One of the most satisfying features of genre TV making is its embrace of long form storytelling. The concept of the long running show itself is not unique; serials and soap operas secured themselves a place on the tube early, along with that other genre stalwart, crime, although until The Wire showed how it could be done, crime tended to use its long running format to tell self-contained crime-of-the-week stories, to which the casual viewer could drop into - and out of - with ease.
In a book analogy, the crime-of-the-week, self-contained episode format is rather like a short story anthology. Maybe all the stories are set in the same place, maybe even featuring the same characters who may gradually change from story to story, but the reader doesn't need to read it cover to cover or in any particular order to enjoy the stories.
Long form storytelling in Sci-Fi, such as Torchwood, DS9, BSG, have increasingly offered their audience something more like a contract - we have a story to tell, it won't be told fast, it's going to involve layers, you're going to need to pay attention, but it'll be worth the trip.
Sci-Fi series, such as Star Trek, began with the self-contained planet-of-the-week format to tell their stories. This model was maintained when Star Trek : The Next Generation was re-launched in the late 1980s, apart from occasional two part special episodes. Within this episode based framework, characters developed and changed and made their journeys over the 7-year run of the show, most notably that of the sentient android Data who sought to become human rather than a facsimile of a human. But these developments happened often in spite of the alien of the week format, rather than because of it.
The long form narrative, a coherent detailed and expansive story remained limited to mini-series, such as V until, in 1993, two new shows launched: Babylon 5 and another iteration of the Star Trek universe Deep Space 9. Both series, though structured around the self-contained episode-based storyline format, contained one significant new element.
They were static.
The were set on stations in a fixed location in space, with residents and neighbours and conflicts that weren't going to disappear in the rear-view mirror at the end of forty-five minutes never to be seen again. In this universe the decisions made had long lasting consequences, and the makers of those decisions had to stick around and experience the ramifications.
For the first time perhaps, in recent Sci-Fi TV making, there was a real sense of a fully developed place. Place in a literary sense of the word, containing all that that implies, not just the physical space of the station, but layers of people, politics, culture, geography, society and history that surrounded the station.
The effect of this sense of place on the storytelling that developed, particularly in DS9, was crucial. It morphed from a self-contained episode-based space opera quite early, opening its second season with the first three-part story arc in Star Trek storytelling history.
The subject matter of this extended story explored the rebuilding of the political culture of the station’s nearest neighbour, the planet Bajor. It revealed the religious and political culture of an alien world; it played out conflicts, established characters and saw decisions made that would reverberate all the way through to the conclusion of the series, five years later.
This was story telling on an epic scale.
Whether the Star Trek creators were initially aware of the narrative consequences of their decision to remain at a fixed point in space is debatable. The fact that the two subsequent series in the Star Trek world, Voyager & Enterprise, both reverted to the ship-based blast-away-at-the-end-of-the-episode structure suggests that some in the franchise were uncomfortable with the long form story format inspired by anchoring yourself in a place and creating authentic worlds and people in that place.
The storytelling influence of Ronald D Moore, who both wrote and produced on DS9, became clear as the drama began to develop this rich and complex sense of place, and a large cast of regular supporting characters. As Moore and show-runner Ira Steven Behr’s confidence grew the story arcs became longer, richer and more complex and the creators asked their audience to check in and commit for the long ride.
Next time: Taking the long ride
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