Why Justified is the Best
Season Four is a whole new approach to plotting a season. it carries an underlying story throughout the season, a mystery, while allowing for detours throughout. Some plots last an episode, some plots take a few or four episodes for their own arc. One starts in the premiere, only to be revisited in episodes seven and eight in near complete detour that somehow still manages to be a character study of Raylan. Some of them tie back into the main mystery and some do not. The kicker is that the mystery is resolved not in episode 12 or 13 but in episode 9! How does one tell a thirteen chapter story by resolving the underlying question in episode 9, you ask?
Fallout and reactions. The world constructed by Graham Yost & Co. is such a well developed, organic creature that revealing the mystery demands fallout and reactions from the characters. The characters created by Yost & Co. are so well fleshed out, even if they are new to the scene in Season Four, that the audience is better served and more interested in seeing the reactions to the unfolding events than by simply playing up the mystery at hand and making the climax the reveal. Instead, the climax of the season is when all parties, deftly tied together, react and converge in a not only believable but expertly plotted way.
The approach could have been inspired partially by the format of Raylan, the most recent book by Elmore Leonard which contains three stories. Each story is about 100 pages long, too long to be a short story but too short to be novels unto themselves. While the entire book tells a story of Raylan's marshal adventures in his hometown, each story has a beginning, middle and end similar to the detours taken in Season Four*.
* Started this post only talking about Justified ("Why Justified is the Best"), but realized I could not properly explain it without the context of other plotting examples.
We discuss and analyze and recap shows on an episode by episode basis out of the natural convenience of shows broadcasting one episode on a weekly basis. However, the cumulative effect a show cannot be felt by discussing a single episode, especially early in a season, without considering "all the pieces" as David Simon would. If someone (who had not yet seen the show) were to re-cap The Wire now, it would not make sense to write four articles for the first four episodes. Even the most ardent Wire fan would not claim the show grabs you from the start. Instead, it takes a few episodes before you are "in it" *. Rather, if I were writing about The Wire, I would probably take it four or so episodes at a time, at least to start. There is a reason the show gained traction and attention in the media when HBO decided to send critics the entire season prior to it airing.
* Like Natalie Portman's character in Garden State would say.
As plotting becomes more and more complex, not just in the sense of following a season long storyline, but integrating vingettes and side adventurs like Justified did, the question will be if analysis and discussion can find a new paradigm as well to best suit the new format. Otherwise it will become like recapping a book chapter by chapter and comparing the chapters to each other (if it isn't already).
And we already see the format changing again. With Netflix recently releasing all thirteen episodes of House of Cards and all fifteen episodes of Arrested Development, viewers are more able to get the whole picture in a manner more appropriate to the format. When House of Cards was released, a bunch of articles popped up about this new phenomenon called "binge watching" that has been around for quite a while. In fact, binge watching, which was just called "watching DVDs" played a big part in revival of dead shows like Family Guy and Futurama.
The reason this now has a name is because of the demographic shift in who is doing it. Rather than college kids (with no money) watching a DVD collection they got for Christmas, these are adults watching a high minded show via a subscription service. A Venn diagram of the audiences may actually show that many of these adults are simply the aged 2013 version of the Family guy watching college kids from 2004.
You could build a house, or at least a nice shed, out of the brick jokes flung about in the new season of Arrested Development. The serialized and simultaneously released nature of the House of Cards episodes lend to show predicated on the long, long con at the highest stakes. So not only has the way we watched television allowed us to enjoy the shows in ways not previously available, it is actually influencing the way shows are produced.
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