‘Stranger Things,’ ‘Bloodline,’ ‘Preacher’ & The Problems Of Plotting & Pacing In Peak TV

But amid all this disruption, storytelling has failed to adapt to the changing shape of programming, and many shows feel almost deathly boring as a result. Without a procedural, case-of-the-week structure to put a skeleton on the individual episodes, but with hours (and often seasons) to stretch their story across, so many of these series end up padding out their episodes with filler, drip-feeding revelations over glacially paced, repetitive storylines.

“Bloodline” feels like the prime example of this. The Netflix show is beautifully directed, has terrific individual scenes, and an extraordinarily talented cast (Ben Mendelsohn and Kyle Chandler are as good as anyone else on TV right now). But even in its first season, it felt woefully under-plotted, like it was stretching two hours of story across 13 episodes (hour-long episodes, at that). Things were not much better in its second season, which might have been marginally more interesting if it had just been 600 minutes of an actual wheel spinning (it ends the season with very little changed from where it began, all told).

“Daredevil” is guilty of much the same issue, which is odd given that it’s a superhero show. Flashbacks, filler, and endless anonymous henchmen tend to make the show feel like it’s unfolding at a sluggish pace. Sometimes, there’s nothing wrong with a slow narrative, as Sundance’s “Rectify” has shown, but as a much less profound series than that, in places “Daredevil” (and to some extent “Jessica Jones”) makes you long for the pulpy artificial discipline of network TV, with its commercial-break cliffhangers and episodes containing their own micro-stories while serving a larger macro tale.

“Preacher” is the latest example of this. The show debuted with one of the most enjoyable and energetic pilots in recent memory, and still normally drops a great sequence or scene in every episode. But viewers have fallen away, and understandably so, because the show is frustratingly, infuriatingly, uneventful and slow. And yes, TV should be a vessel for character as much as it is for plot, but your characters have to be truly interesting, and they have to change if that’s going to be the case, and that simply hasn’t happened with “Preacher,” as fitfully dazzling as it can be.

Even if you nail your first run of episodes, it’s far from guaranteed that you’ll repeat the trick. “Twin Peaks” and “Friday Night Lights” are among the shows that tanked in their second seasons (though the latter eventually rallied, creatively at least). Only in the last few weeks, two of the most acclaimed new shows of last year, “Mr. Robot” and “UnREAL,” returned for their second seasons, and have almost universally been deemed to be disappointing follow-ups so far.

It’s easy to put the blame for this sort of thing on executives, greedily wanting multiple seasons and extended runs to get as much as they can from any potential golden goose, rushing towards a second season as soon as possible after the first (having had years to pen pilots, writers can find themselves with less than six months to pull a second season together — see “True Detective” season 2). And while we’re sure that’s true in some places, by most accounts, Netflix takes a mostly hands-off approach. “Stranger Things” co-creator Ross Duffer told Alan Sepinwall today that Netflix “don’t mandate how many episodes they think your series should be. What they tell you is, ‘What do you think is right to tell your story?’ ”

And while the creators of “Stranger Things” got it right, more generally speaking, there seems to be a writerly indulgence that’s crippling the most testing of these shows, an idea that TV gives them the breathing room that a feature wouldn’t have, and that they should take advantage of that breathing room. But it’s too often making the basics of story structure, on a series-long, macro level, go out the window.

The shows that mostly escape this are ones telling one-season contained stories in an anthology manner — “Fargo,” for instance — or those that go in with a clear beginning, middle and end plotted out, like Vince Gilligan’s “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul,” which follow the shape of classical tragedy; or “Game Of Thrones,” which has all along been building towards an overthrowing of the system, a disruption of the patriarchy and a battle against the White Walkers. But too many other shows have a beginning, eight seasons of middle, and eventually an end.

The longer you go on, the more likely it is you’ll fail to stick the landing (it’s notable that some of the greatest shows, like “Freaks & Geeks” or “Hannibal,” are the ones that were cancelled well before they could finish their stories).

If it sounds like I’m pointing fingers, that’s not my intention at all. The point is more that the serialized prestige TV drama — and doubly so the serialized streaming prestige TV drama — is a relatively new form. We’ve had 100 years of movies, roughly 500 of the novel and two millennia of the stage play, and people still mess up the story structures of those all the time.

It’s hard to find a story that can be told organically over not just 10 episodes, but 50 or more. And it’s just as hard to juggle plotting and pacing with the demands of telling a story across an individual episode, and it’s hard to adjust your show to the various ways that people now absorb TV.

That said, it’s an exciting time watching this new form evolve, and people are going to get better at it, learning from each other’s mistakes and their own. “Stranger Things” is a great example, a show that takes exactly the right amount of time it needs to tell its story (and interviews suggest that they have a good approach to avoid the second-season slump going forward). But at a time when peak TV provides us with literally too many good options to watch, audiences are increasingly less patient, and creators might need to cut back on the filler if they want their shows to last.