It’s no ordeal to wait a week for a television treat
So who did kill wealthy philanthropist Rachel Argyll with a crystal decanter to the skull, making family estate Sunny Point’s Persian rugs bloody and its servants scream? At nine o’clock tonight, we’ll get more hints and red herrings as the second episode of Agatha Christie’s whodunit Ordeal By Innocence is broadcast on BBC One. For some viewers, though, it will come six days too late.
At Christmas 2015 and 2016, allstar Queen of Crime adaptations by the same team – screenwriter Sarah Phelps and Mammoth Screen, the production company behind Poldark – aired over consecutive evenings. Phelps’s devilishly dark reworkings of And Then There Were None and Witness For The Prosecution proved both critical and ratings hits, pulling in eight million viewers each and winning multiple awards.
Ordeal By Innocence was similarly intended to air at Christmas 2017. However, when one of its cast, Ed Westwick, became the subject of sexual assault allegations, the corporation pulled it from the festive schedules. The crew then reshot Westwick’s scenes with a new actor, Christian Cooke, as Rachel’s volatile adopted son Mickey. The new-look version launched on Easter Sunday, three months later than planned.
Once again, it was widely watched and well received – at least, until fans realised this three-parter was going out in weekly instalments, rather than running over consecutive nights. Social media was soon awash with anguished cries from annoyed armchair detectives, desperate to binge-watch the drama and dubbing the seven-day gap “Ordeal By iPlayer”.
I watched this hubbub with bemusement. What exactly is wrong with waiting until the next week? Have we really become so spoiled by the instant gratification of boxsets and streaming services that we can’t countenance a weekly serial any more? In some ways, yes. The BBC recently admitted that “as the trend shifts towards on-demand viewing, [the corporation] risks being overtaken by competitors”, with teenagers now spending more time watching Netflix than BBC channels.
But the sort of binge-viewing encouraged by Netflix and Amazon Prime is not necessarily desirable. It risks creating a generation of entitled consumers who want everything and want it now, like stampy-footed toddlers. Dying to know what happens next is human nature but insisting on instant answers isn’t.
The BBC has begun to adopt the on-demand model by putting entire series on iPlayer. Recent dramas Hard Sun and Requiem were made available as “boxsets” but these were genre affairs of mixed quality and modest ratings. The suspicion remains among executives that stronger series would be thrown away if they were shown in this manner. You can’t imagine BBC One doing it with flagship properties like Doctor Who, Poldark or Call the Midwife, which benefit from being on linear TV at appointment-to-view times. Latest Ofcom data says that 59 per cent of over-65s prefer series to be released in the traditional way, compared to 36 per cent of 16- to 24-year-olds. The corporation needs to strike a balance and serve both audiences. Cult, youth or niche dramas on-demand, perhaps, with crowdpleasing mainstream fare kept as weekly treats.
Charlotte Moore, the BBC’s “director of content” (now there’s a 21st-century job title), said last week that Christmas is a time when families sit down together in front of the TV for several nights in a row, but Easter is not – hence the decision to schedule Ordeal By Innocence weekly. I have sympathy with this view. There’s no Easter equivalent of Twixtmas or Winterval, that interminable gap between Christmas and New Year which provides a captive audience. Christmas is a 10-day holiday, Easter a four-day mini-break. Less time for TV-watching with a tin of Quality Street being passed from lap to lap.
In our enthusiasm to embrace new technology and immerse ourselves in fictional worlds, let’s not forget the pleasure of delayed gratification. A weekly series allows narratives to unfold at their own pace, revealing their secrets gradually. It lets anticipation build, audiences become hooked and word of mouth buzz spreads. Despite the trend towards binge-viewing, we need to protect this storytelling method too.
With home-grown hits like Broadchurch, The Night Manager or Line of Duty, the wait adds to the suspense. Viewers have breathing and thinking space between twists. They can chew over clues, analyse characters and concoct their own theories. Would the “Who shot JR?” cliffhanger have been a fraction as effective if we’d been able to click on the next episode of Dallas immediately and discover that it was, disappointingly, the villainous oil baron’s sister-in-law Kristin?
Part of the pleasure of communal viewing is the conversation around it. Who really killed Danny Latimer? Which members of police anti-corruption unit AC-12 are themselves bent? Will Lady Mary marry Matthew Crawley? How did Sherlock fake his own death? Such gripping plot points lose something when we skip straight to our next fix.
Our favourite TV becomes a lot less fun to discuss – at office watercoolers, around dinner tables or on social media – when some viewers have watched ahead and everyone fears spoilers.
We waited three months for Ordeal
By Innocence to reach our screens, an extra few days shouldn’t make much difference. As 19th-century novelist Charles Reade said – in a motto adopted by his contemporary Wilkie Collins, that pioneer of serialised mystery fiction and a major influence on Christie – “Make ’em laugh, make ’em cry, make ’em wait”.
Binge-watching risks creating a generation that wants everything – and wants it now