Momentum in serial dramas is crucial, if not only for marketing and advertising concerns, but simply for the fact that people like their shows to play as continuously as possible with very little reruns, except when shows take breaks between the holiday season and for special events.
I was thinking about this recently, concerning the show Lost. Lost demands a great deal from the viewer - commitment, reasoning, perception, and a whole lot of patience when it comes to deciphering clues each week as to the mystery behind what is happening to the people trapped on the island. The fans have spoken, and they really dig the show - they just don't dig getting 3 episodes at a time, followed by 6 reruns.
Fickle as we are, we sometimes forget that creating television takes a lot of hard work, long hours, and tons of creativity that doesn't come easy to the writers who have to come up with this stuff. However, Network programming schedules do influence this flow a bit, and that's why I think ABC could learn a thing about how FOX does their programming.
For instance - 3 years ago, the show 24 was running into the very same problem - it would air about 4 episodes, and then go into repeats for 3 weeks. With a show where each episode represents one hour of the day that's taking place, by the end of the Season, one feels like they've been watching 24 for 2 years! FOX also noticed a decline in viewership because of this, and realized that if they didn't do something soon, this flagship drama was going to set sail very quickly toward "Hiatus Island".
So to keep the energy of the show flowing, FOX rearraged the time slot and the season's start date to January so the show would play CONTINUOUSLY all the way through to May, with zero - count'em, zero - repeats. That means they would air 22 episodes (they've figured out that they can air two-hours back to back to count as one long episode, and this year the Season Premiere actually lasted 4 hours but it counts as only two episodes) that could keep the audience excited about what is happening, and ultimately, make sure that the action and suspense didn't wane as the season progressed.
FOX's strategy worked. New fans were being drawn to the non-stop drama and action and old fans were coming back 'cause they could feel the high stakes again, just like in Season 1. People started caring whether or not Jack Bauer was really going to make it out alive, and how he was gonna save the day.
In ABC's defense, I do believe that they heard the gripes about Lost's constant reruns that were occuring in Season 2. ABC's current fix of airing 6 episodes last fall and the next 16 this Spring - uninterrupted - is a step in the right direction, but will it be enough? Can the show capture back our interests as if time hasn't passed at all? I guess we'll just have to wait and see, if we can really "find" ourselves "Lost" again... ;)
SO -- What do you think? Are there better strategies that the Network execs have missed? Or am I just dreaming when it comes to "Network Scheduling Utopia"?
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