My early adulthood was, even during this era, called the Golden Age of Television. It was a period in which the medium ascended in quality (and budget) and there was a lot more serious consideration of TV shows as an art from to rival cinema. Indeed, as movies began playing it safer, with more and more franchise-focused projects (I will defend the MCU as being an original experiment in blockbuster movie-making that everyone just tried to copy, though even I have gotten kind of tired of it in the post-Endgame stretch these past 5 years,) we got TV shows that were becoming the place for talented actors to showcase their skills, allowing for gradual and thorough character development over time.
While the shows that were seen as "high art" usually starred villainous protagonists and antiheroes like The Sopranos, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad, the era also saw more ambitious genre shows. Lost, for example, was the big Water Cooler show, with Game of Thrones probably taking that spot over shortly after Lost ended (or did they overlap?)
Anyway, the format of television shows for much of their lifespan was episodic: you'd have a premise with a regular cast of characters, and each episode (each week) they'd be dealing with some new challenge or conflict. Many shows were structured in such a way to encourage this kind of storytelling. Police procedurals, medical procedurals, and fantasy/sci-fi "monster of the week" shows are all built around having some kind of mystery to solve. In most cases, the mystery is resolved by the end of the episode, and the characters reset to their starting positions, essentially, in a happy equilibrium, before the next episode challenges them.
Now, on a practical level, this style of storytelling could be very helpful when the show went into syndication: if the plot of each episode is self-contained, then you don't need to watch the episodes in order. You could hop into a season four episode of Star Trek the Next Generation, and then watch a season six episode next, and you should be able to follow both relatively easily.
The Simpsons, hardly a procedural, at least used to make something of a joke about this zero continuity structure: in one infamous episode, milquetoast elementary school principle Seymour Skinner is revealed to actually be an imposter who stole the identity of his sergeant back in Vietnam after the real Skinner supposedly died. However, when the real Skinner is finally released from a Vietnamese P.O.W. camp, the false Skinner, actually named Armin Tanzarian, is ousted from his job and the community struggles to adjust. But, by the end of the episode, basically just because the town feels weird about this change, a judge rules that Tanzarian will now be considered the real Skinner, that the actual Skinner is banished from the town, and that no one shall mention it again under penalty of torture.
Still, even in the 1990s, the idea of recognizing some continuity over the course of a series wasn't entirely out of the question. Star Trek TNG had, for example, the ongoing conflict of Worf with the Duras clan, as well as Picard's struggles to reckon with his PTSD after being briefly assimilated by the Borg. Notably, Deep Space Nine, the Star Trek show that slightly overlapped with TNG, eventually put a lot of its focus on the overall arc of the Dominion War, an arc that took, if memory serves, over half the series' length, starting in full in season four.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which straddled the turn of the millennium, had an interesting approach: most episodes told a self-contained story, but each season had its Big Bad who had to be dealt with in the season finale. While the villainous threats didn't tend to last more than one season (except Spike, who gradually evolves from a villain to an ally) the ongoing weight of the events that transpire does take its toll on the characters.
But I think it was in the late 2000s/early 2010s that we started to see shows really go full-serialized. Some shows probably should have done so earlier: I remember watching Dollhouse, Joss Whedon's post-Firefly TV project before he directed the Avengers and before the world discovered that he's apparently a piece of shit, and feeling infuriated that the show was so slow for any long-term plot to finally take effect.
So, it was around this time period that Fringe came out. Premiering four years after Lost did, it was J.J. Abram's next big thing (while I have no reason to think that Abrams is a bad human being, I have grown very skeptical of him as an artist, starting around Star Trek Into Darkness, as I feel that he largely just re-creates the movies that he loved from the 1980s without contributing any real new ideas). Like Lost, though, I think Abrams' involvement in the show was only at the outset.
To start, the show was very much in the vein of The X-Files - a group of investigators who looked into paranormal events, though while the X-Files lived more in the land of cryptids, UFOs, and conspiracy theories, Fringe focused more on "fringe science," the kind of weird experimentation that went on in secret during the Cold War, this time under the storm cloud that was the War on Terror. There's a lot of victims in this show who are randomly selected but deliberately targeted, much as terrorists will pick unlucky civilians to die in their attacks.
The show starts off with (though it's a throughline) a lot of Body Horror, but to begin with, most episodes are your classic case-of-the-week structures. Yes, there's an ongoing plot in which central protagonist Olivia Dunham has a lingering phantom of her dead lover's memories in her mind, the after-effect of a mad experiment intended to help her recover some of his memories while he was comatose and dying from a strange synthetic toxin.
Season one does introduce David Robert Jones and the ZFT terrorist organization as primary threats, but it only touches on these guys in some episdoes.
