Theorizing the Television Episode

Kathryn VanArendonk

Narrative, Volume 27, Number 1, January 2019, pp. 65-82 (Article)

Published by The Ohio State University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/nar.2019.0004

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/712871

Access provided by Newcastle University (18 Mar 2019 22:02 GMT)

 Kathryn VanArendonk

Theorizing the Television Episode

ABSTRACT: Television storytelling is one of the most vibrant, dominant fictional

modes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and yet its foundational structure,
the episode, has been undertheorized. All television stories deploy the episode in some
way, and its formal and fictional contours are both inescapable and distinct from exist-
ing narrative theories of other serial forms. This essay is an attempt to provide a nar-
rative theory of the television episode as a form, one that accounts for plot-based epi-
sodic storytelling as well as episodes built around a thematic structure, and it outlines
a common framework for all fictional episodic expression on television. To do this, the
essay considers several key texts, including Mad Men, House, and Friends, and explores
the episode in contrast to the theories of narrative parts and wholes provided by works
like Barthes’s “Structural Analysis.” The essay also gestures towards a longer history of
episodic storytelling in television through shows like I Love Lucy and Twilight Zone,
and also notes more recent developments in streaming television storytelling, where
the episode’s diminishing formal weight is growing more palpable.

KEYWORDS: episode, television, seriality, twentieth century, twenty-first century,

form, Mad Men

SINCE ABOUT 2015, as streaming platforms have started pumping out ever-increas-
ing numbers of serialized television stories with whole seasons appearing in front of
the audience all at once, the familiar, ubiquitous weight of the TV episode as a defining
form has started to shift a little. On network television, in shows still watched by the
plurality of the TV audience, the TV episode pulses along as usual. But in some new
series on Netflix and Amazon Prime, the episode as a meaningful formal device—the
episode as something that seeps into the pores of every moment of a television show,
something that operates as a driving inescapable pressure on its form and the story-

Kathryn VanArendonk is a staff writer for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, where she writes about
and reviews television. She has a PhD in English from Stanford University and wrote her dissertation on
the formal modes of serial storytelling, focusing on the singular role of television’s episodic structure.

NARRATIVE, Vol. 27, No. 1 (January 2019)

Copyright © 2019 by The Ohio State University
66  Kathryn VanArendonk

telling—has begun to look less insistent and less essential. That waning influence is
most apparent in the context of series that appear in massive multi-episode chunks all
at once, like Jessica Jones or Godless, but it’s also visible in a series like Game of Thrones,
where bits of various plots can appear almost at random throughout an hour, and
could just as easily have been scenes from the previous episode or the next. In shows
like this, the episode has become, if not a completely invisible force, then something
with much less power than it used to have.
But that change is arriving on the TV landscape slowly and unevenly, and for de-
cades before this moment, the episode has been nestled deep in the most fundamental
structure of how a TV show works and what makes it distinct from other forms of
fiction. And even as it’s slowly begun to erode as a driving force in narrative con-
struction, for some newer series, the potency of the episode—the opportunities and
flexibility it affords—has become even clearer. This essay will explore the television
episode as a narrative structure, arguing that its structure marks television seriality
as distinct from seriality in the novel, or anywhere else. I’ll consider what defines the
episode, how its central features have enabled formal experimentation and become a
unit of meaning even in long-running stories, and how the episode’s possibility as an
optional deviation from the norm has allowed it to survive even after strict, time-lim-
ited programming grids have started to fall by the wayside.

The Episode as “The One”

The crucial difference between the television episode and other units of narrative di-
vision can be pretty well understood through the naming conventions of episode titles
for the sitcom Friends. On Friends, a classic sitcom format usually following an A, B,
C plot structure where a main story dominates, a second story is woven throughout,
and a third story provides color, each episode gets a fill-in-the-blank title: “The One
with the Monkey,” “The One Where Ross and Rachel Take a Break,” “The One in
Vegas.” There are a few exceptions over the course of the show’s ten seasons (“The
One Hundredth,” “The Last One”), but by and large, the names of Friends episodes
take one plot point as a description for the whole piece. The convention is winkingly,
self-consciously reductive because it can be—there are other plot lines in “The One
with the Holiday Armadillo,” but the armadillo is introduced, given a conflict, and re-
solved within that episode’s twenty-one minute runtime, and he will not be returning
in the next episode (he is, after all, a holiday armadillo, and there’s not much point
in keeping him around after December). In cases where the titular event does leech
across episode boundaries and returns as an issue in the subsequent week (Rachel’s
baby does not disappear after “The One Where Rachel Has a Baby”), the episode’s
title is a marker of monumentality. Long-term plot development that builds slowly for
many weeks eventually reaches some crisis point, and in the case of these episodes,
the title represents a milestone event in the lives of Friends characters.
The real utility of the Friends episode titles for thinking about the episode’s form
has less to do with the title’s fill-in-the-blank section and more to do with its opening
words. Each episode of Friends is “the one . . . ,” a formulation that marks both the
 Theorizing the Television Episode   67

