You know one of the things I like about ‘procedural shows’ more than 'a single overarching plot’shows?
The fact that time passes.
You can basically expect that within the universe it’s been basically as long between episodes as it’s been outside it. And then between seasons there’s probably like a three month skip within the show too. People get to grow older. You know how long they’ve been killing vampires, or meeting aliens, or conning rich people.
And yes it means that June tends to be Apocalypse season and “it must be Tuesday” whenever something weird happens (but who doesn’t love an inside joke?).
On the other hand with shows that start the next episode where the last one ended? And the new season where the old one ended too? Who the hell knows how time passes in there, sometimes it takes four seasons to tell a story that in universe takes up anywhere from two to six months and by the time they’re done you need timey-whimey algebra to figure out how old the characters are now (and sometimes not even the writers know anymore).
Like, I actually enjoy both kinds of shows, as long as the story and characters are interesting I will love it. But I kind of miss getting to watch new fantasy and science fiction shows that have the demon/alien of the week. There are a lot of things I like about procedurals, and this is one of the reasons (another being that generally they have more time for character exploration).
There’s a reason BtVS, Charmed, Stargate SG-1, Leverage and other shows with that format are so well loved (admittedly I’m probably the only one for who the way time passes in them is one of those reasons (in my defense it’s not the main one, the main one is how the writers made me love the characters)).
a character whispering “kiss me” to their love interest is kinda hot and you can’t really go wrong with it
enemies to lovers? check the slow burn of finally being able to kiss each other. friends to lovers? confirmation that everything you’ve been feeling hasn’t been unrequited. fake dating? it was never a lie to begin with
forbidden love? screw everything else, all that matters is you and i. second chances? i’ve never stopped loving you. opposites attract? look at me. i love you for who you trulyare.forced proximity? we can hereby no longer fight this thing going on between us
i do enjoy in survival-esque escape-type movies when someone gets hurt and someone else is like “i can help, don’t worry i’m a doctor.” like. they’re probably not lying, but they totally couldbe
just once i want the villain in the movie to be revealed as the person in the group who said they were a doctor and everyone had just taken them at their word because why the fuck would you lie about that
i can’t believe all the bad luck and injuries that have befallen our little group. good thing we have Dr. Hedical Halpractice with us
Kids these days expect characters in TV shows to have, like, consistently drawn personalities and comprehensible emotional arcs and such. In my day, we had to infer our favourite character’s basic personality traits from 175 under-budgeted episodes written by fifty-eight different people who mostly hated each other’s guts and actively worked to undermine each other’s characterisation choices – and those were the ones who’d actually bothered to read the series bible before turning in their scripts, which not all of them had. And you know what? We hated every minute of it!
(This is why it’s comical when somebody tries to “gotcha” a post about an older TV show by bringing up an example of the character they’re talking about behaving at odds with what the post is describing. In pre-2000 serial television it was completely normal to watch a character for six consecutive episodes and see them written as six completely different people – sometimes with mutually incompatible backstories, to boot, because naturally the writers couldn’t reasonably be expected to keep track of every tiny little detail, like whether their parents are alive or dead.)
