This year I faced wandering into the new fall television season as I usually do – showless and alone. Desperate Housewives had ceased to compel my interest. Watching Arrested Development unfold its absurd tricks is a pleasure every time, but the show has never been something I exactly looked forward to. It lets me marvel at it for half an hour, but since I don’t have to worry about the characters or how they’ll extract themselves from some crazy situation, I spend no time thinking about the show after it's over.

So, what did I do? Research. I read about TV shows, mostly at Flow, and decided to make mine Lost. The writers there seemed to approve: one said it (along with Jack and Bobby) is a rare show that makes a space for the debate of progressive and conservative values, another said “it’s the best show on American network television” (a bold pronouncement, delivered in bold type).

Currently, I’m making my way through the DVDs of season one and am taping the current episodes to watch after catching up to them. It’s not exactly what I’d wanted (a regular show – scheduled relaxation!) but I’m happy enough. The DVD for works so well for television – no commercials, the instant gratification of having 4 or more episodes back-to-back, and the picture quality far outpaces that offered by our rabbit ears. What seems most appealing about the show itself is its concentration on characters that (to this point) are fairly complicated, the way their stories are revealed slowly in accreting flashbacks, and also the way it plays with genre. Lost leaves open the question of whether the world it has created is one where miracles happen, or one where conspiracy, alien intervention, or pure coincidence happens.

Having gotten my feet wet, I checked back in at Flow to see what if anything was new, and found that the most recent articles seem to fret over the show’s serial form. They’re worried whether its central mysteries can last.

and:

 
The problem they sketch out is one of the withholding of knowledge and audience fatigue. How can a TV serial keep the audience happy? Presumably by solving mysteries and giving the audience closure. And then how can the show keep the audience interested in watching (more important from the show’s perspective keep itself going and from the network’s perspective keep selling ad time)? Presumably by delaying resolution or piling on new mysteries.
 
Put to the screws, I doubt that many people actually want closure from a TV show. It’s plot, it seems, that engenders the death drive (the vulgar, un-careful reading of the death drive that stops at “things want to die”). Wanting to know what happens next, wanting all of the mysteries to be solved, viewers secretly end up longing for the end of the show (maybe it’s a tele-cidal or seri-cidal impulse). But that can’t be what viewers really want. (I take that back – viewers can’t want that unless their show has so seriously hobbled itself, like The X-Files did, that they want it to die and put everyone, including the show, out of their misery.) The real pleasure in watching TV, it seems to me, is the painful suspense of not knowing what happens, and of working out scenarios and theories about what might happen and why it might happen. Of course, the show has to be good enough in the first place for viewers to care about what happens.
 
It is a tough dilemma. But if DVD sales of TV shows begin to outpace advertising revenue (and I have no idea how likely that is) TV just might begin to change. In the time it takes for one good show to (inevitably) exhaust itself and languish, infuriating and alienating viewers, writers and producers could offer multiple mini-serials. This truncated serial could last two or three seasons on broadcast TV and then just stop – before they answer all the questions, before they solve all the mysteries, prolonging the pleasure of not-knowing at a point when the audience still cares to know.
 
** Stay tuned (in true serial form) . . . Next time on printculture: S Shirazi with more on TV, serial form and Lost.