I recently got the DVD sets for the latest seasons of two of my favorite cable TV shows, Sons of Anarchy & Dexter, both of which I watched in their entirety last fall as they aired. With both shows, I was disgruntled with some aspects of the seasons.

On Sons, the main story of the entire season was the primary group of characters searching for a McGuffin. The pursuit was extended nearly the extent of the season and it was aggravated by ongoing plot twists placing the McGuffin further out of reach, and the characters' dedication to the search allowing more problems to pile up for them in both the season itself and setting up more things for the long haul. One character compromised himself in such a way that would be almost irrevocable in the context of the show's rules, and others ignored problems or did things that would be certain to bite the group in the ass later. The entire season felt really frustrating and a lot of the good will of the first two years of the show might have been squandered, had it not been for an excellent finale that resolved a lot of those problems. In addition, the show did a lot of exploration of its own mythology and prehistory, but in a kind of indirect, gradually revealed way. Characters who were important to that backstory were introduced early on, leaving the audience confused for many weeks as to their purpose or the significance of their interactions and relationships with each other and with the regular cast.

On "Dexter," for once, they wrote around that yanking-the-goal-out-of-reach problem, which is a recurrent one for that show. Usually Dexter spends most of a season pursuing a killer, but despite his wide array of skills relevant to finding and capturing people, he is mysteriously unable to come to grips with the villain until the finale, with the goalposts being moved further out of his reach for the last month or so until they have filled up their story quota. With that problem apparently averted by the writers, other long-standing issues came to the forefront. Because of the probable logistical difficulties of having one character on-screen for 90% of the show, and the actor portraying him a recovering cancer patient at that, they keep going to stories about less interesting peripheral characters, seeming to require that the viewers care about the romantic happiness of his moronic and treacherous boss, or the resolution of a case unrelated to anything involving the titular killer. Really, there's no one on the show worth giving a rat's behind about (except small doses of some of the humorous supporting characters), aside from Dexter & his sister, but it was kind of annoying how they kept forcing this other stuff on us just when the main plot was getting interesting, or why they seemed intent on making the sister have adventures on her own unrelated to Dexter. Of course not every case she works would be a race with Dexter to get the killer first, but the show doesn't pretend to show every minute of their lives either - we only see the cases they work "together," and that is Dexter's main means of finding targets. It would be a more implausible stretch for Dexter to keep fortuitously stumbling over serial killers on his own without police awareness, than for he and his co-workers to constantly be in secret competition to bring down/in the latest one to be working Miami. The show's internal logic has made it clear why Deb & Dexter would end up at cross-purposes (unbeknownst to her, of course) so often, so diverting her and the other cops for half a season to chase killers that have no bearing on Dexter or his storyline (he spent literally five minutes on that case - remove that whole storyline and absolutely nothing in Dexter's arc changes for almost the entire season) and introduce yet another character who is an embarrassment to Hispanic Miami law enforcement, felt like a frustrating waste of the viewer's time.

However the issues with both seasons seem to disappear when watching them all in a block on DVD. With "Dexter" the superfluous storyline and characters caused character developments that had a cumulative effect on Deb. In the finale episode she makes a crucial decision as a character in her own right and as an ancillary satellite of Dexter's that sets up possible future developments of her character and their relationship. When fed in small doses over the course of the season, you have no clue what it is all about. Your mind, from week to week, is on the latest threat to Dexter or the new twists in his relationships with the guest star characters (and one of the disappointments in that regard was the suspicion, fulfilled for the most part, that these were only going to be single-season guest stars, and that they would be removed from the scene by season's end, and thus there was no long-term point to them and no reason to care much beyond how they might trickle over into his permanent life). You don't see what the Deb story is doing to her, but her actions and reactions just seem normal and in character for her by the time she does them. But when you see it all at once, in a shorter time-frame than you originally watched any two given episodes during the season's air time, suddenly the juxtaposition of the events that effect her makes it clear what is going on.

