Fox, Fringe, The Doll House, And The Nature Of TV Advertising

Fox recently announced that they will be showing fewer commercials than usual during two of their upcoming dramas. Said Fox Entertainment chairman Peter Liguori: “We’re going to have less commercials, less promotional time and less reason for viewers to use the remote. We’re going to have more character, more content, more value.”

What’s not clear is whether this shift in policy merely means fewer commercials, or fewer commercial breaks. There’s a huge difference. One way simply means more content per hour. The other way means a major paradigm shift in the way that television is written.

The plots of TV shows, both dramas and comedies, are structured according to acts, just as plays are. It’s easy to tell where one act ends and another begins: at the commercial break. Commercials are used instead of, say, curtains closing in front of a stage.

Each show has a formula for what happens in each of the acts (in the case of drama, there are usually four acts per episode). If you start to pay attention to your favorite show in terms of these acts, you’ll see the structure emerge pretty quickly. In the first act, the villain of the week often emerges. In the second act, the heroes go about fighting the villain, and fail. In the third act, Read the rest of this entry »