[This is the third installment of Marc's more or less regular column "An Episodic Life." Want more?]
All right, so I’ve got this theory I like to call "The Rule of Four." And while I know a 'theory' can’t be a 'rule,' just roll with me here.
Put simply, The Rule of Four is that a show needs to have some type of seismic shift at the end of its third season/beginning of its fourth in order to remain creatively interesting. As a consequence of this, the fourth season of many great TV shows can be a little weak. Or, as in the case of Buffy and Sopranos, just downright fucking atrocious.
So far, I’ve found that this rule applies mostly to open-ended, longform TV series, and more specifically one-hour dramas with a shifting continuity. This would discount shows like Law & Order, which is comprised of almost entirely discrete episodic units, but would include something like Weeds given its highly serialized structure.
The reason this works is because it allows the show, after establishing itself over the course of the first three shows, to grow and, frequently, become something other than what it started as. It allows the writers to come up with dramatically different scenarios for their characters and keeps the stories from becoming repetitive or stale. Now, I figured to best illustrate my idea, I’m going to run down a number of shows and talk about how The Rule of Four applies, and why many shows’ fourth seasons are just so terribly, terribly dreadful.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: This is the show that made me extrapolate The Rule of Four. The first three years of Buffy are built around literalizing one very simple metaphor: High school is Hell. Which is great, except that Buffy and the rest of the Scoobies hit their senior year in season three and would have to move on to college. So all of a sudden, the show has to morph into something else. Its central metaphor has become completely irrelevant.
So what did Buffy creator/showrunner Joss Whedon do? He got rid of Angel, Buffy’s on-again-off-again love interest up to that point, moved the kids to college, and began laying the groundwork for the second half of the series. While the first three years were very much a story of Buffy coming into her own, asserting her independence from her mother—in essence, being a teenager—the second half was all about her transformation into adulthood. The show was no longer about adolescence and high school, it was about the real world as Buffy was forced to make sense of it and become an adult. Hell, he even turned her into a mother-figure in the seventh season, mentoring all the other potential Slayers.
As for that terrible fourth season of Buffy…I really love this show, but I will be the first to admit that much of season four is unwatchable. But that was its transition period. You can’t just switch gears like that and not expect any growing pains. Just as everybody’s freshman year at college is that awkward, gangly year when you just start to get a glimmer of who you’d be and what you’d be like as a real adult-type-person, Buffy, as a show and as a character, goes through the same process. Yeah, it’s painful and awkward to watch, but it’s also incredibly important for everything that comes after it—and everything that comes after it is pretty fucking great.
Mad Men: I just watched the third season finale to this series last Sunday, and it’s what prompted me to write this now. Of course, we haven’t seen any of the fourth season yet, but showrunner Matt Weiner certainly gave the show a couple of seismic shifts, with Don Draper, Roger Sterling, Burt Cooper and the rest of the crew having to start out on their own, clearly lower on the totem pole than they had been in the preceding years. Couple that with Don’s impending divorce, and you have a recipe for a dramatically different show. While the first three years were about Don thriving, Don already having accomplished the American Dream with his nuclear family unit and high prestige job, we’re now going to see a very different Don Draper, one who once again has to work to get what he wants and to get to where he wants to be.
The Wire: This show’s third season shift was actually very similar to Mad Men’s. The third season of the Wire ended with Stringer Bell’s death and the arrests and indictments of most of the Barksdale crew. For the first three years, fans saw a drug crew that had already established itself. Runner David Simon laid the groundwork for the fourth season with the introduction of Marlo Stanfield in the third, but Marlo’s arc really took off the following year. That’s when fans got to see the flipside of the Barksdale story—not a drug crew in its prime, but one in the middle of its ascent. Again, it’s a very different dynamic and leads to very, very different types of stories.
The Sopranos: This is actually a series I’ve thought a lot about in relation to The Rule of Four. For a long while, I was convinced it was an exception. There is no real seismic shift at the end of the third season, nor at the beginning of the fourth. The closest I could come to thinking of any major change that occurred in this time period of the show was Carmela throwing Tony out of the house and asking for a divorce at the end of season four. But since Tony and Carm get back together again halfway through season five, I figured that couldn’t really count as a major shift.
But it is, and here’s why:
The overall arc of the Sopranos is parabolic. Most character arcs, in television and, hell, fiction in general, are not. Most arcs begin at point A and end at point Z. Now, here’s an interesting exercise. Watch the first episode of the Sopranos, then fast forward and watch the final episode of the series. Not a single character has made any dramatic change between the two episodes. Now, go back and watch the first episode of season one and the last episode of season one. Tony’s in a very different place between those two episodes. He’s acknowledged the toxic effect his mother’s had on his life. He’s talking about how important family was, whereas at the beginning of the season he’s more distant from them. Look at the beginning of season one and the end of season four. Tony and Carmela’s relationship is very different. She begins by ignoring his criminal and adulterous behavior, and ends by denying him to live in the house his blood money has paid for.
But the end of season four is when the character arcs start to boomerang. By the end of season five, all the characters have begun to regress, and over the course of its sixth and final season the show brings each of its characters snugly back to the exact place where we found them at the beginning of the series.
Clearly, there’s more I could write about the Sopranos, and that’s probably a column in and of itself, but I’ll leave it at that for now. I’ve already blathered on for more than 1,000 words, and John keeps on tapping his watch telling me to wrap it up. Thanks for listening, you lone, crazy rascal you, and I promise to be back next Friday. I’m like a bowel movement in that way: Usually regular, except when I’m not.
|