melissa troutman

A twenty-year-old film can sound current and look unmistakably of its period. Colour grading ages faster than almost any other element, and…

Every film is said to have three acts, which is true in the way that every day is said to have three…

Two and a half hours is presented as evidence of seriousness. Runtime tells you about a film's relationship with its own material,…

Long-running shows fail at endings far more often than at middles, and the cause is structural. A season built to accumulate is…

Fidelity to the source is the standard applied to almost every adaptation and it is the wrong one. The question that predicts…

A cliffhanger is a loan taken against the audience's goodwill. When the repayment window stretches to a year or more, the interest…

When a season feels scattered, the cause is usually arithmetic rather than writing. Count the screen time per character and the problem…

Short seasons are praised for cutting the filler out of long seasons. The cut is real, but it removes something else at…

A platform's original slate is marketed as a guarantee of quality. The name that actually predicts it is usually a person, and…

Anthologies fail when the audience is promised continuity and given a reset. The ones that last make the reset the point rather…

The scene before the title sequence is usually treated as decoration. In serialised drama it is one of the few structural devices…

Recommending a show on the grounds that it rewards patience has become a way of defending anything dull. Pacing is a technique,…