Kevin's Delightfully Documented Deliberations and Carefully Curated Currios

For a little while (read: years) I’ve been thinking about television and the episode as a core unit. There are lots of ways to judge a tv show, but one that I’ve started using more is what I am calling the Baywatch standard.  The core idea is this: Baywatch did episodic storytelling better than most TV shows of today.  Baywatch, as a show that existed primarily through local syndication, had to make sure that each episode worked as a single unit. Syndication packages were untrustworthy, and there was some unpredictability regarding the episode order. An even more important than that, if you didn’t watch a show when it aired, it was effectively gone forever. You might get reruns in the summer, but good luck finding specifically the episode you missed back in March.  It’s his is how TV worked for the majority of TV history. If something was considered Appointment Television that meant you had to bend you schedule to fit it in. It’s also why Friday night was considered a bad schedule spot for most TV shows. Friday was when people were more likely to leave the house and not  be at home watching TV. Eventually we invented the programmable VCR (Video Cassette Recorder) and if you were able to figure how to actually work the dang thing (and make sure the time was set right) you could record a TV show if you knew you were going to miss it in advance. Or if you knew you wanted to keep it for posterity. This eventually lead tot he Tivo/DVR (Digital Video Recorder) era, where instead of recording to tapes, we could record to hard drives, and the programming interface was easy enough that you could schedule recording of all airings of a TV show, so you didn’t know in advance if you were going to miss an episode.  The convenience of these tools cannot be overstated, I was overjoyed when my family got our first DVR, something I had been asking for for years, because I watched a lot of infomercials and that’s how Tivo got started. The hit phrase was “You can pause Live TV” but I didn’t care about that as much as being able to record my shows and watch them on my schedule. And now we’re here in 2026 where almost all TV is on-demand. The question around the metaphorical water cooler isn’t “Did you see that episode last night?” It’s instead “Are you caught up on that show yet?” Netflix pioneered the “binge release” where you could watch all of the episodes of a season at once instead of doling them out week by week. Most other streaming platforms followed suit, at least for a little while. If it was a terrestrial (i.e. non-streaming) show first, then weekly releases stayed the standard, even as more people cut the cord and switched to streaming only.  And some networks realized the benefit to a weekly release. You could have the show stay in conversation for longer, there was a benefit to building anticipation week to week. There’s balance. Once a show was completely out, there was tie for people to find it later, but week to week releases allow buzz to build.  Sorry, I was goin to talk about Baywatch, wasn’t I? Baywatch was a syndicated show. It aired on whichever local station paid for it. And that station aired it when they wanted to. There were some conventions, because consistency is good for ratings, if you make it harder to watch the show regularly, fewer people will. But in a given week, there was no guarantee that people had seen last week’s episode. Most TV shows knew this in the 90s. Because, up until that point, it was how all Television worked.  You can turn on any episode of Baywatch and know exactly what is going on. The show tells you what you need to know. Which is not to say it has reams of exposition, characters aren’t walking around explaiinng their backstory all the time, we don’t have time for that, instead it focuses on economy of storytelling. What is the minimum amount of information that an audience needs to know and how do we convey that most effectively? And Baywatch is not the greatest TV show of all time, it’s not even the greatest show of *its* time. Baywatch is a mid-tier show. It was an easy punchline for hack comedians like Jay Leno. But that’s actually a benefit to what I’m trying to do. When I’m watching a show, there’s a question often in the back of my mind. I don’t usually think it directly, but I’m trying to put it into words here. That question is “Does Baywatch understand television better than this show?” There are lots of great television shows on TV right now. There is also a lot of garbage. Sturgeon’s law tells us “Ninety percent of everything is crap” and that generally holds true for TV too. Heck, Baywatch easily falls into that 90%. But I think there are so many TV shows out there that don’t know how to be a TV show.  Here’s a recent example. I enjoy the fallout video games. I have played most of the modern ones, and I like playing around in the world they take place in. The Fallout TV series doesn’t really know ho to be a TV show.  When my sweetheart and I start watching an episode of Fallout (we’ve watched all of both seasons) after about 45 minutes we start playing the game of “is this the last scene?” and we usually get it wrong. Because Fallout is a series of interconnected scenes, but despite what the menu says when you start watching it, Fallout barely has episodes. Things start happening at the beginning of an episode, they keep happening and some, relatively arbitrary point they stop happening. Then in the next episode they start happening again. There is no story with a beginning middle and end in a given episode. It’s all middle. If you were flipping channels in the 2000s and an episode of Fallout came on, you would skip right past it, because you would have no idea what was going on.  Baywatch does it better. To be clear, this is not an indictment of serialized storytelling. Some of the greatest TV series of all time are heavily serialized. But almost all of the greatest shows of all time, including the heavily serialized ones, are also great on an episodic scale. Each episode is a distinct unit of storytelling. J. Michael Straczynski, a pioneer in serialized TV storytelling and the creator of Babylon 5 treated episodes like chapters in a novel. But if you’re going to have chapters, it should be clear where each one starts and stops.  And there are exceptions. I think The Pitt is a fantastic show. But The Pitt is not better than Baywatch when it comes to episodic storytelling. In some ways it tells you that up front, it says “this is an hour by hour, day in the life of this hospital” and as such there is a lot of bleedover between episodes. Arguably even more than 24, which pioneered the real-time hour-by-hour format. But even the Pitt knows this and does at least some work in trying to tell self-contained stories in each hour. There are patients in each episode who show up, get treated and are gone by the end of the episode, which gives the episode slightly more structure than it would otherwise. But also, most shows aren’t as good as the Pitt. It is made by some of the best people to have ever made TV (ER was not worse than Baywatch at the episode) and they know what they’re doing. Some Joe Schmoe who couldn’t make his movie and decided to stretch it out to eight hours long as a TV show does not get that benefit of the doubt.  So next time you toss an episode of whatever er show you’re watching, ask yourself, did Baywatch do it better? You might be surprised by the answer.