Mike Gold: Must We, TV?

Mike Gold

ComicMix's award-winning and spectacularly shy editor-in-chief Mike Gold also performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com and on iNetRadio, www.iNetRadio.com (search: Hit Oldies) every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, rebroadcast three times during the week – check www.getthepointradio.com above for times and on-demand streaming information.

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3 Responses

  1. Cable has largely accepted the BBC’s definition of “season”, more specifically, “Series”, that meaning “a block of episodes”. There’s a small impetus to get them started in a tradition “new season” period, but not as much, as they realize that quality takes time.

    Similarly, cable is willing to let a show end when it should, as opposed to broadcast TV which would much rather have the same exact stuff for as long as it can. So we get far too many seasons of shows, some so different that specific seasons have their own fandoms.

    Right now we’re already in the part of the year where the networks are burning off the episodes of shows they’ve already canceled, so The Wife is happily grabbing the remaining episodes of Made in Jersey, which she feels got too early a canning.

    What Cable and the BBC call “series” are more what broadcast TV used to call mini-series. Six to ten episodes, one coherent story, with a proper ending. Maybe a loose thread or two for a second series, but not so much that it may as well say “To be continued” at the last episode. What they call a miniseries now is an embarrassment. TWO episodes is not a miniseries, it’s a two-part movie.

    24 is about the only recent example I can think of, Heroes to a lesser degree. And even there, once it was announced it was renewed for a next season,

    Twin Peaks was a proper mini-series. It ended. The second season was a mistake. I’d be very curious to see if a proper mini-series, shown weekly, not five nights in a row, could succeed on broadcast TV anymore. One that would end, and that’s it.

  2. JosephW says:

    Vinnie, I’m not sure what your complaint is with the time frame in which a mini-series airs. Two of the greatest full-fledged mini-series in American TV history aired on consecutive nights (Roots and Shogun) and no one seemed to have a problem with it; in fact, it made the shows real events. You are correct in the slipshod way that current “mini-series” are nothing like what they used to be (although, it should be noted that the two-part movie “mini-series” aren’t exactly new–the 1979 adaptation of “Salem’s Lot” and the 1990 adaptation of “Stephen King’s It” were done as two-part “movie mini-series”).

    As to “cable is willing to let a show end when it should,” not really. Might I offer up “Damages” as an example? It aired for 3 seasons on FX before pulling the plug due to low ratings (with DirecTV picking it up for 2 more seasons). Or how about FX’s “Over There?” It only ran 1 season with the formal cancellation announcement coming a few days after the last episode had aired.

    And regarding your opinion of “Twin Peaks?” Sorry, but the first season did NOT “end”; Laura Palmer’s killer–the whole point the series was based on–wasn’t revealed until partway through the 2nd season. If the show had ended at the end of the “first season,” it would be like only reading 2/3 of a mystery novel–getting the crime but not finding out whodunnit. (You may be misremembering the series’ production. The first “season” began in April of 1990 and only ran to the end of May for a total of 8 episodes. The second season began that September and after the December break, the show aired somewhat sporadically until the end of June 1991. Additionally, the show’s pilot episode was filmed with additional scenes that didn’t make it into the TV airing–most notably, the revelation of Laura Palmer’s killer–as a standalone movie for Europe.)

  1. January 24, 2013

    […] Gold Art 130102 Mike Gold: Must We, TV? I was a little slow when it came to adopting television as a part of my lifestyle. I only cared about cartoons as a small child, and no wonder: teevee was mostly local and cheaply produced and all those public …Mike Gold: Must We, TV?Comicmix.comGold Art 130102 Mike Gold: Must We, TV? I was a little slow when it came to adopting television as a part of my lifestyle. I only cared about cartoons as a small child, and no wonder: teevee was mostly local and cheaply produced and all those public … Go to Source […]