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 overboard in the opposite directions.

I'm calling this end of the spectrum "Novel", by which I mean "Every episode pushing the meta-plot forward at a breakneck speed" And by "meta-plot" I mean the a larger season, or total-show arc. So the desire to put as many new or Novel things in every episode that changes or twists the plot… that’s over-ridden the fundamental stability that Procedurality brings to a show.

So I see it this way. Too much Procedure and you’ve got a stagnant, safe, predictable show. But too much Novelty and you’ve got an incomprehensible mess of too many plot threads to keep straight, and too many things happening to remember.


I think this would be fine if I only watched one TV show a season. But I can’t keep 20 different shows that are constantly throwing as much meta-plot progression as possible straight in my brain parts. Maybe you can. In which case, feel free to ignore the previous stuff. But there’s another problem I think I’m perceiving with the push for maximum Novelty in modern TV. And that is the creative and story-telling problems that come into play. If you’ve watched any behind-the-scenes of these shows, something you’ll hear again and again is “It’s like making 12 movies in less than a year!” And in a lot of ways that’s clearly true. But here’s the thing. Most movies are bad. Most movies that ARE good have a script that went through a ton of revisions and edits (But not by committee) and also went through an extensive pre-production phase where all the various disciplines came together with their input. AND, the END of the movie is ALWAYS (mostly) known before shooting begins. For TV, many of these processes are either drastically reduced or non-existent. Instead you have a room full of writers who have been incentivized to evolve the story as much as possible. Yes, they usually have some rough outline of a season arc that they can’t totally break, but my experience as a viewer is that most TV stories are a collage of set-pieces and cool stuff that happens. That stuff may or may not be thematically or tonally coherent or fit into a pleasing flow or narrative arc. The important thing is that every episode’s plot synopsis should require a 5 page essay. I mean, of course that’s not an articulated goal, but SOMETHING is producing that effect, and I don’t like it. I think it’s generating more quantity of Novelty than quality of Novelty. When an earth-shattering revelation happens on a show I want to feel shattered, not like I do now; which is: “I guess THIS earth-shattering revelation -the fourth one on this episode- might be important… I guess.”


I think TV shows could be better if they rolled in a bit more Procedurality. The Travelers had a pretty good ratio. I’d say it was about 40/60, Procedurality to Novelty. The mix changed in the last season (closer to the modern standard at about 10/90) as you could tell they were wanting to wrap up the meta-plot, and I think that worked great because I didn’t need to remember all the complicated Novelty a year later.


I think if TV show-runners made a decision to consciously determine a ratio that works best for their goals, we could see lots of neat ways to incorporate procedurality into shows. Ep. 4 of The Mandalorian is a very Procedural feeling episode. The intro felt STRAIGHT out of Star Trek: The Next Generation. We have a new character introduced, and learn a tiny bit more about the Mandalorian’s past. But mostly it’s a contained story of a village with a problem, and the cowboy drifts into town and saves the day. So it was like 95% Procedure, 5% Novel. That’s a pretty conventional way to do procedure. But there’s no reason a show couldn’t mix Procedure in a more fine grained way. If you commit to a 30/70 split for a season, you could do each episode approximately 30/70. I think. I think that could work. Either way, you get my point, I’ve blathered enough.

Also, keep in mind I’ve never written for film or TV. So a lot of my assertions are based on hearing from friends who have, industry podcasts, and behind-the-scenes specials. I’m happy to be corrected on anything I’ve guessed incorrectly.