episode’s singularity and its position as one of many. It is a form predicated on its
potentially absolute independence from the rest of a television show’s narrative, and
its existence relies on its status as an incomplete piece of a larger whole. The conven-
tion of “the one” also distinguishes the television episode from potentially analogous
forms in other long narratives. On Friends and elsewhere, this “one” is functionally
identical to that “one.” Where episodes in other forms (for instance, the novel) are
defined solely by their fictional content, the television episode is defined by both
its fictional and formal elements. A television episode is one half-hour of Friends,
but it is also one complete, self-contained narrative. As a result, a chain of episodes
run back to back can follow a continuing, developing storyline where Chandler and
Monica’s London hook-up eventually leads to their engagement and marriage, but
these episodes are also uniform blocks of plot with the same size and shape that retain
individual identities.
The NBC sitcom Community represents a different version of the same episodic
phenomenon. Internally, each episode of Friends can appear relatively fragmentary,
as each thread of the multiple braided plots diverge from each other and the episode
bounces back and forth between separate character groups. The episode is most vis-
ible as a coherent, self-contained unit when viewed in the deluge of dozens of other
Friends episodes, so that the plot patterning emerges as formula rather than fragment
and the insistent drumbeat of the episodes’ titling convention makes its message clear.
The reverse is true for Community. When viewed on the scale of a season or series,
Community looks nearly schizophrenic, with styles and structures as aggressively di-
vergent from each other as possible. Two episodes of Community may resemble each
other as closely as a Vermeer resembles a Rothko; one week Community proceeds as
if it were a blockbuster Hollywood action film, one week it is an 8-bit video game, one
week a Ken Burns documentary, a My Dinner With Andre spoof, a police procedural,
a conspiracy thriller, a claymation holiday special, or a musical. And yet Community
and Friends are operating on precisely the same foundational features of the televi-
sion episode, which allow them both to treat each episode as a separate unit entirely
distinct from what came before or what comes next. In doing so, these two shows
use that structure for opposing ends—on Friends, each episode is individual and yet
nearly indistinguishable from any other episode, and on Community, every episode
throws out the rules and rewrites them from scratch.
As a unit, the television episode is a container for plot as well as a formal structure
that guides reception. For television shows that deviate from the cookie-cutter sitcom
or procedural style of episodic boundaries, the episode retains an authority to shape its
contents into a meaningful, singular whole. An episode’s constituent pieces have the
power to speak more meaningfully to each other than they do to continuing plotlines
in subsequent weeks; even in the most “serialized” shows where plots stretch across
months and years, many episodes could still be given Friends-style titles: “The One in
Rome” (Mad Men’s “Souvenir”), “The One with the Atomic Bomb” (Twin Peaks: The
Return’s “Part 8”), “The One with the Lion Sex Boat” (The Leftovers’ “It’s a Matt, Matt,
Matt, Matt World”). Just as in the case of the Friends episodes, there are other plots
and other touchstones in each of these examples, but the titles are still accurate. “Part
8” of Twin Peaks: The Return is essentially illegible when viewed outside the context
68  Kathryn VanArendonk

of the whole season—Lynch has been one of the many showrunners in recent years to
insist that his TV season is less a TV show and more a cinematic construction. And
yet in more than one instance over that season, he uses the TV episode in precisely
this way, as a formal boundary and a unit of narrative meaning.
There are other complications, and particularly with the advent of streaming TV
narratives, the episode’s formal restrictions vary in force from series to series. But in a
nutshell, these are the elements of the episode that underlie its rigidity and astounding
range as a narrative structure. An episode can stand by itself but cannot exist alone;
it is a unit defined by its content as well as its organizing frames; it is a form that
produces objects that can appear both formulaically identical and entirely dissimilar.
I’ve defined the episode in terms of a series of combinations and contradictions,
a definition that comes out of my sense that the episode is indeed the product of
tensions that pull in opposite directions. More important than these tensions, though,
is the understanding that the TV episode is a product, a carefully designed and rule-
bound entity, and not the mere invisible, inevitable result of televised narrative or
serialized storytelling. Even in series that no longer appear within the framework of
a restrictive schedule-driven setting, where the episode has become something of a
vestigial formal organ, the echoes of its past and its utility as a storytelling tool remain.

Procedural Storytelling and Episodic Logic

For many television shows, especially those that still dominate the bread-and-but-
ter weekly network schedule in 2018, the episode’s serial boundaries are delineations
of plot. The resulting pattern of weekly conflict and resolution, victim and criminal,
challenge and winner, or dilemma and solution clearly outline the beginnings and
ends of each episode, even without contextual or formal markers of division. We have
become so accustomed to this form that its underlying concept seems to fade into a
background of inevitability, but this premise is actually incredibly weird. Take, for in-
stance, the medical drama House. On House, the standard episode follows the prickly,
brilliant eponymous doctor and his medical student lackeys as they diagnose and treat
patients with rare illnesses. These episodes follow a regular, easily predictable pattern:
after a mysterious collapse, a patient arrives at Princeton Plainsboro Hospital. Cur-
mudgeonly as ever, Dr. House refuses to meet the patient and instead sends his interns
to complete a battery of expensive, invasive, and physically grueling tests; when these
tests only deepen the mystery, Dr. House begins to take a more personal interest in
the case. After insisting on a course of treatment likely to kill, maim, or sterilize the
patient if his diagnosis is incorrect, House must appeal to the hospital’s sexy admin-
istrator for approval. At the last moment, just as the surgeons begin to remove the
leg that will forever render the patient incapable of realizing her Olympic gymnastic
dreams, House halts the surgery to reveal that in fact, the patient is suffering from a
different, easily treatable but shockingly rare disorder.
For many series, a protagonist’s changelessness—or change on such an incremen-
tal level as to be more of a blip than a design—can feel like a larger driving force
of episodic delineation than plot. It doesn’t particularly matter what the gang from
 Theorizing the Television Episode   69

