weddings! Babies! A long-awaited kiss/declaration of love! Drama! Death! Almost-death! Characters in peril! Proposals! Pregnancies! Revealed secrets! Fights! Epic storylines! Guest stars! Actual-conclusions-of-story-arcs! …and many more I’m sure you can suggest.

A lot of these are similar to sweeps storylines; again, these are episodes the networks really want you to watch. The motivation is slightly different, though—they want you to watch now so you’ll be sure to watch later. For this, they have their ace-in-the-hole: the cliffhanger. Now, I’ve already written a whole entry about cliffhangers, so I won’t go into them too much. But cliffhangers are almost ubiquitous in season-enders. They’re a great way to make sure the audience wants to watch the next season—or at least the first five minutes of the next season. If they come up with a cliffhanger intense enough—or one the audience can’t figure out how the protagonists will get out of—it has the potential to be talked about throughout the summer, which leads to high numbers for the season premiere. And if it’s being talked about, it’s likely new viewers will be brought to the show by word-of-mouth. The right season finale cliffhanger can be gold for a show (see “Who Shot J.R.?” from Dallas).

There is some danger in ending on a cliffhanger. Not all shows know if they’re coming back the next season; upfronts take place after the episodes have been filmed. Some shows get an early green light. Some shows get news of cancellation early, which is in some ways a blessing. They can find a way to wrap up their storylines and give a complete send-off to the show, knowing it will be their series finale.

But some shows are “on the bubble.” They could be renewed, they could be cancelled; it depends on what the network has on their plate for the next season. Those shows take a risk when they end on a cliffhanger, because, if they’re not renewed, that’s how their story ends. Fans are incredibly frustrated when a show is left with an open ending. If a show doesn’t take the gamble, though, they risk losing viewers the next season to shows with storylines that haven't been wrapped up in a neat and shiny bow.

Reruns, and a Lack Thereof

Well, it’s been a couple weeks, folks. Sorry about that.

But my long hiatus inspired me to focus this week’s blog on what I promised you a while ago: the death of the rerun.

Reruns were great. Say you missed an episode, or got into a show late in the season—you could always count on a hiatus full of reruns to catch up. But that’s unfortunately not really true anymore.

To clear up one small potential confusion: reruns vs. syndication. A rerun is an episode of a show that is played again in its normal timeslot instead of a new episode. As seasons got shorter, they were used during hiatuses to fill out the season. When a show is in syndication, it is played in order (generally) on another channel in a different timeslot. The current season won’t be a part of the syndication set, so it’s not as useful for catching recent missed episodes. (There’s also the instance of a show repeating its last episode at points throughout the week—this is common on non-network channels like USA. I believe they call them “encore airings,” which works for me as a name, so I’ll go with that.)

In any case, reruns have gotten fewer and farther between in the past several years. Some shows still use them during hiatuses, but it’s also become in vogue to replace these rerun episodes with new content of some kind. Reality TV shows often serve this purpose, but scripted programming has also been used to plug hiatus gaps. The most glaring example of this is the summer hiatus. Once filled with a variety of reruns, summer tends to be glutted with reality television and shorter runs of scripted shows.

Why? Well, odds are, viewers will watch something new rather than an episode of something they’ve already seen. You can get a larger audience with something new. Basic cable shows clicked onto this concept many years ago, and started airing new programming opposite the networks’ regularly scheduled hiatuses. USA, TNT, FX, and others knew they couldn’t compete with the basic networks during the normal season—a hit show on cable would likely be cancelled in two weeks on a network because of its low ratings—so they shifted their schedules. And the networks decided they needed to jump on the bandwagon as well, or lose to the suddenly-available new content.

The other big blow to reruns: TiVo and the internet. All of a sudden, it didn’t matter as much if you couldn’t watch right away or forgot to catch a show—there were plenty of ways for you to catch up on what you missed. And TiVo meant you didn’t have to worry if you wanted to watch two shows at once; you no longer needed to wait and catch up on the second one during the summer.

