Would you want the power to decide how a TV… | Little White Lies

Not Movies

Would you want the pow­er to decide how a TV series ends?

07 Mar 2017

Words by Jack Godwin

A hand holding a TV remote control with numerous buttons and lights.
A hand holding a TV remote control with numerous buttons and lights.
Net­flix is work­ing on inter­ac­tive shows with mul­ti­ple endings.

Net­flix is devel­op­ing a new form of inter­ac­tive sto­ry­telling tech­nol­o­gy that will allow view­ers to con­trol how a TV series unfolds. It is only at an exper­i­men­tal stage at the moment, but the com­pa­ny plans to run a tri­al lat­er this year based around choose-your-own-adven­ture shows for chil­dren. If suc­cess­ful, the for­mat could be intro­duced to pro­grammes aimed at more mature audiences.

Accord­ing to one source, these ​‘branch nar­ra­tives’ require the view­er to make choic­es as they watch: ​“All the con­tent will be there, and then peo­ple will have to get through it in dif­fer­ent ways.” It’s unclear at this stage whether this will be imple­ment­ed in future sea­son of cur­rent shows, or whether it will be exclu­sive to new pro­duc­tions cre­at­ed for specif­i­cal­ly with this new tech­nol­o­gy in mind.

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When pop­u­lar shows reach their end, the pres­sure for the end­ing to meet cer­tain expec­ta­tions often leads to dis­sat­is­fac­tion, with fans often hav­ing dif­fer­ent ideas about how a sto­ry should be wrapped up. Efforts to sur­prise audi­ences aren’t always suc­cess­ful, and this is pre­sum­ably what alter­nate end­ings will look to pro­vide a solu­tion to.

As well as fun­da­men­tal­ly chang­ing the view­ing expe­ri­ence, this new for­mat could present writ­ers and direc­tors with more cre­ative options. Video games have adopt­ed more of a sim­i­lar deci­sion-based sys­tem of game­play in recent years, and it’s pos­si­ble that inter­ac­tiv­i­ty in tele­vi­sion could bring these two media clos­er together.

But while lit­er­al­ly plac­ing the pow­er in the hands of the con­sumer is an attrac­tive prospect, it may detract from the cre­ators’ abil­i­ty to express their ideas in a defin­i­tive way. As con­tro­ver­sial as it may be, the final episode of The Sopra­nos was a choice made by an artist with a clear vision for what he thought the finale should be. Though the out­come of this exper­i­men­tal new for­mat remains to be seen, it cer­tain­ly rais­es some inter­est­ing ques­tions for now.

Would you want the pow­er to con­trol a show’s sto­ry­line? Have your say @LWLies

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