Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Monster-of-the-Week


The thing that I always appreciated about The X-Files was that I could typically turn on any given episode and find that I didn't have to have seen any prior episodes to understand what was going on: despite the mytharc, Mulder and Scully were pretty reliably caught up with some new serial killer or monster that I could learn the entire origin of, get to see in action, and then see summarily defeated by the end of the episode. I recognize that such disposability may not represent great television, but it was nice to have something dependable when I couldn't be sure that I could watch a television show for an entire season.

In the article "It's the Libidinal Economy, Stupid: The X-Files and the Politics of Post-modern Desire," the author describes how The X-Files acts as a sort of post-modern evaluation of the prior half-century of genre television, combining the anthology nature of shows such as The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits and the ongoing mytharc of new television shows like Twin Peaks. Sort of an old meets new kind of thing. But it got me thinking: what exactly is the appeal of the monster-of-the-week format?

There's the obvious benefit of not having to follow a complicated narrative over the course of many weeks (it's a big commitment for a lot of people), but it goes beyond that. Shows like Smallville and innumerable Sci-Fi channel programs have followed the format (although we really owe most of the credit to Kolchak: The Night Stalker), and many of them have received, if not rave reviews, then at least a dependable base audience that will go back and watch it week after week.

There's at least one major reason: you don't have to spend a lot of time learning a lot of new powers or abilities for characters, but can instead rely on the stock tropes of vampires (they die when you drive a stake through their heart, they suck blood, blah blah blah). So goes The X-Files, which has episodes about werewolves, voodoo, cults, ghosts, and all other assorted things that we already know the basic rules for. It's an easy out for writers who would altogether rather not develop something really new (if there are any really new things), and it's comforting for an audience not to be exposed to things that it's never seen before, and might not fully understand.

The format also represents a moment of synergy with a medium even older than television: the comic book. Long before The Twilight Zone was producing an episode a week, William Gaines was publishing Tales from the Crypt, which featured a cast of characters similar to the ones that eventually featured in The Night Stalker and The X-Files on a weekly basis. Nearly all of those characters were featured long before that in the gothic literature of the 1800s. So, if I've learned anything in media studies, it's that everything comes in a cycle, and that every new medium finds a way to cannibalize the old ones.

For information on William Gaines, the publisher of EC Comics, click here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Gaines

For a look at the Smallville episode list (see if it doesn't look kind of repetitive):

http://www.kryptonsite.com/episodeguide.htm

For more information on EC Comics:

http://www.time.com/time/columnist/corliss/article/0,9565,631203,00.html

For The X-Files episode list:

http://redwolf.com.au/xfiles/


http://www.kryptonsite.com/episodeguide.htm

1 comment:

Peg A said...

I read at one point (in an interview, I think) that Chris Carter was interested in a "monster of the week" format in part because that was how Kolchak encountered the strange creatures he investigated in Chicago....