In Defense of the Procedural In Television
I haven't seen these yet, but I'm expecting to see complaints about Ep 4 of The Mandalorian because "nothing happened". We watched The Travelers recently and that show made me realize something that had been bugging me about this current golden age of television. Imagine a spectrum with Procedural on one side, and Novel on the other. Shows like Murder She Wrote, Law And Order and Star Trek The Next Generation are very Procedural. That is, every episode is self contained and you can watch them in any order because Novel things (Meta-Plot progression) almost never happens. The closest you have to that stuff on those shows is when an actor leaves the show. TV shows back in the day were mostly Procedural for non-artistic reasons, and I would never want to go back to those dark days. (Though I DO love me some ST:NG) But when those shackles were removed, guess what happened? The same thing that happens in all industries when shackles are removed.... everyone went overb