When watching all the "Sons of Anarchy" episodes in close proximity, a similar effect occurs. The motivational purpose of the McGuffin and its connection to the main character's arc over the course of the whole show is more clear when you see the show exploring that backstory and mythology. Basically, the motivation behind the search is connected to the main character's interest in the show's prehistory. The McGuffin is being constantly jerked away from the protagonist because what he learns as he pursues it is important to his ultimate decisions & choices, relevant to his own development and arc. Sorry if that is totally obscure - I'm trying to avoid spoilers, but I'll be specific in a subpost below. As in Dexter, the finale is not just a pretty good standalone story, it is the culmination that absolutely depends on the plodding or tiresome events and developments of the earlier episodes. The awesome moments wherein they resolve their problems or slice the gordian knots of their character arcs cannot happen without those knots getting tied in the first place, and for the audience to see all the agonizing details to get how and why the characters do what they do and why they make the choices they make. In both shows, crucial decisions in the finale might be viscerally satisfying, but they are also morally and intellectually questionable and in some cases, contradict earlier characterization. The entire season, viewed as a whole, serves to put the characters and viewers in a place where those controversial choices are not only satisfying to the audience, but retain their verisimilitude.

With the examples of these last two seasons of these last two shows, I now have to wonder - have the cable shows created a monster that might kill them? There has been a lot of talk in the last few years about how the DVD market and internet and DVR technology is changing television, invalidating the ratings system and undermining revenue streams. What has not been mentioned is a new development that seems to be positively affecting the creativity of television shows, and at the same time adversely affecting their accessibility. The rise of cable shows with their shorter season than shows on the major networks, as well as a certain degree of creative license offered to those shows, seems to have resulted in superior storytelling. A network show has a hard time maintaining a single coherent story arc for 20-25 episodes in a season, and also seems to be more market-driven, as they compete with one another for ratings and commercial time, and thus feature more self-contained episodes and filler, clip shows and one-shots that focus entirely on an aberrant aspect of the show. The cable shows, on the other hand, can be plotted out more tightly and in a more coherent arc, and increasingly seem to be more like a miniseries or giant movie, and in particular, written as such.

How do you break down "The Godfather" into 10-13 chunks to show over the course of three to four months? This evolution of short-season TV shows that seems to have blurred the line between "series" and "mini-series" appears to have expanded the movie into a giant story. This is what to the surprising (to me, anyway) success of "Game of Thrones." A novel far too long and dense to be properly adapted into a movie was very well adapted into a TV show (and as a fan of the Godfather novel, I am now forced to wonder what could have been if they had been able to use the cable TV season format, rather than limit it to the truncated film adaptation, that is nonetheless extremely long for a feature film). However, the key point here is that now that they have finally found the right visual format to showcase a decent-sized novel, they are just doing what has already been done for a couple of years - tell a dense, character-and-plot-driven story with a full, drawn-out treatment, but as a result, we have to look at these TV seasons as a complete work, rather than a collection of individual stories.

A season of "Modern Family," one of the few network shows I still follow as closely as the shows I discuss here, seems like an anthology of humorous short stories, compared to the series of novels that are the seasons of Sons of Anarchy and Dexter. But you can't read a novel in bite-size chunks as stand-alone works. How satisfied would GRRM or RJ readers have been with a monthly novel detailing a couple of events of the greater stories of their novels? Actually, given some of the former's delays, they might have been happier, but the chopping of the latest novels of each writer's series into more than one book has definitely had an adverse effect on the creative success (and by the torpor of the WoTMB, the fan interest as well) of those works. ToM & AFfC might have been the worst individual books of their respective series, but with each one, there is some hope for the overall product, given the thematic connections visible with tGS & DWD, respectively. That is, I believe the dilemma for the individual episodes of the modern cable TV show (Or at least the ones on FX & the premium networks, not the USA, SyFy & TBS fare which imitates the patterns of network programing much more closely). We are no longer getting a series of stories with a thematic connection or unity, we are getting bits and pieces of a greater work, which are too interdependent to fully appreciate on their own. Watching them as a whole on DVD or TiVoing them until the end of the season might very well be the solution to properly experiencing the story.