They returned the next week, and the week after that, because feisty, fabulous, hardworking Jane, Xiomara, her grandmother, Raphael, Petra, and Michael won their hearts, sympathy, and ongoing curiosity.
If Jane really had been plain, the show would have fizzled by the time she decided to keep the baby. One way to ensure that your second episode sets the standard for the rest of your series is to figure out your ending.
Figure out who you want your characters to be in a hundred episodes. Figure out what makes them worth watching despite their flaws and why they have those flaws at all. Write out their ultimate goals and what could go wrong along the way. Ongoing struggle is the name of the game. Between the first and hundredth episode, a lot can happen, but your pilot and your series finale can and should set the constraints that you use to push your characters along their arcs.
And each episode can be a chapter in that journey. Knowing where that journey ends simply helps keep you on track, and it gives you something to shoot for in your second episode, as well as your third, fourth and fifth. The original hook that sold that show, that got it made, was the idea of a group of strangers forced to survive on a mysterious island together. Stranded people have made great story characters for centuries just look at Swiss Family Robinson, Robinson Crusoe, Life of Pi, and The Martian , among a million others.
Add to that the genre element of a mystery island with mysterious, supernatural, and dangerous forces plaguing our survivors day and night and boom, you have one of the most influential shows of the s. The rest is almost entirely dedicated to character introduction, early cliques, and interpersonal conflict, tension and foreshadowing.
The bite-sized episode story involves Jack, Kate, and Charlie going to recover the transceiver from the cockpit. While there, plot and character mix. The second episode ends exactly where the first left off. We get flashbacks, deepening island mystery, and a bite-size episode story involving getting a signal on the transceiver by going to high ground.
Just like the first episode, much of the meat is driven by character introduction and conflict. Sayid and Sawyer fight. Sun hints at her rebellion against Jin. It's based on advertising history. Again, commercial television makes its money through advertisers. Lots of those ads are about cars. New cars usually debut in the fall and need commercials at that time. Thus, new TV also debuts in the fall.
The season was born out of advertising and still rules network tv today. But times are changing. That's right. There's no season for Amazon because they're not beholden to anyone for commercials or advertising revenue.
That gives them a ton of flexibility when it comes to debuting shows. In the past years, Amazon has brought several ideas to pilot. They track who's watching what, and made series orders based on that information.
The radical thing is, Amazon leaves most of its pilots up for you to check out at any time. That provides a ton of useful information to anyone looking to write or study the show's pilots.
That means that you can make your schedule and debut shows when it's the right time for you. When Netflix announced the new season of Stranger Things would come out on July 4th, people had their fireworks ready. They knew that on that date all the episodes would be available and could be binged as they saw fit. These streaming channels also have a habit of dropping all their content at once, which means people are not beholden to weekly views. That means they don't have the ability to milk one show for 22 or 24 weeks.
Instead, they need to constantly churn out new content to keep people on their apps. The pilot season for streaming content is a thing of the past. Instead, they have a year-long cycle of buying, developing, and debuting shows. Plus, streaming channels are buying Network shows to also air on their content. While this may get someone interested in a show, like The Good Place , it also downgrades the urgency for anyone to watch during Network airings.
Streaming helped shows like Mad Men and Breaking Bad find new fans in between seasons. That saved these shows and kept them on their networks. The shows that test well, start production in July, so the show can premiere in the fall. In May and June, TV production companies take a brief hiatus.
Each year, networks buy a ton of pilots. But they only shoot the ones they think have the best chance of staying on the air. Remember commercials and ad space still rule broadcast television. Pilot season is important for networks because the shows need to keep viewers to generate revenue. They can make any schedule they want, whenever they want. Which is a much more democratic system if you ask me. Give more of what the people actually want. Not being a slave to ads also means you can watch whatever you want, whenever you want.
Most streaming channels drop their content all at once. No more waiting each week for the new episode to air. But because they do this, that also means viewers can finish series in a matter of days or even hours. So not having a pilot season, and accepting new material on a consistent basis, keeps up with this new-age model.
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