Seinfeld is getting up to, nor are the specific store shenanigans the most memorable
thing about an episode of Superstore. Plot setups exist as a showcase for character,
letting the audience spend more time with familiar, remarkable individuals. And in
many cases, a significant moment of characterization is the most notable thing about
any particular installment—less “The One With the Holiday Armadillo” and more
“The One Where Ross Tries to Be A Good Dad.” But Ross tries to be a good dad (and
fails) in many Friends episodes, just as Seinfeld nitpicks about a mundane annoyance
and House is abusive to his employees. These revelations of character may be the point
of an episode, but they’re not clearly and regularly mapped onto an episode’s shape.
Particularly for crime procedurals or sitcoms, plot is the foremost driver of how an
episode begins and ends; it is the thing that allows for the significant moments of
character revelation, and it is the force that pulls those character revelations to some
kind of closure. The pleasure may be in watching the Cheers cast be friends, but there’s
no episodic rhythm to their friendship without individual plot-based premises for
each episode. Particularly in the case of highly amnesiac television storytelling—most
predominantly, sitcoms and crime procedurals—character becomes subordinate to
plot as a driver of episodic form.
With a few variations and a few brief departures, House’s repeating, amnesiac
storytelling, commonly referred to as a procedural format, was repeated on a highly
rated, incredibly popular network television show about twenty times a year for eight
years.1 In spite of his remarkable record for last-minute saves, House must still ask
permission to violate hospital policy when his treatments seem out of line. Addition-
ally, House’s personal failings continue to be a cause of concern for his employers and
employees, even though his pattern of addiction and rehabilitation is as regular and
predictable as his patients’ rate of rare-disease acquisition. The glow of success from a
previous week’s case rarely if ever enters into the tension of the current medical mys-
tery. House and other television dramas that operate on this formula are perpetually
in the moment, with no echoes from the past or concerns for the future entering into
the conflict at hand. How strange to return to the same characters again and again
with no expectation that their circumstances will ever change.
This strangeness is entirely enabled by a function of the television episode’s narra-
tive form. On House and on similar programs (more recently, The Good Doctor, 9–1-1,
Blue Bloods, Seal Team, S. W. A. T., etc.) the episode is a reductive force. Its boundaries
are an inward-moving pressure, neatly and relentlessly encapsulating everything es-
sential about a television show within its forty-three-minute run time. Few episodes
of House go without a reference to the main character’s unstable mental state, his
astonishing Holmesian powers of reasoning, and a patient’s unlikely-and-deadly trop-
ical parasite, because each episode is a relatively equal, equally representative piece of
House. The episode enables this kind of reductively repetitive logic because it comes
with a built-in, implicit reset button. Different genres take advantage of this element
in a variety of ways, and some never use it at all. But somewhere within the promise
of any episode is its potential to be a beginning (even if it’s the fourth episode, or the
fortieth). The episode’s capacity for re-beginning is instantly apparent in the structure
of a show like House, where its patient-of-the-week mechanism builds a new intro-
duction into each episode, but its formulaic patterns of conflict and resolution beyond
70  Kathryn VanArendonk

the patient are equally important products of this episodic feature. House’s adversarial
relationship with the hospital administration is repeated so frequently, and with so lit-
tle meaningful development, that the only way to make sense of the show’s regularity
(aside from a belief that the entire cast ironically suffers from a rare disease causing
weekly amnesia), is that on some level, the show starts all over again each week. What
came before may not be erased or entirely forgotten, but it could be, particularly if it’s
an element of the show that affects its episodic formula.2 The episode’s automatic reset
feature also explains the necessity for each episode to be equally representative of the
show at large—in a series where every episode is a do-over, every episode is equally
responsible for carrying the burden of the show’s identity.3 Like a cell that carries a
complete DNA sequence, each typical episode of House contains the raw information
necessary to reconstruct the entire series.
Even for many series where the central premise does not require elaborate narra-
tive machinations in order to continue making sense each week, the episode’s implicit
capacity for re-beginning shapes weekly plotting. Nothing about the logic of I Love
Lucy insists that there be sudden gaps in narrative, that cause and effect have dimin-
ished impact, or that episodes necessarily start a new story from scratch. Unlike House,
the characters and plots of I Love Lucy do not rely upon a set of dramatic tropes that
somehow must be repeated ad infinitum; as the episode titles suggest, much of the
show is built on everyday material. “Ricky Asks for a Raise,” “Men Are Messy,” “Ethel’s
Birthday,” “Lucy Learns to Drive”—why would a story need a structure allowing it to
return to status quo when it’s hardly left? And yet, the episode operates within I Love
Lucy just as it does on House four decades later. Televisual episodic form permits
endless repetition (how else could a fiction sustain not one but four episodes where
Lucy wants to redecorate?4), and the episode’s capacity to start all over again—and
in so doing, forget much of what has come before—informs each of the many Lucy
episodes which end with Lucy mid-crisis, hilariously caught in yet another seemingly
inextricable conundrum. “Lucy Does a TV Commercial” may be the funniest of these,
and the episode closes with Lucy staggering drunkenly onto Ricky’s television show
as he sings live on camera. The episode’s conclusion signals I Love Lucy’s release from
the probable implications of this scenario, making it clear that Ricky will not have to
deal with the fallout from this event, nor will Lucy’s dramatic failure prevent her from
attempting a television career in the future. Five decades before the first episode of
House is released, I Love Lucy uses the same televisual episodic form, in spite of the
series’ differences in premise, in genre, in filming style, and in runtime.

The Television Episode’s Serial Antecedents

The kind of storytelling I’m describing here is most commonly associated with televi-
sion, but it also bears a strong resemblance to some earlier serial forms.5 I’ve already
described House as Holmesian, and indeed, the storytelling form that pulses under-
neath House’s constant, scarcely wavering formula looks a lot like the narrative devices
that shape Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories, or any number of mystery novel series from
the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. And many of them are the same—the serial
 Theorizing the Television Episode   71

