Where are Those Miniseries?

When I was a child, it seemed that television miniseries were a common event, and a major one. Before I could fully read I would see the word and pronounce it as though it rhymed with “miseries”. I remember my parents making sure to catch The Thorn Birds, and it seemed as though that epic was on every night for weeks in my house. For years the phrase “Stewie got killed by the wild boar!” was stuck in one little boy's lexicon. Of course the BIG miniseries of my childhood, the one that all the kids talked about on the playground, was V. I had to sneak peeks when my parents didn't know I was watching, just so I could keep up with conversations at school. A few years ago I saw it again on DVD, and couldn't believe how bad some of the effects were. There's one scene of a woman running down the hall to escape an alien ship, and using rear projection they superimpose a blown up image of a lizard which was SUPPOSED to be some alien dragon or something that makes her turn back instead of cutting an opening in the screen. Even the birth of an alien child to a human mother reminded me of the diner scene in Spaceballs when I saw it again as an adult. As a child though, images of people ripping off their faces to reveal lizard-like alien features left a lasting impression.

As I got older, the works of Stephen King made their way to the small screen as multipart events. The best of these, without question, was The Stand. The last survivors of an evil plague that wipes out most of humanity included such notable stars as Gary Sinise, Molly Ringwald, Matt Frewer, Rob Lowe, Laura San Giacomo, Corin Nemec and Bill “M-O-O-N” Fagerbakke, to name but a few. It was huge, and followed a diverse group of individuals, each of which was compelling to watch for different reasons. It went on forever ever and then suddenly, it was over too soon. The only miniseries to suck me in so completely before it was the inexplicable Wild Palms.

It. The Tommyknockers. North and South. It seems that miniseries used to consume television when they were on, featured major stars, and made life and everything else seem irrelevant. I hoped things like Gulliver's Travels would recapture the magic of my youth, but somehow it wasn't the same. I'm not sure if the miniseries format has died out, or if I've simply gotten older. Our perception of time changes as we age. When I saw V again on DVD, I think it was only 3 or 4 2-hour segments, but I could swear it was on for months. Maybe I was thinking of the series. About the only modern epic that compared with these series was Dune and to a slightly lesser degree Children of Dune. Then again, they could only go uphill after the theatrical version.

Maybe miniseries don't work anymore, or maybe they just don't interest me. Most dramas are set up with season-long arcs that offer some sense of closure after 24 episodes, something 24 definitely offers. And Buffy was always structured with a season-long “big bad”, an enemy that would recur throughout the season leading to a final confrontation and boss battle in the season finale. Joss Whedon always said he structured the show that way because he never knew if he was going to be canceled. Considering the fate of Angel and Firefly, there's both wisdom and irony in that.

Perhaps we're all too busy to devote our lives to a miniseries. The ongoing dramas take up our attention, and DVDs and TiVO offer an immediacy we didn't have twenty years ago. Who wants to sit through commercials? Who wants to remember to watch something Sunday, Monday, and Wednesday, or whatever nights a show is on? Rose Red was the last miniseries I watched, and it was a chore to force myself to stay with it. I should have learned my lesson from the remake of The Shining.

I can't go back. The miniseries is dead. Long live the miniseries....