Star Wars: A New Chapter For The Serial

Looking back at the nineteenth century,
it's

possible to say that the extreme
popularity of the serial novel,

the novel released in installments
over time

was inevitable.

In London, changing economics were
creating the perfect conditions

for this to happen.

Thousands of people were moving into
the city,

literacy among the lower and middle
classes was increasing.

And new printing and distribution
technologies were coming into their own.

But the magic that made serials such a
huge success wasn't only in the conditions

of the times,

and publishers like Chapman and Hall
knew that.

It was also in the genius of upstarts,
like the one they chose.

A young writer named Charles Dickens.

Chapman and Hall commissioned Dickens
to write a few sporting stories

to be released with sketches done by
the artist Richard Seymour.

Altogether, the project was called,

"The Posthumous Papers of the
Pickwick Club".

Or, "The Pickwick Papers" for short.

The first part was a horrendous failure.
Only 400 copies were sold.

After the second part, Seymour committed
suicide and had to be replaced.

It wasn't until the fifth installment,
when Dickens introduced a funny

working-class character named Sam Weller,
that the project struck gold.

Weller was a massive hit, and after the
insistence of the readership, the

character was expanded throughout
the rest of the series, launching

sales from 400 to 40,000 per installment.

Thanks to Dickens, thanks to publishers
like Chapman and Hall,

thanks to new printing presses, and liberal
education, and railways,

the serial novel dominated the world
of literature for the next sixty years.

And though most novels these days aren't
published like the Pickwick Papers were,

the genre of serializaton
-and it is a genre-

has proven to be remarkably strong.

Flourishing in almost every
storytelling medium.

And this is no accident, as Jennifer
Hayward notes in her incredible book,

"Consuming Pleasures",

the serial is sort of the perfect form for
capitalism.

It captures readers with the promise
of more.

Constantly delaying gratification, and
this makes it very

commercially effective.

And for the same reason, for it's appeal
to mass market consumers,

serials have been castigated by critics,
from the jump.

Before Dickens became a household
name, high society reviewers

raked his work through the mud.

And the same kind of treatment has
been meted out on every new incarnation

of the serial, whether it's comics, the serial
films of the '40s, Holt novels, soap operas,

or the endless sequels of Hollywood
blockbusters.

NARRATOR: "Somewhere in space this
may all be happening right now."

Star Wars holds, I think, an interesting
place in the history of the serial,

a history that began with Dickens and,
like Dickens, George Lucas is a special

kind of visionary.

Going against the grain of gritty,
realistic films that dominated the 1970's,

Lucas devised a sweeping space
adventure epic, with

broad themes influenced by the first
generation of film serial,

like Flash Gordon.

And he was shrewd enough to understand the
advantages of serialization.

LUCAS: "When it came up to doing the
contract of the film, I knew"

that what I really had to do was to
protect

the unwritten part, the other two
parts of the script.

The truth is, that all serials share a
group of common features and

characteristics, going all the way
back to the Pickwick papers.

Like Dickens' stories, comic book
universes in Star Wars serials,

tend to feature giant casts of characters.

And those characters tend to represent
the mass public that consumes them.

Over time, and often far too slowly,
serials trend toward diversity.

And, because of the massive casts,
serials also have lots of subplots,

and the main plots often feature surprising
reversals and twists and revelations

that keep the audience reaching for the
next installment.

Now, this can make for cliche and
hackeneyed storytelling,

like in the case of soap operas,

which reconstructed the form into delaying
all conclusions infinitely.

But even soap operas demonstrate
what is probably the two most

important features of serials. The
creation of interpretive communities

and their sensitivity to the audience's
desires.

A lot of the criticism of Dickens' work
centers around it's addictive quality,

that the books took their readers out of
everyday life.

But the truth was the opposite.

Serials created social bonds around
the content in question,

acting, in this case, against the
alienating effects of capitalism

in the industrial revolution.

What's more, within this space, even
the lower classes had a forum

for engaging in political discourse.

Discussing what you thought about Bleak
House or Oliver Twist was a way of

debating social norms.

When The Force Awakens came out last
year, it's emphasis on practical effects

and tactile imagery was as much a result
of the audience's referendum on

the prequel films as the expansion
of the Sam Weller character was

for Dickens in the Pickwick Papers.

But this relaunch of the Star Wars
serials strikes me as something new

under the sun.

Like Soap Operas, it's promising to be
endless.

Like the Marvel film franchise, it's
promising to be connected and

intertwined.

But unlike most of the comic films,
so many of the stories and characters

have yet to be written.

And it's gonna be the first film serial
in which subplots are going to be

told as dedicated features in their own
right.

In the anthology series.

This means opportunity for audiences.

The so-called "New Golden Age of TV"
is almost exclusively down to serialized

shows that up their game because that's
what audiences demanded.

The new Star Wars franchise is primed to
explode in a thousand directions,

and right now, at the beginning,
is when we can help to write the rules

for what kind of serials that we want
to see.

A new incarnation of serialization is here
for film.

180 years after the Pickwick Papers
were first published,

that's a long history.

So why not mine it for all the best
qualities of this resilient and

receptive genre.

Hey everybody, thanks for watching.

I really wanna recommend Jennifer
Hayward's book "Consuming Pleasures"

If you want to know more about the history
of serialization, not just in novels

but in comics and soap operas, it is
required reading,

I loved it so much, so I'll put a link
in the description below.

Also, thank you to Squarespace for
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you guys next Wednesday.

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