unit as a container for plot, the repetition, the presence of a detective figure whose
mere existence promises the eventual solution of the mystery. The difference is in the
part’s assumed relationship with a larger whole. A television episode is more beholden
to its accompanying cohort of episodes—television episodes necessarily exist as one
of many, in a way that was not integral to the earliest Holmes stories and is not func-
tionally defining for many mystery novels. My particular favorites, Dorothy Sayers’s
Lord Peter series, do not use the inter-book breaks in any regular way, nor does each
book maintain a steady relationship to their role as a serial. Beyond a certain point
in the series, the protagonist isn’t really Lord Peter anymore; Have His Carcase is told
from the perspective of Harriet Vane, Lord Peter doesn’t even arrive in Gaudy Night
until the halfway point, and the final two novels are more about processing Peter
and Harriet’s trauma than they are about mystery and resolution. The mystery novel
series, like the novel itself, is a looser, baggier beast.
Part of the difference is in the implied multiplicity of the part. One episode of
House is representative of House, but as a series, House is defined by being the um-
brella of numerous episodic installments. There’s no such thing as a television series
consisting of only one episode.6 For however much weight a single episode of House
can carry, the identity of House as a series is also defined by how it uses episodes, the
way it repeats, the things that do carry over from one week to the next (generally who
his interns are sleeping with), and the things that somehow do not carry over (the
consequences for House’s perpetual misbehavior). This is not integral to the identity
of the Holmes canon, where the relationship between one part and the next is noto-
riously ad hoc—some serial “parts” are novels; others are short stories. Some operate
with a long memory of the fictional past; some ignore it entirely. The Holmes texts
lack the regularity and drumbeat sameness of their mystery-solving counterparts on
television. That same relative fluidity is also a marker for the mystery novel series
more generally—while one series may use each novel in a way that looks quite a lot
like a group of television episodes (Sue Grafton’s Alphabet series, for instance, or Ed
McBain’s 87th Precinct group), another may use each novel in a much less regular, less
structured way (e.g., the aforementioned Sayers books). A crucial part of the televi-
sion episode’s identity is its inescapability: with the exception of a very few of the most
recent streaming shows, the episode is an absolutely unvarying, obligatory force in
TV storytelling. For Holmes stories and mystery novel series, there’s no such required
rigidity, and there’s no implicit assumption of a part being one of many.

Episodic Structure beyond the Procedural

Although it’s a well-represented and commercially successful variety of television sto-

rytelling, the House-style drama is not the only option for TV fiction,7 and a formulaic
approach to weekly serial plotting is not an inevitable result of episodic structure.
House’s perpetual state of rinse and repeat is a narrative avenue made possible by the
underlying features of the episode as a device, but it is also only the most extreme ver-
sion of this form of episodic storytelling. This is already apparent in House and I Love
Lucy themselves—each of these series relies on amnesiac breaks between episodes as a
72  Kathryn VanArendonk

default, but each series also writes across those boundaries at some point in their run.
For I Love Lucy, the episodic walls are breached when Lucille Ball’s real-life pregnancy
becomes a fictional plot in Lucy Ricardo’s life. Many series fall in something like an
interim space, with some episodes operating as extremely plot-bounded stories and
others relying more on linear storytelling across installments—for a show like Bones,
the standard episode is wholly self-contained and the rare linear episodes are those
that suddenly pick up a linear romance plot to boost ratings for the Nielsen sweeps.
For a show like Justified, which has fewer episodes per season and isn’t harnessed to
a major network’s ratings calendar, the balance is reversed: most episodes are a part
of the season’s broader linear arc, but a significant handful are self-contained stories.
The episode is equally present in each installment; any episode has the potential to be
self-contained.
But in these short runs of a strictly linear story, or on a series where every ep-
isode is unquestionably bound inside an ordered narrative, the episode often shifts
into a slightly different expression of the form. This may be best represented by a
show like AMC’s drama Mad Men. The season 2 episode “Maidenform” is a useful
example—while every episode of Mad Men plays with this structure to some de-
gree, “Maidenform” is an unusually adept demonstration of the form. Unlike a pro-
cedural House-esque television series, Mad Men’s plotlines meander across episode
boundaries, developing slowly over the course of several weeks, and this episode
is a typical example. All of the season’s plotlines are in play here—protagonist Don
Draper is struggling with a failing marriage and his stolen identity, copywriter Peggy
Olson is searching for professional and personal fulfillment, the ad agency Sterling
Cooper is increasingly unstable—but none of these plots have come to a full boil, and
none are either introduced or resolved. Instead, “Maidenform” is full of various minor
events, each of them so ordinary and apparently insignificant that they hardly qualify
as “eventful.” Don and his wife Betty attend a fashion show at their country club.
Uncharacteristically, Peggy shows up at the stylish strip show where her colleagues
are entertaining a client. Don continues his affair with a client’s wife. The ad agency
works on a new campaign. The episode is nearly humdrum in its lack of narrative
momentum. Furthermore, the absence of any significant crises seems to suggest that
this is a very different type of episodic plotting than the self-contained, solved-in-an-
hour structure of a show like Law & Order or House. Almost everything that happens
in “Maidenform” either continues what came before or moves things into place for
later—and if that’s the case, what is this episode’s purpose? Is it even an episode, in the
same sense that an installment of House is an episode? How does a serial installment
like “Maidenform” in any way resemble the internal coherence and inward-looking
reductive pressure that seems to be a key feature of episodic structure on other tele-
vision shows?
As it happens, “Maidenform” and many other Mad Men episodes do include at
least a small element of procedural episodic plotting. In “Maidenform,” Don and his
creative team develop a new ad campaign for the lingerie company Playtex, and like
the plot-of-the-week structure in a procedural, the ad campaign has something of an
episodic arc. But Mad Men’s strategy is still quite different from a standard procedural
episode. For one, the Playtex plotline is a tiny piece of the larger episode—it takes
 Theorizing the Television Episode   73