Overall, the decline of the rerun was probably a profitable decision by the networks. While it costs more to air something new than to air a rerun, reality TV is cheap to produce and the increase in viewership (and therefore ad revenue) makes up for it. Still, we do have to take into account the main downside of not airing reruns: less exposure. With reruns, people could happen onto a show during a hiatus and decide it was worth watching regularly. The potential for grabbing new viewers was strong. Now, a show’s exposure is often limited to its new episodes. If you look at the math, that’s probably half of what could be expected a decade ago. So while this strategy is profitable on the surface, it remains to be seen if the networks are actually shooting themselves in the foot.

Know Your Demo

Television, much as I love it, is not so much an art form that exists outside of capitalism. Or, at least, mainstream television doesn’t. There’s always the trade-off between making something awesome and making something that a large enough group of people will want to see; some shows are able to walk that line, others fail miserably. (Referring both to awesome shows that fail, and terrible shows that somehow last season after season.)

Because television is a business, and it’s all about the money. Where does the money come from? Commercials. Sure, some profit can now come from DVD sets and tie-in merchandise, and there have been a few success stories of canceled shows being somewhat resurrected based on these sales (Firefly, Futurama, and Family Guy spring to mind. I guess it also helps if your show starts with an ‘F’). But the majority of the bread-and-butter of shows is advertisements (and syndication, which requires having enough of an audience to get to the syndication selling point). Basically, what they (networks, generally) want is eyeballs. But not necessarily your eyeballs.

There are two numbers generally mentioned in quick ratings overviews: the total number of viewers, and the demo. That’s right, the demo. There’s one main demographic that networks focus on, and that’s people aged 18-49. Shows that can get those people to watch are prime real estate for advertisements, as they are considered the most likely to a) have disposable income and b) dispose of it. Those are the eyeballs everyone cares about.

There are a few other things that matter. Some shows have, with middling-to-decent ratings, been helped by the fact that they are popular with the “earning > $100,000” demo (Friday Night Lights… another ‘F’). Males 18-32 are believed to settle into their brand preferences during that time period of their lives, so that subset is also weighted heavily. And some networks are just looking for a different audience; the CW (and before it, the WB) looks for the niche of girls aged 11-17.

Some people claim the current ratings system is outdated, and they’re probably right. Especially with DVRs, watching online, and illegal downloads. But currently, it’s still what the networks are looking at when they’re deciding which shows to keep and which to cancel. It’s the nature of the business, and it doesn’t look like it’ll be changing anytime soon.

(This, of course, doesn’t refer as much to cable channels, which try to find more niche audiences, and premium cable, which makes its money off of subscriptions.)

The Protagonist

Few shows are true ensemble shows; most are centered around one or two characters, with several more peripheral ones. Sometimes this goes to the extreme of not having all the characters in the credits appear in every episode (generally for budgetary reasons). Most of the time, though, it leads to a split between main characters and supporting characters. Main characters get the majority of screentime and storylines. Supporting characters do exactly what it says on the tin—they support the main storylines. They’ll get a B or C story in a lot of episodes, and occasionally (maybe once a season), they are given a focus episode. Generally it will lead to insight into their character background, something that is sorely lacking from most supporting characters.

Shows with single (or dual) protagonists have been around since television began. But there was always one requirement for a show’s protagonists—they had to be likable. Protagonists were the centerpiece of the show, and they therefore tended to be upstanding citizens—like Andy Griffith, or Marcus Welby. Ratings are and have been the name of the game in television, and networks were worried that viewers wouldn’t watch people they felt they couldn’t root for.

But audience began clamoring for more “realistic” protagonists; ones that aren’t perfect and aren’t entirely likable. Cable started the trend, and the F/X network is practically built around the concept: The Shield’s Vic Mackey, Rescue Me’s Tommy Gavin. It took some time, but networks got into it, too. House is probably the biggest network example of an unlikable protagonist currently on the air. Recently, ABC introduced Dr. Megan Scott on Body of Proof. The network protagonist is allowed to be unlikable as long as they follow a few simple rules:

1) Have the other characters point it out: A character is unlikable because other people say they are. It tends to be your first clue. It helps if they overreact before we see that the character is unlikable.

