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This came out of a discussion about stargate, and whether it could survive today. Stargate, even up to the end, was highly episodic with an overarching story.
TV used to be like that, where if you missed a show, you where kinda screwed for the next episode you where scrwed. But with shows now streaming, you can watch every episode in order.
If you miss Game of Thrones, your screwed, you cant follow it, while with Xfiles, close your eyes, pick any season, and barring some cast changes, you can follow the episode no problem other that "Where is David Duchovney"
So, do you guys think Monster of the week/episodic shows can survive today? It seems like the popular shows, GoT, Walking Dead, DareDevil, Jessica Jones, hello, even movies to an extent are serialized now.

Even cartoons are like that now. Look at the new ninja turtles show for a perfect example.

I think you meant to scroll a little further down to "Off Topic" to post this, didn't you?

My ordinary rebuttal would have been South Park, but, uh...



Brooklyn 99's pretty episodic, and that show is insanely good and pretty darn popular. Things do change, but the overall dynamic is still the case/hijinks of the week.

Doctor Who is a highly successful "monster of the week" series.

Though this year they have done several two-part stories, Dr. Who has always used one-part, two-part and even longer stories.

I wish. I've grown tired of every showing having a, usually bad and plot hole ridden, myth arc.

X-Files is getting a re-boot and it was one of the, if not /the/ most famous MotW shows.

Supernatural does pretty well for itself.

On the younger/kid side of things you have Friendship is Magic, Star vs The Forces of Evil and Gravity Falls for episodic monster of the week shows.

I haven't watched a whole lot of the episodes, but Arrow and The Flash seemed to have a Monster of the Week feel to them.

I could be wrong though, I do need to watch more episodes.

It's a spectrum, not a binary choice. You can have varying levels of Monster of the Week and Season plot. Even in the same show in different seasons.

Supernatural as an example, their three best seasons by my estimation were one, four and five. One was basically a monster of the week tied together by a loose plot of searching for the main character's father.

Seasons four and five are one of the characters being raised up from hell and the beginning of the apocalypse all the way through it's conclusion. And even in that they had awesome episodes that were basically monster of the week.

Flash is definitely a Monster of the Week show with a general overall plot, and it's pretty solid.

Supernatural, Arrow, Doctor Who, and Star Wars do that pretty well nowadays.

 Commissar-Danno wrote:
On the younger/kid side of things you have Friendship is Magic, Star vs The Forces of Evil and Gravity Falls for episodic monster of the week shows.

FiM is more Slice of Life than episodic, with the exception of the season premiers and finales. Falls is definitely episodic. Star falls in between.

 Bromsy wrote:
It's a spectrum, not a binary choice. You can have varying levels of Monster of the Week and Season plot. Even in the same show in different seasons.

I think there's a ton of truth to this... I had made a comment on FB about my dislike for the current season of DW going with so many multi-part episodes. One response was basically, "back with Dr.s 1 and 2, they used to do a ton of multi-part episodes and you had to watch each week to not miss what was going on".... of course, that comment failed to mention that back in those days, each episode was 20 minutes.


I think Fringe, for the first season or 2 made some decent use of a weekly/episodic theme, but by seasons 3+ they were so entrenched in the overarching story that the whole thing became rather incoherent even to me.

I also, IMO, think that Gotham is doing fairly well with this, even though we KNOW there's an overall plot arc: Gotham slips to the point it needs Batman.


But, I think that the shows that are going to thrive with less of a long-term plot are probably your sitcom comedy shows. Shows like Home Improvement, Malcolm in the Middle, Modern Family, Cheers, etc. I think show less of a timeline (even though we are guessing things are progressing in relative real-time) and more of a making light of certain aspects of everyday life, and modern (in the show's time) life.

Most of your procedural police dramas are episodic. They tend to do a little serializing by having old episodes impact newer episodes but that doesn't take up most of the series.

Otherwise sitcoms are still a safe haven for episodic entertainment.

 Overlord Thraka wrote:
Supernatural, Arrow, Doctor Who, and Star Wars do that pretty well nowadays.

I'd say the reason that the last series of Dr Who was so good is because they abandoned the 'let's bludgeon the viewer over the head with a plot arc' approach and instead decided to do a series of mostly 2-part stories that really, could be watched in any order, or even no order at all (you could just pick a story from the series, watch it, and not feel like you're really missing out on anything, unlike the last couple of series where a good 5-10 minutes of each episode would only be relevant if you'd seen the previous ones). I vastly prefer that direction, to be honest.

Arrow is a little less Monster of the Week this series than in previous ones, it's not a spoiler to say the same villain keeps turning up, directly involved in an overarching plot, but Flash is still very much MotW and Supergirl is off to a great start using that same formula. There are still plots that run over multiple episodes, but they're still ultimately episodic in nature.

Star Wars Rebels is a good example; yes, it's an animated series so slightly different, but still largely episode-based.

So in short, yes! In my opinion, the best shows are the ones that you can watch week to week and get something different each time.