up approximately ten percent of the episode’s total run time, while a classic House
episode would reverse this balance, with the patient plotline covering ninety percent
of the episode.8 More importantly, though, Mad Men mines its episode-length plot for
its thematic suggestions. The Playtex story raises questions about female beauty, cos-
tumes, and body images, and even though this plot covers a small piece of the over-
all episode, its related associations and queries bleed into the surrounding material,
as various female characters are shamed or rejoined about their clothing.9 Even the
episode’s title cues its thematic cohesion: Sterling Cooper is working on the Playtex
campaign, but the title comes from the much more literal name of Playtex’s competing
lingerie brand.
By linking its brief, symbolic episode-length plot to a broader thematic concept,
Mad Men substitutes episodic reduction on the level of plot with an episodic explo-
ration of theme—where a sitcom may have had one particular plot to organize reve-
lations of character, Mad Men spins its characters around episodic axes of thematic
boundaries. The driving question is not, how does Don Draper make the Maidenform
campaign and how does that plot resolve, but rather, how is Draper’s character ex-
posed through explorations of self-reflection and character binaries? And of course,
this too is a form of reduction. Mad Men’s aesthetic and its highly stylized dialogue
make ambiguity, vagueness, and the disconnect between beautiful surfaces and dam-
aged interiors the series’ bread and butter. It’s a show that pretends to be difficult. Matt
Zoller Seitz writes that Mad Men’s characters are “random, inscrutable, and mysteri-
ous,” and its “explanatory speeches and dream sequences tend to muddy motivation
rather than clarify it,” and in the New York Review of Books Daniel Mendelsohn muses
about why “so much of Mad Men is curiously opaque, all inexplicable exteriors and
posturing.” It’s not, though. The desired result of Mad Men’s apparent inaccessibility
is not to be actually inaccessible—its every mystifying shot of Don examining a fly
caught in the ceiling light and each obfuscating line of dialogue about misrepresented
desire is instead an open invitation for interpretation.10
So far from endlessly muddled vagueness, Mad Men basically begs its audience
to search for meaning and thematic resonance. One need look no further to judge
the success of Mad Men’s request than the endless day-after blog posts attempting
to piece apart an episode’s every cultural reference and long, suggestive glance for a
deeper understanding of the show’s meaning. Whether we land on a “correct” reading
is beside the point. The show that appears to be shrouded in mystery and replete with
unplumbable emotional depths nevertheless succeeds in instigating what amounts to
a show versus audience game of hide and seek, which we play happily in spite of the
program’s apparent impenetrability. The explanation for this disconnect between Mad
Men’s supposed difficulty and its audience’s cheerful, productive search for mean-
ing comes from the reductive capability of the episode as a form. Against the slowly
developing plots and casually dropped references to Frank O’Hara collections, Mad
Men uses the episode to build a digestible unit out of an otherwise intimidatingly
expansive narrative.
The episode is the narrative container that allows Mad Men to explore weekly
variations on a theme, but the substitution of theme for plot does not mean that Mad
Men’s episodes also lack internal fictional structure. For the purposes of understand-
74  Kathryn VanArendonk

ing the episode’s resiliency even in these highly serialized television dramas, the ques-
tion of what any specific episode means is less interesting than the question of how
that episode gets an audience to ask, “what did that episode mean?” in the first place.11
In the case of “Maidenform,” the first technique is to set aside this one episode as a
readable, interpretable unit even though its major plot developments are inextricable
from the surrounding episodes. The Playtex campaign does some of the work here,
but it’s not the only piece of episodic structure. “Maidenform” is recognizable as a
single, completed unit thanks in part to its structural bookends, which cue a sense
of beginning and ending, even though the episode lacks a strong, dominant internal
plot arc. It begins with an opening montage sequence, in which Betty, Peggy and Joan
get dressed in the morning. This opening sequence gets its parallel closing moment
in the penultimate scene of the show, when Peggy arrives at the strip club. After the
viewer watches Betty, Peggy, and Joan dressing in the show’s beginning, the end of the
episode turns on the spectacle of a woman undressing. None of the show’s storylines
start or finish in this episode, but these scenes create a beginning and ending all the
same; day and night, dressing and undressing, introduction and conclusion.
It’s clear that Mad Men retains the television episode as a narrative device in spite
of its move away from episodic plotting. But the more significant issue here is that
this is not a peculiarity of this one episode or of this one television show. This kind
of narrative technique—in which one piece of a big text is built as a whole, self-con-
tained unit even though it’s also a subordinate piece of a longer work—is a charac-
teristic of the television episode across genre and platform, and until the most recent
developments in TV storytelling, was absolutely ubiquitous. Not all episodes look like
“Maidenform,” but even in those that don’t, the episode has always been represented
somehow, in some combination of a formal, thematic, or plot-based technique. What
the episode means, in this respect, is that television seriality does not work like seri-
ality in the novel, or seriality anywhere else—in this sense, for this form, the whole
is something less than the sum of its parts. Perhaps it’s because television series can
be so inordinately long, or because they’re often entities that exist outside of any
single creative mind and are instead the product of multiple producers, writers, or
showrunners. Or perhaps it’s because television has figured out how to do seriality
differently—how to make the serial part an end in and of itself and not just a means
to something bigger.
It also makes the more recent decline of episodic rigidity unsurprising, as it’s
come at a time when so much new television storytelling is serial on the level of a
“season” (i.e., a group of maybe six or twelve episodes) but not on the level of an
episode. A TV episode no longer has to represent the whole series, and no longer
needs to produce meaning for an audience in each episode, because the audience has
access to so much more of the series at once. Not coincidentally, this move away from
episodic absolutism has come hand in hand with a rise in the number of television
series that displace the “complete unit” pressure onto the television season as a frame;
since 2010, the “anthology” series has become increasingly popular. For shows like
American Crime Story, True Detective, and Fargo, shifting the opportunity for a new
beginning onto the seasonal structure is a middle road between reductive episodic
limits and an audience’s desire for definitive endings.
 Theorizing the Television Episode   75

In one light, the current move toward making the episode an opt-in structure
in contexts where television is no longer a weekly serial is a relief from the burden
of regular rhythmic intensity. If one episode is mostly about place-setting for what
comes next, a viewer has immediate access to the aftermath. There’s no need for every
episode to fulfill the same role of individuality and meaning-making, and for those
that don’t, the episode becomes something more like a gesture, a pause—a convention
fulfilled. But the episode as opt-in structure can also be a way of perpetually kicking
the narrative can down the episodic road, in a way that many popular critics have
come to note is often to the detriment of a series’ narrative drive.12 The loss of the
episode in some streaming platforms can mean more freedom for writers, but on a
granular level, it can also mean looser, emptier storytelling. In this context the epi-
sode’s opt-in iteration impoverishes the series.