2) Be abrasive, not actively evil: Okay, they can say unlikable things, but generally, they act like a good guy. Maybe they’ll complain about it, but they’ll mostly do the right thing. Or, at the very least, they'll:

3) Work toward the right end: Even if they cut corners or act wrongly, it’s because they’re trying to achieve the right result, whether that’s catching the bad guy, saving the patient, or protecting the people they care about. They may be rebels, but they're rebels with a good cause.

4) Care about something (or someone): Someone matters to them. There’s something that shows their vulnerable side (preferably, this will happen in the pilot).

5) Be right, pretty much all the time: Their correctness gives them more leeway to be abrasive. After all, they’re the best, and they’re always right. If you doubt them, you are clearly inferior and just plain wrong, and you deserve any and all of their ire.

Simple rules, but key in keeping from going from "on-air" to "canceled" in one fell swoop. Because while the character may be a rebel, that's probably not going to be an option for the showrunner.

When Good Shows Go Meta

A recent prevalent trend in television has been an increase in the meta-ness of shows and episodes. This is likely due to the narrowing of the gap between the creators and participants of a show and the viewers. Nowadays, actors and creators tweet at fans, read fan reaction boards, and are generally well-aware of fan opinions. Gone are the days when the only major way of responding to a writer or actor was through fan mail.

There are two main ways of being meta in a show, which I’ll term “subtle” and “overt.” Subtle tends to be when you feel like the show is winking at the audience, whereas overt is more like they’ve rented a giant billboard that says “We’re winking at you!”

The most common type of subtle meta is via casting. Chuck, for example, cast Linda Hamilton and Scott Bakula as Chuck’s parents. Both are well-known within the science-fiction community, Hamilton as Sarah Connor from the Terminator movies, and Bakula as Quantum Leap’s Sam Beckett and Enterprise’s Jeffrey Archer. If you aren’t aware of these facts, you’re unlikely to be confused, but you won’t get the meta-joke. This is also often done with guest actors who were tied to the main cast in previous shows or movies; Sara Gilbert guest-starred on The Big Bang Theory as a love interest for Johnny Galecki, and they had previously been love interests on Roseanne. Alternatively, the actors can be connected in other ways, either through their personal lives (like husband and wife guest stars) or through related projects they have worked on—viewers are often amused when the Whedonverse collides, for example.

Still falling under the category of Subtle, but a little bit more in-your-face, is the throwaway line. Castle does a lot of these, making references to Nathan Fillion’s previous work on Firefly. They won’t be relevant to understanding the story, but will generally be either confusing or unfunny to people who are unaware of the connection.

In the overt category, you have the tribute. This can go anywhere from a small scene (with Castle, again, they dress Nathan Fillion as a “space cowboy” for Halloween) to a full-on tribute episode. Psych did this recently with “Dual Spires,” a tribute episode based off Twin Peaks. For those who knew and had an understanding of the basis, it was a lot more compelling.

Also under Overt, there is breaking the fourth wall. This is often done through lampshading—a way of saying, “Yes, we know we just did that. We recognize it too.” Community often winks at the audience in this way, especially through the character of Abed, who refers to everything that happens as though they were part of a TV show or movie. (“I like it. It makes every ten minutes feel like the beginning of a new scene in a TV show,” he said shortly after a scene started.)

I feel like you can’t have a conversation about Meta without talking about Supernatural. It’s poked fun of itself many times, from acknowledging the perceived sexual tension between Sam and Dean to one of its latest episodes, where they were transported to an alternate universe where they inhabited the bodies of two actors named “Jared Padalecki” and “Jensen Ackles.” All of the actors played exaggerated versions of themselves throughout. This isn’t the first time that Supernatural has done this kind of episode; it is a show that really likes to acknowledge its fans.

But at what point does it become too much? I’m actually a pretty bad judge of this—I love television and pop culture, and if a show wants to call attention to the fact that it’s a TV show or make a connection to something else, I tend to enjoy it. But the entirety of your audience is not going to have that viewpoint. Personally, I think the best rule to follow is: “Don’t let it take over the show, and don’t alienate the audience.” If your extended scene or entire episode is going to confuse the viewers who don’t get the meta-joke, or if your show is going to morph into something that’s only about the meta, don’t do it. A few meta jokes are fine, but if your show stops being about what’s going on onscreen, and becomes all about the connection between off- and onscreen, you have a problem.