Thanks for your comments Patrick. It’s a salient point that writing a feature and then chopping it up for online is a poor way to build effective episodic structure. However I would suggest that the structure of TV series is much more varied and complex than you suggest.

There are virtually no TV series dramas that conform to a 3-Act Structure. 4 and 5 acts are much more common (around ad breaks and with very different turning points) and the whole model changes again with cable, no advert, shows. The comparison to Soap Opera is also more relevant than you might think. The traditional (albeit modern) episodic drama structure where each episode has a closure whilst contributing to a series-long macro arch (ie shows like the West Wing) is not as all prevailing as it may seem.

A Show like Deadwood or The Wire very rarely has closure at the end of an episode – Any given episode, at any time in its duration may answer some dramatic questions just as it asks and opens up others. Its structure is much more akin to Soap Opera where each episode contributes to the whole incrementally – the true definition of a serial (as opposed to a series). We wouldn’t call Deadwood or The Wire Soap Opera but their ongoing ‘serial’ as opposed ‘series’ structure is much closer to Bold and the Beautiful than it is to West Wing.

Then there are other variations – the tiered structure exemplified in a show like Battlestar Galactica where there 3 levels – multi-episode (serial) archs lacking closure in each ep. Stand-alone eps where the story is complete and closed out within the hour. (these usually occur in the middle of a series) And the macro-arch which runs the length of the season and isnt’ closed out until the final ep of the season with a new one beginning in the next.

There are numerous other structures (and I’ll hopefully be publishing a new work on TV drama structures soon) But this leads me back to he start – the Web series. I believe the Webseries is very much commensurate with TV writing as a Webseries can have any of these variations – from self-contained eps, to ongoing serial (soap opera structures), to tiered micro/macro archs – all possible in Webseries (and there are numerous examples of each onlien right now)

The other aspect is that I think it’s folly to put artificial restrictions on what a Webseries show can be or to assume it is inherently short and distinct from TV. We need only look at the increasing prevalence of internet receivers in TV sets (Sony Bravias for example) with dedicated ingest of BlipTV and other Webshow channels as a ‘tunable station’. This is the normalisation of streaming TV as indiscernable from a broadcast. When that happens from a users perspective, where the distinction between stream and broadcast is null and void, then to suggest that Web shows have inherently shorter or different episodic structures seems illogical.

I’ll be writing much more about this topic soon.

Cheers

Mike

Instead, web series writing is similar to soap opera or films where you can stitch the whole series to make one long, complete story. A model being used more today is write a web series knowing you’ll piece it all together to make a film. Don’t, however, write a film and then chop it up to release online in a webisodic form.