A recent discussion in the Lost thread reminded me of something that had struck me as unique about the show.
Most TV shows work on (roughly) the same calendar that the audience does. There’s traditionally a Christmas episode (and often other holidays), they often acknowledge the changing of seasons (if it’s geographically appropriate) and one season typically represents One Year while the subsequent season represents The Next Year.
Some TV shows have played around with this a little. 24, of course, has its entire season represent a single day, but subsequent seasons are still spaced a year or two apart from each other, so a generally “normal” passage of time still exists. The West Wing, IIRC correctly, skipped an administration year at some point, while the smartest kids in Head of the Class seemed to stay in high school forever. And Dallas had “the season that never was”.
And of course, animation shows (from The Flinstones to The Simpsons) are stuck in perpetual time warps where virtually nobody ages.
But Lost continues to be unique. We’re 1/3 through the second season (16 months in audience time), but the events of the show (not counting flashbacks) have still not even reached 2 months yet. And it certainly seems unlikely that we’ll be getting a title card anytime soon reading “12 months later”.
So, has any TV show handled the passage of time similarly–meaning, staying at a much slower pace from the audience’s calendar year, to the extent of maintaining that continuity through subsequent seasons?
Survivor is sort of an example. The events of the show take place in 39 days and are broadcast over 13 weeks. Each week’s episodes usually cover two or three days.
Well, not forever - it was only on, what, five years? And I seem to remember there were some context hints that a year was only supposed to be passing on the show for every two years it was on… nothing that they were very consistent or clever about, just some season premieres making a big deal about being ‘back to school after another summer’ while others were just another day in class, often continuing the plots of the cliffhanger season finale on the same day or the next day. (All this is just to the best of my memory - really a long time since I thought about HOTC lol.)
No examples to contribute as such, though a number of action-soap opera type shows seem to play games with time or warp it a little themselves… Roswell and Buffy have had some arcs in which several weeks worth of episodes seem to take up only a week or two, leaving us to wonder what happened in the breaks between. I imagine that if you counted up every time that events on a soap opera were supposed to take place on a single day, you’d probably get about 19 days in the year. One of which is christmas of course.
In a season and a half of Battlestar Galactica, only about 2 1/2 months have passed thus far (though it’s harder to keep track since they’ve stopped with the “XX Days on Caprica” captions).
Stephen King calls it The Soap Opera Kid Trick: A woman gets pregnant. 15 months later, she gives birth to a premature child. Six months later, the kid gets hit by a car while walking home from school. Two months later, it’s mentioned the child is in boarding school. Seven months later, the kid is living at home and going to the local college. Five months after that the child has a child.
On Days of Our Lives, Belle Black was a flower girl at her parents’ wedding, and in high school when they came back from their honeymoon.
Deadwood season 2 takes place over about 2 weeks… and from what I gather is roughly 8 months after season 1 ended.
I think season 1 took place over a period of months (3 or so) and ended mid summer. since this is South Dakota and no snow is on the ground, season two must pick up around March or April.
Of course, the amount of time laped in each episode could vary considerably. Some covered a few hours, others a few days, and at least one covered an entire year.
I wonder if anyone has done an actual timeline for MASH* based on the few historical markers the show would occasionally provide (McArthur’s visit, the Olympics, etc.)
The actress who played Lucy on “Twin Peaks” was on a talk show (Dave Letterman IIRC) wherein she mentioned that she hoped her character (who was pregnant at that point in the storyline) would lose her baby. She defended the statement by pointing out that the show had been on the air for almost two years and only six weeks had elapsed in the series, and she didn’t want her character to be carrying a baby for the next seven years in the show (it had not yet been cancelled).
The most infamous case of the Soap Opera Kid phenomenon has to be an early 80s heroine on “Search for Tomorrow” who got pregnant, gave birth to a baby, and was seen taking care of her toddler - all in the space of two months!
AFAIK, The West Wing didn’t skip a year, though it did start a year or two into the administration.
Every episode of Hill Street Blues took place in a single day. When they needed a multi-day story, it would be put into a story arc.
And the kids in Welcome Back, Kotter were in his class for years. There also was the Movie Classroom phenomenon: no matter how poor and understaffed a school is, the teacher only teaches one class.
That year episode confused me when I was a kid. It came fairly late in the series and I initially took it to mean that every previous episode had taken place in 1950 and every ep after took place in 1952.
I forgot about Alias. In the final scene of season 2, it’s revealed that between the previous scene and that scene two years have elapsed. IIRC there’s no lost time between any of the other seasons, in fact I think S2 picks up the same day as the end of S1 (can’t remember about S3 to S4). In the opening of the new season, we pick up at the same moment that S4 ends, but later in the ep we jump four months (because of Jennifer Garner’s pregnancy being written into the show). The creators have made few on-screen references that I can remember to the fact that the show is technically set in the future (other than of course resolving the plotline of where Sydney had been during those two years), although in an ep a couple weeks ago a character noted that it was 2006 in the show. Which seems to indicate that the creators are deliberately acting to synch up the show’s timeframe more closely with real time.
Perhaps the oddest example of “Soap Opera Kid” syndrome wasn’t on a soap but on Growing Pains. Between seasons the newborn daughter suddenly became like seven years old while no one else in the family aged.
I don’t think it’s possible because some historical markers conflict with others, most notably the date of Potter’s arrival. I have seen a count of how many times they celebrated Christmas and stuff like that, probably was in some thread around here.
I do know that many of their storylines were supposedly taken from the experiences of actual vets and one of the reasons that they decided to cancel the show in '83 is that they were running out of such inspriations.
British sitcom Hi-de-hi ran for 9 years. The first five years of the show were set during a single holiday season, ie about 6 months. The final four seasons took place over 6 months the following year.
As for MASH, it’s definitely impossible to construct a consistent timeline. Just assume that every season was set in a slightly different parallel universe.
And I seem to remember there were some context hints that a year was only supposed to be passing on the show for every two years it was on… nothing that they were very consistent or clever about, just some season premieres making a big deal about being ‘back to school after another summer’ while others were just another day in class, often continuing the plots of the cliffhanger season finale on the same day or the next day. (All this is just to the best of my memory - really a long time since I thought about HOTC lol.)
