Distressing Episode

I often extol the virtues of episodic TV from the pre-streaming 'good old days', the era before overarching 'story arcs' and the like, when each episode was self-contained.  Back then, it didn't matter if you missed an episode or two, as when you next tuned in, nothing at all would have changed in terms of the set up and character dynamics and you wouldn't find yourself having to pick up loose plot ends and try to make sense of developments you had missed.  Which was great, because it meant that you didn't feel committed to having to watch all twenty six episodes of a season (the average series length of US TV series in the seventies; in the UK it could vary from six up to twenty plus, depending upon the type of programme).  Which, of course, is the way watching a TV series feels these days, as missing an episode could prove fatal to your chances of actually understanding what is going on.  (If I were a more cynical sort of person, I might suspect that this modern styling of drama series is a deliberate ploy by streaming broadcasters to keep you paying for episodes).  

But the self-contained episode format can have its disadvantages, as I was reminded of the other day, when I caught an episode of CHiPs.  This was from the final series, when the series format was pretty much exhausted, any way, (Larry Wilcox had already quit - along with a lot of the regular supporting cast - leaving Erik Estrada as the undisputed star, now with Tom Reilly as his new partner).  I mean, just how many car crash variations can you run?  How many plots can you somehow manage to weave around road traffic law enforcement?  So the producers had clearly decided, 'What the Hell?' and thought they'd try something different and spend an episode trying to develop Estrada's character beyond his flashing smile and womanising.  So, in this particular episode, he falls in love, gets engaged and makes plans to get married.  Now, bearing in mind that the rule in these seventies/eighties series was that the format was never broken - everything had to reset to normal by the end of each episode, we just know that this isn't going to end well.

Nevertheless, the episode plays out as if his marriage is really going to happen.  So, in the course of fifty minutes of screen time, Estrada's Ponch meets a woman - a teacher - falls in love with her, woos her, gets engaged, even considers giving up his job for her - something which, these days, would form a whole story arc for a season.  But here it has to all play out in a single episode - which also has to accommodate a sub-plot involving the usual motor mayhem regular viewers expected - which makes it all seem ludicrous.  Particularly when it reaches its inevitable conclusion, with the teacher abruptly being run over as she tries to rescue the puppy Ponch has given her from the path of an oncoming car.  It just comes out of nowhere, feeling surreal and likely to elicit laughs rather than tears from the audience, especially as we know that, with the start of the next episode, the grief-stricken Ponch will apparently have forgotten her, with no mention of these events ever being made again. Which is actually a pity, as the main actors involved do play it straight, doing their best to sell what should have been a moving and ultimately tragic story.  In truth, to do such a story justice, it should have played out over one of the two-part episodes you sometimes got in these series.  At least then it wouldn't have felt so perfunctory.  So, sometimes perhaps there is something to be said for modern TV formats.