Toward a Taxonomy of Episodic Expressions

The type of episode I’ve described in Mad Men’s “Maidenform” is just that—a type of
episode, which in some crucial and useful ways is a clearly and substantially different
structure from that which drives a show like House or Friends. It is, perhaps, a the-
matic episode, recognizable for the way in which its boundaries and internal logic are
defined by a central thematic concern that creates an episodic framework for long-arc
plotlines. Mad Men is not alone in the use of thematic episodes, nor is it the first.
Primetime soaps like Dallas and thirtysomething also deployed this version of episodic
form, and it’s equally visible on shows like Veronica Mars (a neo-noir), Transparent (a
genre-busting half-hour series), and Jane the Virgin (a telenovela).
My distinction between the plot-delimited episodes of House and I Love Lucy
and the thematic episode typified by Mad Men is an effort to chart two expressions
of episodic form, but of course they’re not the only iterations of episodic structure on
television, nor is the spectrum on which I’ve located them (defined by the use of either
plot or theme as a primary marker) the only tool available to define episodic models.
There are ample, continually proliferating versions and varieties of episodic structures
on television. One could set aside, for instance, network TV season finales as a defin-
able set, or The Good Place’s careful combination of comedic arcs with a closing twist
as a distinctive genre-bending blend, or one could group together shows like Game
of Thrones and Jessica Jones that seem to abjure the episode’s utility in the boggy mid-
dles of their seasons and then return to thematic episodic rhythms by the end. All of
which is to say that this argument about episodic form on television is not intended to
exclude the identification and examination of particular instantiations of the episode.
These are necessary and valuable lenses through which to understand the way tele-
vision narrative functions. Robin Nelson’s work on flexi-narratives, for instance, ex-
plores a particular episodic form that is the result of “institutional constraints” which
privileges prolificacy over “dramatic quality more traditionally viewed” (42). Rather,
my aim here is to identify and examine the underlying episodic engine that drives
each of these types equally, and in so doing, to recognize the foundational structure of
the television episode as a singular form.
76  Kathryn VanArendonk

Previous Narrative Theories and the Standalone Episode

This understanding of the television episode’s role does not fit comfortably into the
major theories of narrative form. Critical work on the television episode’s narrative
structure has tended to focus on its erasability in the broader context of a whole series.
Centering her argument on the audiences of soap operas, Jennifer Hayward suggests
that “each serial episode means little in isolation from its long history and contextu-
alizing narrative flow; each modifies the previous installment while simultaneously
tilting forward to the next, reaching out of the last frame to grab a hint of the one to
come” (136). Hayward’s analysis expresses an important point about the episode’s ul-
timate relationship to its broader serial contexts, but in so doing, doesn’t spend much
time on the role of form and coherence within the episode itself. In a similar vein,
Jason Jacobs asks, “how do we know when to halt our judgment, since the boundaries
of the episode take us beyond and before it? To what extent does the critical concen-
tration focused within an episode push us outside it for answers?” (444). Particularly
for television series with long-running plots, or indeed any series where characters
have the capacity to develop from one week to the next, a critical focus beyond the
self-contained context of a single episode is a fruitful and indispensable level of ex-
amination. But exploration outside of a single episode’s limits does not exclude an
appreciation for the role and structure of episodic form, which aside from enforcing
self-containment, also provides a significant critical lever with which to understand
how plot and character move within the season and the series.
Few theories of literary narrative say much about episodic structure, but those
that do tend to consider the episode as a more granular unit than anything compara-
ble to the television episode. David Miall’s work, which elaborates on Reformatsky’s
contribution in Russian Formalism, defines the episode as “a number of sentences
taking up half a page or a page, usually demarcated by a coherence in the temporal or
spatial setting . . . [which] offers a thematically distinctive topic requiring a shift in the
reader’s understanding” (112). Miall’s insistence on the small-scale level of episodic
form here might be better aligned with a television episode’s scene or “beat,” but it
is incongruous with the episode’s much larger relative position within the narrative.
The same objection of scale is true for Umberto Eco’s “discursive structures,” though
Eco’s account is even further from the comparable television structure due to its total
reliance on the reader’s recognition of these structures rather than any regularized
formal feature of the text (31).
Of the available theoretical accounts of episodic form, Barthes’s “Structural
Analysis of Narrative,” which conceives of pieces (functional units, catalysts, indi-
ces, etc.) in a hierarchal relationship with the total text, may be the closest. Barthes’s
description of the narrative unit relies on the concept that these sequences move in
“counterpoint,” creating a narrative with a “fugued structure,” so that sequences in-
evitably overlap, precluding any moment where the narrative is interrupted. “Within
the single work,” Barthes writes, “the imbrication of sequences can indeed only be
allowed to come to a halt within a radical break if the sealed-off blocks which then
compose it are in some sort recuperated at the higher level of .  .  . the characters”
(103–4). This description leaves no place for the extreme procedural form of the tele-
 Theorizing the Television Episode   77

