This past weekend was completely obliterated by the single most emotionally manipulative show ever created: Lost. Unfortunately I could only get through about three and a half of the six discs before I had to turn it off. I found the writing to be painfully glib and there seemed to be an emotionally charged crescendo about every 3 minutes (the emotional charges, of course, having nothing to do with the horror of being stranded on a deserted island, but more to do with polar bears, monsters and voices in the forest).
The crescendos were partly a result of the awful writing, but part of it was a result of the experience of watching TV on DVD. It has its positives – no commercials, no waiting for a week to see what happens, all of it right there for you to consume at any point you choose. But the unfortunate reality is that the show was written and edited to accommodate commercials….hence the constant crescendos.
Why can’t they take the 9 hours of episodes and string them together as they would a really, really, really long movie? No title graphics or episode recap at the beginning, no credits at the end, and all the building-up and letting-down that constitutes going to and coming from commercial edited out. It’s strange how aware one becomes of all the repetitive sound cues and visual tricks when watching the whole thing at once. These are little things you’d probably forget from commercial to commercial and from week to week, but are so apparent on DVD.
June 10th, 2008 at 11:07 am
That would actually be a really fascinating experiment, if some intrepid young gets brave enough to it on. Mixing the audio cues is easy to do after the fact, but avoiding the unnecessary visual cues would require shooting many scenes multiple times. This is done normally for editing purposes anyway, but with the specific intent of later editing for DVD … intriguing. Recording interviews and set tours are one thing, but this would take shows even further into realizing that there’s some serious money in catering to the DVD market right from day one.
Of course, most shows can’t fit on a single DVD, so maybe there’s still room some smaller artificial crescendos at the end of each disc. Nothing like what they do now though, because they only have to keep you captivated for a few minutes (or maybe overnight technically), rather than an entire week, much less over the summer break.
Now I’m really curious to know how something like that would play out.
June 10th, 2008 at 6:52 pm
I love your point. I recently worked my way through a season of Battle Star Galactica, and while I actually liked the show…watching it on DVD after the fact pointed really brought out the annoying commercial breaks and un-needed recaps.
I know it’s a no-brainer to dump TV shows to DVD…but it really could be so much better if they just went the extra step and stiched it all together taking out the irrelevant bits like you suggest. Hopefully some day someone in the know will catch on and make it happen :-D