Dramatic structure, editing and ad-breaks
Without doubt some of the most satisfying, engaging and downright exciting cinematic media experiences I've had over the past few years have been on the small screen not the large. The one-hour episodic TV drama has had some great high points of late. US cable and network TV has delivered in spades with the
The West Wing, The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Carnivale and the utterly sublime
Deadwood. But the UK has also thrown in some great additions with
Spooks,
Rome and
Wire in the Blood. And still Canada's
Newsroom rates as one of the cleverest and most sardonic (and at times wonderfully poetic) media satire's ever written.
What I have found very interesting in looking more closely at the structure of the writing and editing of these drama series' is the various implementations of the 1-hour episode format and how it seems to be subtly evolving. Whilst all episodes in all the series mentioned above run more or less the same length, they are all rendered somehow unique in their structure.1-Hour episodes for traditional network TV in the states obviously conform rather precisely to the specifics of ad-breaks.
As a result the structure of the writing (and by proxy the editing) is built to specific 'act' break dramatic points going into each ad-break. Nowhere is this more evident than in the precise and perfect structure of The West Wing.But cable TV in the US, and BBC TV in the Uk, is ad-free during the program and so there isnt the same reliance in ad-breaks to provide clearly distinct narrative sign posts. The drama is much more continuous and gives shows made for cable, as opposed to those made for network, a distinctly different 'feel' which is largely extraneous to the show's genre.
This article from the US Editor's Guild Magazine explores this topic amongst other in the context of editors working on TV drama series such as the throughly engaging drama series
DEXTER.
Serial Thrillers TV's New 'Kidnapped' and 'Dexter' Present Challenges for Editors
"a cable episode can run 55 minutes with no interruptions.... It?s not that the peak moments cease to matter on cable, but you can propel the story forward with more inertia. It?s much more like cutting a feature. There?s more time for things to develop and play out, and you don?t have to worry about all those climactic act outs.?
Posted at 12:00AM Sep 26, 2008
by Mike Jones in general |