vision episode, where the intervening space between episodes, the “radical break,” is
less a “break” than a reset function. For this type of television narrative, the connec-
tion between sequences on the episode-level cannot be “recuperated” by an “actantial
relation” because the characters that do cross episode boundaries retain little more
than their names and basic introductory qualities. Formula in television storytelling
is only possible because of its repudiation of “actantial relations.”
But there’s a critical, defining feature of the episode that precludes it from coexis-
tence with Barthes’s “Structural Analysis”: the episode’s potential—even now, in an era
of the streaming behemoth—to be completely separate from the rest of a series. Epi-
sodes that follow this model tend to rely on one or more major changes from a series’
typical narrative, stylistic, or structural modus operandi—these episodes take place
in an alternate reality, they are told from the viewpoint of a minor character, they
entail a sudden, striking departure from the show’s familiar stylistic tropes (the noir
episode, the musical episode), or any number of other dramatic changes.13 This curi-
osity of television narrative, the standalone, deviant episode, is frequently the focus
of both critical acclaim (for episodes like Breaking Bad’s “Hermanos,” Homicide: Life
on the Street’s “Three Men and Adena,” BoJack Horseman’s “Fish Out of Water”) and
disparagement (Happy Days’ Hollywood three-part episode, The West Wing’s “Isaac
and Ishmael,” the live episode of ER). There is no guarantee, in other words, that these
episode-long experiments in narrative play will be successful. And yet, in spite of the
mixed results and mixed responses, the deviant episode is a widespread and surpris-
ingly common phenomenon.14
The classic example of the one-off episode, the deviant departure from a show’s
norm, is an episode from the sixth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the musical ep-
isode “Once More, With Feeling.” Like other long-running shows (and like other sci-
ence-fiction or fantasy series which tend to include more of these playful, stylistically
anomalous episodes), “Once More, With Feeling” is one of several unusual episodes
that appear throughout Buffy’s seven-season run. As with earlier examples of stylistic
departure, “Once More, With Feeling” contains a diegetic explanation for the show’s
extra-diegetic stylistic divergence: a demon, part of Buffy’s standard weekly-issued
conflict, has appeared and changed everyone’s behavior. In season four’s “Hush,” the
monster-of-the-week prevents anyone from speaking, leading to an episode almost
entirely without dialogue; later in that same season, a demon who tries to kill the cast
in their sleep leads to an entire episode of dream sequences (“Restless”). The same
is true for “Once More, With Feeling,” where a mysterious source (as it happens, a
demon) causes everyone in Sunnyvale to occasionally break into spontaneous, Hol-
lywood-musical-style, highly choreographed singing and dancing routines. This is an
episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but it is also is own discrete text; it is somehow
both a constituent feature of the series, and, at the very best, loosely related to the
larger project of the show without being at all representative, or even akin to the rest
of the series.
This is the curious position of the deviating episode, and its existence is entirely a
product of the television episode as a form. The boundaries between one episode and
the next are strict, perhaps more strict than any other unit of narrative division—even
on Netflix or Hulu, where a viewer watching on auto-play can easily slide between
78  Kathryn VanArendonk

installments without even clicking “next,” there’s still no question of where the border
is between episodes. The implication remains: this piece of this fiction will end, and
after a period of time, another will begin. Whatever the internal fictional content of
this unit may be, the unit’s boundaries (and the existence of the unit itself) are beyond
question. Because of the strict borders of the serialized television episode—because
the rules of its relationship with the rest of the text are so incontrovertible—each
episode contains within it the potential, often unrealized, to suspend the previously
established narrative norms, to veer off into experimental and strange territory, to be
entirely different than what has come before. And, just as importantly, these deviant
episodes can suspend the rules of a series without threatening them wholesale. There’s
never any danger that the montage scenes from the standalone musical episode seven
will now be standard narrative procedure, or that episode eight will now necessarily
include song and dance numbers. The same features that make the television episode
a more stable, cohesive and complete structure than the season or the series (or the
novelistic serial part) also make the episode prime material for the kind of dramatic
departure that results in a single serial installment in the style of a Hollywood musi-
cal.15 It is entirely logical that a system that makes the subordinate part more powerful
than the organizing whole would result in parts which occasionally swerve off in an
unanticipated direction.
The sense that the episodic part has more power than the whole may well be
fading from some branches of television storytelling. But this iteration of episodic
form—episode as optional opportunity, as unevenly activated potential—has never-
theless made the leap into a landscape of streaming series and shows written to exist
outside a scheduled programming grid. Shows like Transparent, Stranger Things, and
The Handmaid’s Tale have deployed the deviating episode structure even inside sea-
sons of television that might otherwise be described as only occasionally episodic:
Transparent uses standalone episodes to jump backwards in time and Stranger Things
2 inserts a spin-offy hour set in Chicago into the final third of a season otherwise
carefully limited to the small town of Hawkins. Even in a streaming show as brief as
I Love Dick, one of the only eight episodes is a complete departure from the series
status quo, adopting a mosaic point-of-view structure that’s entirely separate from
the rest of the series. It’s as if these new series’ shared memory of televisual episodic
logic allows for the potential of a brief resurrection of episodic thinking, even when
it seems to be otherwise forgotten. That idea of a new episode as a potential, a new
episode that might throw out all the rules and look like something else entirely, a new
episode that might be the start of an entirely new story, a new episode that might be a
self-contained experiment—that idea still exists.
This isn’t the only way that television series from streaming outlets have taken
advantage of episodic form in recent years, either; just as the episode seems to be a
waning feature in some television series, it’s also returned as a force in the new bubble
of popular episodic anthology shows. Once a dominant genre of TV (Twilight Zone,
Outer Limits, Alfred Hitchcock Presents), the episodic anthology has started to make a
comeback. The best known of these is Black Mirror, but there are now a hearty hand-
ful of others, including Black Mirror-inspired Electric Dreams, the modern life short
story series Easy, and HBO’s Room 104, which lets a single hotel room become a unit
 Theorizing the Television Episode   79

in a way that cleverly mirrors its episodic form.16 Even Mad Men’s creator, Matthew
Weiner, has embraced the form; his series The Romanoffs is a collection of loosely
connected standalone stories with no continuing plots.
There’s one additional sense in which the episode as a singular unit of storytelling
continues to hold sway, even in the context of all-at-once television season releases
and binge-viewing paradigms: criticism and reception. Without a time-limited serial
frame to organize viewer responses and critical analysis, the episode has become the
defining feature around which to drive viewer engagement with new series—Netflix
may release all of a new season of Mindhunter in one fell swoop, but popular criticism
websites still produce episodic recaps or reviews for each installment of the series. In
the process of writing those reviews, critics (including myself) are careful to watch
only one episode at a time before writing each response, a method that carefully repli-
cates and reinforces a serialized scaffold for receiving the series even if the series itself
is scarcely serial. In part, that method is driven by the economics of digital publishing:
one post per episode means more opportunities for advertising dollars. But it’s also
because audiences recreate serial experiences on their own schedules. Some viewers
do watch all of a new season at once, but audience engagement traffic data for episodic
recaps indicates that many more viewers watch a few episodes at a time, stretching
the experience over a week or more. They check in with critical assessments as they
go, and whether by audience preference or simple necessity of time, many streaming
series attain ad-hoc seriality, regardless of their release schedules. Most importantly
for the purposes of storytelling form and critical assessments, the boundaries of those
serial units are still the episode. Regardless of whether a television creator treats the
episode as a potential standalone unit, the audience still relies on the potential to
receive it that way.
In spite of recent shifts, in other words, episodic structure and episodic reception
are still far and away the dominant mode of television storytelling. Even in the context
of longform televisual narratives, even within a drastically altered serial paradigm and
the immense changes in the way an audience consumes television narrative, the idea
of the television episode as always containing a potential to exist as a whole, individ-
ual unit, is still alive and well.

