No, really. You’ve already noticed, right? The epic is back:
Game of Thrones. House of Cards. Breaking Bad. The Sopranos. Downton Abbey. Harry Potter. The Hunger Games. Twilight. The NHL playoffs.
Modern storytelling is reverting, all the way back to the Canterbury Tales and Beowulf. (This one, people, not this one. Come on.) Episodic long form is taking back the ground it lost to the three-act play.
“There’s a reason why people now talk about this as the golden age of scripted drama. You can write a character that grows over the course of thirteen hours of television. That’s more attractive than a two-hour movie.”
–Michael Lynton, CEO, Sony Entertainment, as told to Ken Auletta in The New Yorker, 2/3/2014.
Your flat screen is fast becoming the new village square, Netflix and HBO the new traveling bards. This is a big deal.
How big? Netflix just overtook HBO with nearly 30 million subscribers. With the overlap, that’s what, 40 million gathered in just those two village squares? 50 million? And there are a lot of squares.
So, yes. Epic.
Epic is a big word, and while I agree that episodic drama is back and that it does leave a great deal of room for character development, I wouldn’t say that any of the series (TV or film) you mentioned qualify as epic. Why not? The answer is in Michael Lynton’s quote. The characters do grow over the course of the series, but more often than not, the plot of the series, the action, the long arc, if you will, fails to make the grade as epic. What happens is that these episodic works devolve, rather quickly in some cases, to melodramas. This is what happens when character takes precedence over plot. With the exception, perhaps, of the Harry Potter and Hunger Games films (and the NHL), writers give in too quickly to audience hunger for deepening relationships between the characters. We saw this especially in the X-Files and Lost. Then, when the series conclude, you find that these same longtime fans are dissatisfied with the endings (there was a great deal of discussion about how Breaking Bad, Dexter and the Sopranos ended their long runs). It’s as if the long game—the sack of Troy in the Iliad—gets lost. Is modern storytelling reverting? Yes. Are we there? Not yet.