Jade wanted me to show off my hard screenshot work, so here’s the Khan of the Day at a convenient 100×100 size (click to enlarge, download if you want it):
In her blog, Seema praised DS9 for “friction, continuity, war and angst.” DS9 was the least popular of all Trek series before ENT came along to wrestle for the title. Trek fans clearly don’t want continuity or angst - not because cohesion and plot are bad things in and of themselves, but because they’re bad television.
Television has to be episodic to succeed. You can do it without the annoying reset button - Stargate doesn’t suffer from the reset follies that Voyager did - but you can’t show a five year movie in one-hour bits and expect the audience to stick with you. Yes, rabid fangirls will come along for the ride, but rabid fangirls are not a large enough demographic for network TV.
A series is something you can drop into at any point, see an episode, understand more or less what’s going on, and want to see more. A serial requires you to go in order or you’ll miss, not the subtle details, but the main meaning of what’s going on. You see one episode and you’re hopelessly lost; you know you don’t have the time for this. You walk away.
The serial vs. series problem affects virtual seasons as well. I’m not the only one who had the best intentions of reading VS7.5 but fell off the wagon early on. It’s not always clear at the outset which one you’re dealing with - you might think Lois McMaster Bujold is a serial writer, but she writes series. For all I know, VS7.5 is a series - but if it smells like a serial, I run away.
It doesn’t matter whether serials are superior to series on some literary or fan-fodder basis. I’m willing to admit, sight-mostly-unseen, that Babylon 5 and DS9 were far, far better shows than Stargate or Voyager. It’s a purely economic decision on my part to watch the latter. I can miss entire seasons of VOY or SG-1 (and believe me, I have) and still follow the fandom and write fic. The barrier to entry on a show that has five-year plots, or even one-year plots, is too high for me.