Endnotes
1. On this kind of formulaic television, Albert Moran writes, “ . . . from one point of view, a television
format is that set of invariable elements in a program out of which the variable elements of an
individual episode are produced. . . . Van Manin quotes a television producer who offers a more
colloquial summary . . . : ‘The “crust” is the same from week to week but the filling changes’” (258).
2. Although often connected with procedural storytelling of the type demonstrated by House or by
police shows like Law & Order, this variety of intensely self-contained weekly storytelling is also
highly associated with the sitcom, and is apparent in series as historically widespread as I Love
Lucy, The Beverly Hillbillies, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and Cheers.
3. In the context of patently episodic shows like House, this understanding of how the episode works
is well established. One example is Jeffrey Sconce’s description of what he calls “episodic series,”
which “must feature an appealingly familiar and yet ultimately repetitive foundation of premise
80  Kathryn VanArendonk

and character relations” (100). Sconce contrasts this to “cumulative narratives,” which in his work
constitutes a “distinct format” from that of the episodic series (96). Sarah Kozloff describes this
phenomenon as the “series format”: “because each show repeats without progression, the viewer
finds surface variability on top of a rigid formula” (91).
4. Season two’s “Redecorating” and “Lucy Wants New Furniture,” season three’s “Redecorating the
Mertz’s Apartment,” and season six’s “Lucy Gets Chummy with the Neighbors,” in which new
neighbor Betty convinces Lucy to buy new furniture, again.
5. The closest formal predecessor to the television episode outside of TV is most directly the radio
serial, where titles such as Dragnet, Ozzie and Harriet and The Honeymooners were directly im-
ported from radio onto the nascent television programming, with much of the episodic structure
intact. The history of the radio serial belongs to other work, but many of the earliest television
writers were hired from radio to work on the new medium, and the general episodic structure of
a radio episode of Dragnet bears a strong resemblance to the early Dragnet TV episodes.
6. This claim is true in form—no TV series is ever a TV series if it only has one episode. But it’s
hilariously untrue in practice; many, many a TV show has been produced with one episode and
then not given funding to produce more. The spirit of the claim remains correct, though. These
unproduced pilots are not really a series, and even as pilots, they’re written with the understand-
ing that the single episode would quickly be one of many.
7. In fact, that House-style drama is not even the only option for House—throughout its run, House
makes many attempts to depart from the various circumstances that underlie its central formula,
and for brief periods it resembles a completely different show. After experimenting with a new set
of interns or changes in House’s relationship or addiction status, though, the formula eventually
reverts to its initial state.
8. The House version of episodic plotting also requires a single-episode plot, some version of a pa-
tient of the week, whereas the episodic ad campaign in Mad Men is optional—many episodes lack
“Maidenform”’s arc from client request to concept development to presentation.
9. Don discovers Betty in the kitchen dressed in a skimpy bikini and scolds her for her lack of mod-
esty. Joan urges Peggy “stop dressing like a little girl” so that she can be “taken seriously,” and
when Peggy later joins her male colleagues at the strip club, she arrives in an uncharacteristically
done-up style.
10. This discussion of Mad Men’s use of the small episodic plot as a thematic touchstone has relevance
beyond just Mad Men. A thematic relationship between an episode-length plot and longer-run-
ning character development or seasonal plotlines has been a crucial marker of episodic form in
many shows that play with the space between fully episodic or fully serialized plotting. Among
these, Grey’s Anatomy has been the most consistent, and is notable for its long-term, soap-operatic
inter-character plotting as well as extremely delineated individual episode structures.
11. For a more in-depth consideration of this episode’s political implications, however, see Tonya
Krouse’s chapter in the Analyzing Mad Men.
12. See for instance Alan Sepinwall’s “Your TV Show Doesn’t Have to be a Movie: In Defense of the
Episode (Again)” or Todd VanDerWerff ’s “Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu get one basic thing about
TV very wrong” or my own “In Praise of the Standalone Episode of TV.”
13. Jason Mittell’s “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television” describes a range
of deviating episodes through their role as “narrative spectacle,” focusing on the way that these
episodes “invite viewers to engage at the level of formal analyst” (36). Through this lens, Mittell
frames the concept of the deviating episode more broadly than I do here; in his terms, this kind
of narrative complexity includes episodes which do not wholly deviate from a diegetic norm but
which nevertheless exploit and expose the episodic framework in the effort to demonstrate “nar-
rational bravado . . . by violating storytelling conventions” (36).
 Theorizing the Television Episode   81

14. TV Tropes has a huge, if messily compiled, list of candidates for television episodes that deviate; it
is more useful as an indication of the popular acceptance of this phenomenon than as a narrative
theory (TV Tropes).
15. This is the model that Community exploits on a weekly basis, and in doing so often mocks the
most well-worn and familiar conventions for deviating episodes. In addition to the musical, Com-
munity has also done a clip show episode (featuring clips from episodes that never aired), a bottle
episode, an alternate reality episode, and numerous episodes in the styles of other genres (a west-
ern, a noir, a documentary).
16. These anthology series also bolster the sense of plot as a stronger force for episodic shape than
character; there are no repeating characters in these, and so each episode becomes the revelation
of a new character being thrown against some distinct plot obstacle.

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