After watching the finale of ...
Generation Kill
Question: After watching the finale of the excellent miniseries
Generation Kill, I wondered why the miniseries format is not more popular. I guess the obvious answer is money, since popular TV shows and movies are way more profitable. Books should be adapted into miniseries rather than movies in my opinion, considering how there is enough time to cover most of the material (
The Corner,
Generation Kill and the wonderful
Band Of Brothers come to mind). The format just makes a lot of sense to me anyway, since TV shows can drag on too long, and movies sometimes do not provide enough depth. HBO is the only channel I see willing to do miniseries, and I was wondering why there is a distinct lack of them on other networks. What do you think?
Answer: Changing times, changing habits. Used to be the networks would build their seasons and sweeps months around blockbuster miniseries "events," often based on massive best-sellers or epic historical events.
Roots still ranks among TV's top-rated shows of any sort, and it sparked a trend that had many historic highs (
Lonesome Dove,
Holocaust,
The Winds of War and
War and Remembrance,
The Thorn Birds, etc.) and also no shortage of cheesy multi-parters based on Judith Krantz or Sidney Sheldon page-turners and their ilk. But just as the networks lost their appetite for made-for-TV movies and movie nights in general, the miniseries became something of a non-starter because the prevailing attitude was that it was getting harder and harder in a VCR/TiVo era to gather a mass audience in front of the TV night after night to watch an ongoing story, justifying the massive investment. Miniseries became two-parters at most (generally), and when HBO took up the mantle, it began presenting these epics in weekly chapters, redefining the idea of a miniseries. HBO has the luxury and schedule flexibility to allow itself to be defined at times by its "event" strategy — the marketing for
John Adams was out of this world — and some other cable outlets (Sci Fi, USA, A&E, AMC, to name a few) have had some intermittent success with the format, but the broadcast networks now live and die by their ongoing weekly series and reality franchises. Disrupting the schedule with a major miniseries appears to be pretty much a thing of the past. I miss them, which is yet another reason to be grateful for cable.
