Essays, Not Rants! 052: One Year

Holy ow. This is my fifty-second post. That means I’ve been keeping up this blog for one year. One post a week for a whole year.

Dang.

I’m actually quite impressed I’ve managed to keep this up. My last attempt at a weekly blog wound up becoming bi-weekly, then monthly, then wheneverly. The fact that I’ve been keeping Essays, Not Rants! going for the past year with weekly posts of at 600-800ish words makes me want to give myself a self-five. Which I’ve done..

I’ll admit, it’s not the easiest thing. Sometimes it comes easy, sure. Posts about storytelling and Jesus or Cortana and video game feminism or analyzing The Avengers. Posts like those are fun and come remarkably easy. Sometimes I get those done in the middle of the week.

But my normal Saturday morning routine tends to be me going “crudcrudcrudineedtowriteapost.” Then writing the thing and posting it. Sometimes they turn out alright. Sometimes less so. But I get the post out.

So this makes me think about how crazy it must be to write TV shows and other forms of serialized fiction. See, I just write posts. Sometimes my last ditch effort to find a topic is spending an hour exploring TV Tropes. But having to come up with around twenty-four stories each lasting from half an hour to a full hour? That’s impressive.

Granted, I’m the only one in this outfit, I do all the writing and all; TV shows have entire teams of writers. But my point remains: keeping stories going isn’t easy.

Because this is me, I’m going to bring up Lost. It’s overall an incredibly strong show with fantastic characters and a great narrative, but it’s not perfect. Some episodes (particularly the middle of season 3) felt draggy and filler-like. Granted, most of them had some redeeming qualities, but it’s easy to see how it lost its footing when it wasn’t sure how much longer it’d have to tell it’s story. The fault wasn’t so much in a lack of inspiration as a question of when the writers were going to have to begin tying things up for the major reveals and change of pacing that season 4 onwards would bring.

Chuck is another show that prevailed despite the question of whether it’d continue. Basically, we got several series finales. Not season finales (although we did get two of those in season 3), full series finales. See, Chuck was a show that was always just on the edge of being canceled but also a show that had a very clear narrative for each season. They had to tie up the story to do justice to the shows’ characters, else the story they were telling would have, well, been pointless.

To their credit, they pulled it off. Each finale felt like a proper finale and each continuation didn’t feel entirely forced. I have great respect for the team behind Chuck; they cared about their fans enough to make sure they got their proper ending. No matter how many times it ended.

Which brings me to How I Met Your Mother, another show on TV I enjoy. Currently in its eighth season, everything this season seems to be leading up to Ted finally meeting the mother in the season finale (then spend the next season letting us get to know her). Keep in mind: this is season eight. It’s taken eight years for the plot to advance to its natural end point, and those eight years were because it kept getting renewed for season after season. It’s not necessarily bad to get more episodes, it just harms the conciseness of the plot. Now, some of the stories within those years have been great, some have been dreary and left us itching for the arc to conclude. Good news is the show has for the most part been consistently funny and has had an almost fanatical adherence to continuity. It’s not a bad show, Ted just needs to hurry up and meet the mother.

Carrying a story on isn’t always easy. And I guess neither is keeping a blog going.

So thanks for reading guys, it’s been a heckuva year. Here’s to the next.