Why the Breaking Bad finale broke new ground for ‘event TV’ (spoiler free)

Breaking BadAlong with tens of thousands of people in the UK, I watched the finale of Breaking Bad on Monday.

Without spoiling anything for those still working their way through earlier series, I can say that it was unanimously ackowledged to be a thoroughly satisfying ending for a popular and critically-acclaimed show.

But – in the UK at least – what made this different was how and when people watched the finale.

You see, unlike amc’s 8pm timeslot in the US, in Britain, we chose exactly when we watched it because we were using Netflix.

A new watercooler moment

Although it was shown on a cable TV network in America, you had to watch the final series in the UK via the web.

Netflix made the episode available to watch at 9am on Monday morning – and I have some friends who indulged before lunch – allowing anyone to watch it whenever they wanted.

Breaking Bad is groundbreaking because we didn’t all sit down and watch it at 9pm together, which historically was how we all experienced the end of a TV show.

In this instance, everyone made their own personal choice of starting time: be it 8.01pm, 8.46pm, 9.22pm… you get my drift. And this is the radical change that has been brought about by the way we now consume TV.

Remember Sky Plus?

The arrival of Sky Plus in the UK back in 2002 allowed us to do radical things. Quite aside from recording programmes on 2 different channels, while you watched a 3rd, you could pause live TV, set up instant series links and choose to start watching something from the beginning even before it had finished.

This was the beginning of what we now know as ‘timeshifting’ – watching TV at a time of one’s own choosing, also allowing you to skip the ad breaks.

This has become so endemic that BARB statistics from 2011 suggested that around 15% of viewing was timeshifted – a figure that is bound to have increased since.

The arrival of Netflix has moved things on again. Imagine telling someone 10 years ago, you were going to watch the most talked-about TV show “on Netflix, through your Wii”. Utter gobbledy-gook to someone in 2003, yet it emphasises how much change has occurred in a short space of time.

Why we all secretly prefer an untidy end to a story

The Returned - Les RevenantsLast night, the first series of acclaimed French drama The Returned finished its run on C4.

The anticipation had been building for weeks, as question after question was raised about why dead people had come back to the Alpine town?

Unsurprisingly, to me at any rate, the finale provided some answers, but ultimately raised many more questions.

As a result, Twitter was awash with people frustrated with all the loose ends and gutted that they have to wait ‘until next year’ to see the 2nd series.

Neat and tidy?

But, seriously, what were they expecting? And those who clamoured for a nice, neat, straightforward ending are surely kidding themselves.

Denouments of stories that come tidily wrapped with all the edges perfectly folded and a big bow are few and far between nowadays, and dramatic storytelling is all the better for it, as far as I’m concerned.

As much as we all love a ‘Hollywood ending’, most of us (bar the diehard romantics) appreciate that life isn’t cut and dried and things don’t always resolve themselves perfectly, so why should our fictional entertainment be any different?

After all, very few people would claim that their enjoyment of a show or film is completely spoiled by an ending that leaves a few plotpoints unanswered. In fact, it’s these very frayed bits that can often cement a drama’s reputation.

The Usual Suspects

Remember the end of The Usual Suspects? The payoff at the end as Kevin Spacey walks down the street, gradually losing his limp and the flashes to the noticeboard are one of modern cinema’s great jawdropping finales.

However, there was just as much chat and analysis devoted to proving if Verbal could really have been Keyser Soze, based on what many viewers saw as major plotholes and inconsistencies.

Now, we’re sure that writer Christopher McQuarrie could happily explain them away, if he so chose, but the beauty of the way the film finishes is that you’re left with unanswered questions, thus letting the film sit in your consciousness for longer.

Don’t fight it

In fact, the worst thing you can do is to expect a modern story to finish neatly. That’s not the way film and TV works any more.

Look at Lost. It lasted 6 seasons and became ever more labyrinthine as the show progressed. As one question was answered, it merely raised 3 more.

Unfortunately, creators JJ Abrams and Damon Lindelhof claimed that they always had a resolution in mind for the show, but when the end credits rolled for the final time in May 2010, there were howls of anguish around the globe from those fans who had stuck with it for the past 6 years.

Part of the issue was the rather simplistic answer to the main question, but what frustrated most diehard fans was that there were lots of plot points that were never clarified. Duhh!

Let your perfectionism go

I suspect that people who moan about plotholes or loose ends are the ones who are life’s perfectionists. The ones who have to dot the ‘t’s and cross the ‘i’s [sic].

Well, my message to those is to relax and enjoy what you’re watching. The world isn’t perfect and deep down you know this, so allow yourself the pleasure of immersing yourself in something that has flaws. Go on, admit, you like it really.

What I’ve read this week… 2 March 2013

This is the second of my weekly round-ups – a motley collection of the silly, serious and surprising

1 Black Mirror reality

The first episode of the second series of Black Mirror realised the prospect of a person living on after their death, through the power of social media.

It’s clearly meant to be futuristic horror, but it may not be as fantastic as it seems.
Read this piece from Salon.com and you’ll understand why
(via @moriza)

2 Stranger danger?

Making friends online has had its ups and downs. Time was you were looked at like a weirdo if you met someone ‘who you met on the Internet’.

Now online dating is commonplace, but there are quite a few recent examples of people being duped into believing into talking to someone completely different.
The modern reality of online friendships
Continue reading “What I’ve read this week… 2 March 2013”