Media Mandible

Fox recently announced that they will be showing fewer commercials than usual during two of their upcoming dramas. Said Fox Entertainment chairman Peter Liguori: “We’re going to have less commercials, less promotional time and less reason for viewers to use the remote. We’re going to have more character, more content, more value.”

What’s not clear is whether this shift in policy merely means fewer commercials, or fewer commercial breaks. There’s a huge difference. One way simply means more content per hour. The other way means a major paradigm shift in the way that television is written.

The plots of TV shows, both dramas and comedies, are structured according to acts, just as plays are. It’s easy to tell where one act ends and another begins: at the commercial break. Commercials are used instead of, say, curtains closing in front of a stage.

Each show has a formula for what happens in each of the acts (in the case of drama, there are usually four acts per episode). If you start to pay attention to your favorite show in terms of these acts, you’ll see the structure emerge pretty quickly. In the first act, the villain of the week often emerges. In the second act, the heroes go about fighting the villain, and fail. In the third act, the heroes defeat the villain, but there is some unexpected fallout, which must be dealt with in act four.

Sometimes the “villain” is a disease, a puzzle, or a natural disaster. But it’s the same principle. TV writers know the act-by-act formula for their shows, and following it makes writing those shows – and discussing the writing of them with each other – much easier than it would be otherwise. If you saw the X-Files movie, maybe you remember the disconcerting presence of unnecessary (and very un-cinematic) fade-outs at several points in the film. That’s because the movie was really just a long episode of the show, structured the same way as any other episode (but with longer acts). Without those breaks, the flow would have been much different.

Ever since HBO started original hour-long programming, there’s been room for a commercial-free format. (Was Dream On the first of those shows?) Zero-interruption shows like The Sopranos still have acts, but, like the acts in movies, the lines between them are fuzzier.

That’s not the only difference. Shows without act breaks must keep the user engaged for a cumulatively longer period of actual content time. But shows with breaks must keep the user engaged during commercials as well. That means that writers are compelled to come up with several cliffhangers per episode. And cliffhangers (when they’re well-made) don’t just appear apropos of nothing; they are built up to, and wound down from. In a very real sense, the whole show is built around the commercials.

So, what will be the actual format of Fringe and The Doll House? Two commercial breaks? One break, halfway through the show? When you’re watching those shows, remember this post. See if the action isn’t built around the breaks…wherever they end up occurring. And see if they don’t end up occurring at almost exactly the same time every week.

And if the placement of the commercials in these new shows is different, then what will that mean for advertisers? Will audiences pay more attention to the few ads that do get to make an appearance? Will viewers miss them all because they’re making use of their one bathroom break? Or will 80% of viewers Tivo the shows and skip the commercials anyway, making this all just a game that Fox is playing with itself?

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