From Wandavision To The Mandalorian
The impact of limited series television on cultural production
Length is an important factor in literature and film. Although we may balk at a doorstop length tome, most of us have also experienced the transformative power of a long novel, and in fact long novels and series are consistently some of the most popular (I’m looking at you, Kickstarter wunderkind Brandon Sanderson).
We seem to be always analyzing the shortening of our attention spans (and really they are getting shorter and have been for a century). Intriguingly, though, at the same time political debate has been reduced to 90 second sound bites and social media posts to 140 character tweets, one of the most popular podcasts (and Twitch streams) of note is Critical Role, a live-action Dungeons & Dragons role-play with voice actors, each episode of which clocks in at 4 hours and which now in its third season would require listeners or viewers to log 40 hours a week for an entire year to catch up.
Something similar is happening with television. It’s rare for a series these days to log as many episodes per year or as many seasons per decade as, for example, The Simpson’s or Deep Space Nine.
And yet judged by another scale, limited-series runs like Wandavision or The Mandalorian are actually not short series but rather just long movies released in viewable portions. Zach Snyder take note.
New media has made all the genres much more fluid, and this is important for all creators. Just a few examples: Star Wars is now also publishing the scripts of audio performances as hardback “novels.” Here on Substack I can (and do) integrate podcasts into my blog. And many creators now understand that an important part of their work is making their product transposable between media. Like a source of income for novelists is selling film rights for potential production on a streaming service.
I’ve noticed, as another example, that some of my pastoral colleagues, especially those who no longer have a regular call to a pulpit in a congregation, publish a blog each Sunday that is a textual sermon in some instances a whole “service.” As someone who preaches extemporaneously with no manuscript I’ve started to wonder if I should use a transcription service so I can send my sermons out in a written form post-worship.
Back to Wandavision. I love the opportunities limited series have for storytelling. There’s something you can do there that can’t be done when you are filming episodes for a very long season. In the case of Wandavision you can offer a mind-bending meta-commentary on serial television itself. In the case of a show like Loki you literally move the ball in the entire Marvel cinematic universe (or breaking it?) but without having to assemble all the Avengers.
a bottom line insight here: those old adages “form follows function” and “the medium is the message” still hold true. New forms indicate something new is at work. Whoever imagined a cinematic universe as epic as Marvel’s? And the forms the continuing narrative takes are as capacious as the universe itself.
all communicators of every type take note: you now have options and your audience anticipates your adaptation of new media because honestly we are all hungry for a message that redescribes and uplifts in order to say more than simply that these are “trying times.”
It’s a little confusing out here for us communicators these days. Perhaps it used to be a pastor, for example, communicated with their parish through the Sunday sermon, a monthly newsletter column, and visits. In 2022, you can add to that their follow of you on any and all social media platforms, subscription to a blog, and whatever you send out as mid-week e-mails. A parish can potentially hear much more regularly from their church and pastor than ever before, even if they’re on average attending church on Sunday morning less and less.
That’s another example of the wisdom of form follows function. It sets us the opposite challenge, asking whether we like the bauhaus we’re all now inhabiting, or whether we’ve tricked ourselves into thinking rococo is bauhaus. But that’s for another post.