Television in General

In House of the Dragon's best outing yet, its most significant time skip helps reframe its core characters and their relationships - except when it doesn't. In my review of Episode 3 , I reflected on House of the Dragon's biggest problem: How to pace the time skips. I worried that the periods lost between episodes would be forgotten in unchanging character dynamics and narrative tensions, or else be emphasized with little context and development onscreen.  This episode, in jumping ahead so many years, the writers could not rely on freezing the characters in amber, meaning a lot of work went toward convincing us to buy that a decade had past (work that I wish the show had invested in its smaller time jumps too). As many of the core characters changed actors - Rhaenyra and Alicent, though Laena and Laenor too - the writing and performances imbued the weight of ten years (and an octet of children) into the ways these old friends related to each other. Alicent's anger and R...

Hey again everyone! People seem to have liked my first article, so I figured that I would keep writing :). My pieces are going to take a look at television in general. As such, I will be discussing a large number of shows in each write-up. I’m going to try to avoid specific spoilers; however, spoiler warnings will be issued where necessary. In the next few articles, I’m going to outline the three major ways television shows tell their stories: The Episodic Procedural, The Season-to-Season Serial Drama, and The Multi-Season Serial Drama. Before I really get into it next time, let me give you a definition and example of each.