Where things really transition, though, is about halfway or two thirds of the way through season two. After a story hinted at but never fully confirmed gets its full episode-long flashback, the plot begins to laser-focus on what will be pretty central to the whole series, which is the alternate universe.
Spoilers from here on, I guess?
This back part of season two has some seemingly-stand-alone stories - for example, Peter, running away after finding out the truth about himself, gets embroiled in a serial-killer case that seems, superficially, to involve the Shapeshifters from the alternate world, but it turns out that he just so happens to coincidentally be in a small town with a serial killer while also being pursued (and eventually captured) by Thomas Jerome Newton and his actual father, "Walternate."
Season three kind of pulls back on all of this: we get some self-contained case-of-the-week stories, but it's all couched in the dual plots of A: in our universe, Olivia has been replaced by her alt-universe self, "Fauxlivia," who is simultaneously doing the job of investigating Fringe cases while also ruthlessly performing her mission that will, presumably, wind up destroying our universe, and B: seeing how Fringe cases are investigated in the alternate universe, one in which Walternate has done a pharmacological form of gaslighting to convince our Olivia that she's the one from that world.
While the cases they investigate, like a man in the alternate world who has Flowers-for-Algernon'd into an insanely powerful predictive modeler who can orchestrate the death of a woman by balancing a pen on a mailbox (weirdly similar to a villain I have in my D&D game,) totally feel like case-of-the-week fare, there's still a bit of a continuity lockout. The aforementioned case, of course, takes place in a world in which Charlie Francis is still alive, where he and Olivia have another partner named Lincoln, and which hinges on the fact that the villain's predictions that are intended to kill Olivia hinge on her knowing the protocols in the alternate universe's disaster-ridden culture, so that when she doesn't pull out an oxygen tank upon seeing a warning light flashing, she doesn't hesitate the half-second that would have put her under a cascade of cinderblocks.
The truth is that every TV show is somewhat episodic in structure. Even shows that are really focused on telling a continuous story will need to make an episode kind of work on its own, even if it requires you to know what has been happening.
What I find interesting, though, is that audiences craved a lot more continuity in that period - again, I remember getting infuriated with Dollhouse when it kept hitting the reset button. And yet, now, 15 or so years later, after a period of very continuity-heavy shows, there seems to be the inverse impulse.
Star Trek Strange New Worlds, for example, tells the story of the Enterprise under Captain Pike, Kirk's predecessor, and that show makes a point (or at least did in its first season - I still haven't watched the second because my access to Paramount Plus has lapsed) to let its episodes remain self-contained. And honestly, this actually winds up being an asset. Even when watched in order, there's a lightness that the other new Star Trek shows have lacked.
Of course, the way that we watch TV has changed profoundly. As a millennial, and I imagine I speak for most of my generation and younger ones, I basically never watch TV on actual TV anymore. It's probably been years since I did. And the networks are such a small part of the picture, with so many streaming services (such as the aforementioned Paramount Plus) acting as kind of vertically integrated venues to deliver shows to people.
Streaming was getting started in the era that Fringe began, but a service like Hulu was more a kind of nexus by which you could watch show on-demand instead of having to tune in at the right time. And in its early days, it was pretty limited, with earlier seasons usually disappearing (incentivizing you to pick the seasons up on DVD).
Now, of course, one of the crises that Hollywood finds itself in is that streaming is obviously a much more convenient way for audiences to watch shows than tuning into a scheduled broadcast, but it has also opened a lot of wiggle-room for the executive class to screw the actual people making these shows out of the money they'd be earning based on those earlier business models.
Streaming, of course, allowed shows to become more serialized. You never need to worry about whether an audience knows what is going on if you're sure that they will always be able to watch the show's episodes in order.
But there are claims that it's not as profitable as traditional television. I'm not convinced that's actually true, but I do think that, paradoxically, as the sort of triple monopoly on streaming that Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu once enjoyed has spread out to more companies making their own proprietary streamers, audiences have been stuck having to subscribe to way more of these services - or just missing out on some of the shows that they like to watch.
I have two roommates, and when we moved to our current apartment eleven years ago, it was very simple: I had the Netflix account, and my best friend has the Hulu account, and his then-girlfriend/now-wife has the Amazon Prime account. But with Disney Plus, Peacock, Paramount Plus, and all manner of additional services, we're still left unable to see many of the shows we might want to watch.
Funny enough, one of the big shows Apple TV has (a service I do have access to because my Dad has been an Apple cultist since the 1980s,) Foundation, or at least the books the show is based on, feel like a good model for how this all happened: certain forces seem kind of inevitable - in this case, the transition to streaming and greater continuity in TV shows.
As I imagine a lot of people do, especially those without kids, I sometimes feel as if my whole post-college life ought to be thought of as a singular era. But it is interesting, hitting this point where I'm looking back at things that happened after the major life milestone of moving out to California as a distant-enough past to really analyze it.
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