Size matters. Size is everything. The bigger a thing is, the better it is. Never mind the quality, feel the width. And the length, of course; that’s important too.
This, at any rate, seems to be the thinking in modern television drama production and commissioning, where excess is regarded as the key to success. This is why we get drama series that run for eight, 10 or 12 episodes per season, when in a lot of cases, six would do the job just as effectively, and possibly even more effectively.
It happens a lot on Netflix, where a series is rarely shorter than eight instalments per season. We’ve even coined a term for it: “Netflix bloat”.
It sounds like it should be a medical condition, a nasty physical side-effect of spending hours, days, whole weekends sprawled in front of our TVs or laptops or tablets or smartphones, bingeing on multiple seasons of multiple series.
All it refers to, though, is those series where the writers and producers decide to stretch a series to unwieldy length, with episodes that add nothing to the narrative and which appear to be there to do nothing more than eat up time.
One particularly painful example was ‘The Lost Sister’, the seventh episode of season two of Netflix’s monster (in every sense of the word) hit Stranger Things. Millie Bobby Brown’s Eleven found herself on a kind of road trip with a gang of “punks”. It was embarrassingly bad: a tedious, poorly written, pointless diversion that had no real link to everything else going on in the series. Rather than something set in the Eighties, it looked it had been made in the Eighties.
Netflix’s now-defunct Marvel series were notorious for wheel-spinning mid-season slumps, where the story practically ground to a dead halt. But let’s not put all the blame on the streaming giant. Other broadcasters are just as guilty of bloat.
Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, currently running on RTE2 and Channel 4, is the most egregious example of a series that stretches its material — and with it, the viewers’ patience — to breaking point. Whole episodes go by where virtually nothing at all happens, usually ending with Elizabeth Moss’s June glaring or smirking into the camera again as another empowerment-themed song kicks in.
And it’s not just the big American dramas, either. There’s a case to be made that a number of British series, notably BBC1’s recent hit Gentleman Jack, could do with being trimmed by an episode or two.
Watching a drama should never feel like a chore or an obligation, yet this is exactly what it feels like sometimes. You’re compelled to stick with a series because you fear you might miss out on something, when a lot of the time, you’re missing out on very little.
There’s a lot to be said for the virtues of the single play, which used to be a staple of the schedules, but fell out of fashion around the mid-Eighties.
We’ve had brief tastes from time to time of just how potent the single drama format can be with BBC Three’s powerful Murdered By… strand, and Channel 4’s recent I Am… anthology, consisting of three hour-long dramas by BAFTA-winning writer Dominic Savage.
While there was a unifying theme (women facing crucial personal decisions that could alter their lives forever) and a common writing process (Savage developed the scripts in collaboration with his three stars, Vicky McClure, Samantha Morton and Gemma Chan), they were unconnected standalone dramas that could be watched in any order.
Any one of them would have fit perfectly into the BBC’s famed single play strands, which made the broadcaster’s reputation for high-quality original dramas. Between them, The Wednesday Play and its even more highly-regarded successor Play for Today routinely showcased, over a roughly 20-year period, some of the finest British TV drama ever made, by the cream of the country’s writers, including Dennis Potter, Stephen Poliakoff, Jack Rosenthal, Nell Dunn, Alan Bleasdale, Arthur Hopcraft, Alan Clarke, Barry Hines and Mike Leigh.
Hundreds of plays were broadcast, some of which have been lost to time, or simply wiped from existence in the days when videotape was expensive and often reused. But the best of them remain television landmarks, still mentioned today in any serious consideration of TV drama: Cathy Come Home; The War Game; The Black Stuff; Abigail’s Party; Bar Mitzvah Boy; The Evacuees; Spend Spend Spend.
You could fill an entire week of programming with the single plays Dennis Potter, a writer who dedicated himself almost solely to the medium of television, wrote for the two strands: striking works including Where the Buffalo Roam, starring Hywel Bennett as a disturbed young Welshman obsessed with Western movies, who becomes trapped between reality and delusion; Blue Remembered Hills, which daringly cast adult actors like Colin Welland and Helen Mirren as children; the two Nigel Barton plays, featuring Keith Barron as a miner’s son who ends up as a disillusioned Labour politician, and — most infamously — Brimstone and Treacle, starring Michael Kitchen as a mysterious young stranger (in all probability, the devil himself) who insinuates his way into the home of a middle-class couple with a disabled daughter.
The play, made in 1976, wasn’t transmitted until 1987. In the meantime, Potter had re-purposed it into a watered-down film starring Sting. But the 75-minute original is the one to see. Incidentally, the same fate befell Alan Clarke’s unflinching borstal play Scum, made in 1977 but not shown until 1991. It too was remade as a film in the intervening period.
Potter eventually turned to writing large-scale serials, such as Pennies from Heaven and The Singing Detective, but his single plays remain some of his most vivid and memorable work. The same goes for Stephen Poliakoff, whose lavish series like Dancing on the Edge and this year’s Summer of Rockets can often be meandering and self-indulgent, lacking the edge and finesse of his single plays.
Aside from the breadth of writing and directing talent these single dramas nurtured (Ken Loach and Alan Parker were among those who would progress to making movies), what’s most astonishing was the sheer variety of them.
The Wednesday Play and Play for Today gained a justified reputation for tackling social issues, such as unemployment, poverty and backstreet abortions, and an equally justified one for being left-leaning — which put them constantly in the gunsights of conservative politicians and dreaded Clean Up TV campaigner Mary Whitehouse.
And yet, they were capable of spanning all genres. Penda’s Fen and Robin Redbreast were chilling English folk-horror stories that pre-dated The Wicker Man. Philip Martin’s tough, gritty, violent Gangsters took a classic gangster movie trope — an ex-convict seeks revenge on those who set him up — and transplanted it to a grim, depressed Seventies Birmingham of seedy strip clubs and immigrant-trafficking rackets.
Like Alan Bleasdale’s The Blackstuff and John Mortimer’s Rumpole of the Bailey, Gangsters was later spun off into a series, although it was by far the least impressive of the three and eventually drowned in its own gimmicky pretentiousness.
The Flipside of Dominick Hide, on the other hand, couldn’t be further removed from realism. It was a delightfully playful science-fiction tale with a clever plot twist, starring Peter Firth as a time traveller from the future, who visits London in 1980 in search of an ancestor. It spawned an equally enjoyable sequel, Another Flip for Dominick.
The single play probably fell out of favour because it was costlier to produce than a drama series that would likely run for several years. Its legacy lived on, however, at least for a few years, in the shape of Channel 4’s Film on Four productions, which were produced specifically for television.
They may have looked a bit different from what had come before, in that they were shot on film, and had a slightly bigger canvas to play with, but they were single plays in all but name.
With many of us growing tired of jumbo-sized drama series that drag on for years and often end unsatisfactorily, the time is ripe for a return to the self-contained single drama format. If nothing else, it would challenge writers who are given too free a hand to indulge themselves to tell a compelling story within the strict time limit of an hour or two. It’s a discipline a lot of contemporary TV drama could do with.
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