Neon Genesis Evangelion was an anime released in the ‘90s, about a boy in a semi-apocalyptic society trying to save the world while navigating his own myriad of issues. The show’s popularity stems from its admittedly convoluted plot and heavy-handed themes and metaphors (there’s a whole Wiki page on it), but my favorite episodes aren’t really the story ones – it’s the episodes that, in the grand scheme of things, don’t really matter. There’s a city-wide blackout and everyone has to deal with that; characters don’t get to go to the hot springs but then they do; two characters hate each other and are then forced into a situation that gets them to recognize and respect one another. To understand what happens in the grand story of Neon Genesis Evangelion, you could easily skip these episodes and come out with a complete (or close enough, for this show) understanding of what happens. But to understand the characters in the show and how they grow throughout, these episodes are vital.
Back in the mid-aughts, most popular anime (animes?) had a huge problem with filler episodes – episodes that contributed nothing to the plot. The manga on which these shows were based on would occasionally move too slowly and the show, which usually began airing well after the manga’s first chapter, would catch up to current events without knowing where to go forward. In one instance, the anime showrunners charged forward and made their own plot, a la Game of Thrones, but for the most part, they’d air fillers. Sometimes they’d be a handful of episodes, sometimes they’d be an entire season, but they all shared the trait of having jack shit to do with the overarching narrative and were almost never referenced by anyone in the show once they were back on track with the plot. This problem has mostly been mitigated today and now I’m hard-pressed to find an anime airing currently that has too many plot-irrelevant episodes. It seems they’ve cut out the fluff and stuck with the meat.
Contrary to this long lede, this newsletter isn’t really about anime. And contrary to the title of this newsletter, I’m actually going to try and make the case for filler episodes – at least in western media.
Let’s compare two TV shows: Community and Veep. Both revolve around a cast of unlikable people in an environment they mostly hate and everyone hates them. Both end up in dire situations that were, for the most part, caused by their own making. And both, in a way, had some overarching plots – season 2 of Community revolves around Shirley’s pregnancy, adding Chang into the group, and passing Anthropology; season 2 of Veep revolves around the bungled hostage crisis, the government shutdown, and whether Selina will even remain in government down the line.
How many episodes of Community are about nothing, and how many episodes of Veep are about nothing? One of Community’s most popular episodes is about a myriad of alternate universes that could occur from a single dice roll that has little bearing on the rest of the show aside from a few gags, whereas something happens in every episode of Veep that carries into the next episode literally or just through the emotional weight felt by the characters as they tick closer and closer to insanity.
Let me put it this way: Community has Halloween episodes and Christmas episodes; Veep has neither.
Now you could argue that I’m stretching the definition of “overarching plot” – these are two comedies, there’s not a plot so much as an occurrence of events in an order and then a big one that ends the season. And you might be right, so let’s take a look at a different genre.
Procedurals are the most common type of show to have filler episodes. You’ll have an episode or three at the beginning of the season to kick things off, something juicy in the midseason finale, and then a banger at the end of the season. In between, a bunch of little events that are mostly just the team interacting and dealing with the consequences, more emotionally than anything. The X-Files is a prime example of this but I’d like to use Supernatural: you’ll get episodes with Sam and Dean taking on Lilith or Abbadon or Crowley or any of the many Big Bads they’ve had, and then immediately after you’ll get an episode where they hunt some random monster and argue about how one of them fucked up last episode before coming to a brotherly truce at the end. Narratively, you might wonder why Sam and Dean bother fighting little monsters when the giant apocalypse-inducing guy is still around trying to end the world, but from a Doylist perspective, it gives the audience a chance to see the characters develop without having to add yet another layer of complexity to their plot.
Of course, you could now argue that Supernatural and shows like it were afforded this many fillers because of their length, and it’s true – even the last two seasons of Supernatural had 20 episodes. Can shows with almost half that amount divert time away from their plot for episodes just about characters developing?
Yes, they can. Season three, episode 10 of Breaking Bad (which had about 13 episodes per season) is a bottle episode, in which Walt and Jesse try to capture a fly that’s somewhere in the meth lab. That’s it. That’s the whole episode. No murder, barely any other characters, just about two guys trying to catch a fly and talking about their feelings.
It’s ranked number 15 out of the 62 total episodes in the series.
Now, there is a problem in the television industry about shorter seasons and what that means for writers in terms of job security and payment, and why studios like it like this way (hint: money), but from a purely artistic perspective, it should still be possible to make time for filler even with a shorter season.
Side plots, ranging from B and beyond, can in some cases fulfil the roll of a traditional filler episode. For example, in FX’s The Bear, the main plot involves Carmy trying to manage his restaurant without going insane, while a side plot involves two of the chefs at that restaurant learning to respect one another. It doesn’t really have anything to do with Carmy’s story but at the end of the episode the fact that these two chefs now get along helps him in his mission to keep things in the kitchen running smoothly. It’s not quite a filler but it does the same job of fleshing out characters and their personal relationships in a way that feels like you’re taking a break from the main plot.
However, it feels like more and more shows feel their side plots should somehow relate back to the main plot in a major way, to the point where everything feels like a major plot. This sort of trend is happening a lot in modern mystery TV shows, including all those HBO miniseries (serieses?) like The Staircase and The One with Hugh Grant, where there is only one mystery to be solved but every second of every episode of the entire season is spent trying to solve this mystery. There may be moments where two characters talk about something other than the plot, but those moments are few and fleeting. Consider how in the latest season of Stranger Things, there were about four scenes total dedicated to Robin’s love life. There were even less scenes dedicated to Eddie’s character outside of being wanted for Chrissy’s murder, and they almost all took place before that. Almost every other scene involved Vecna in some way. A TV show in this fashion feels more like a sprint to the finish line than a light jog across the neighborhood with brief moments where you’re being chased by a tiger.
Meanwhile, in traditional procedurals, where there’s only one episode to solve a mystery and the sideplots might be totally irrelevant to said mystery, somehow the episode feels so much slower in comparison. In a typical Bones episode, you have the main plot where there’s bones for the team of scientists to examine and a mystery to solve, a B-plot surrounding someone’s love life having troubles, and a C-plot where two characters do something dumb and get in trouble.
It could simply be pacing; it could simply be better writing. Some shows can bombard you with plot beat after plot beat after plot beat but due to the way it’s presented, it never feels that way. The Leftovers has 10 episodes per season and each scene is plot relevant, but it’s one of the slowest shows you’ll watch. Even some of the intense dramatic scenes feel like you’re moving through molasses compared to the fast-paced breakneck speed of something like The Boys. Severance is another example – every subplot relates back to the main plot, but the presentation eases you into it so you never feel overwhelmed. It’s not boom boom boom but more boom………. boom………. boom.
Of course, not every TV show can or should have filler subplots, and some feel like they’re entirely filler. Do you know what the overarching plot of Succession is beyond “who is gonna take over the company?” Neither do I! Imagine watching The Terror and everyone’s just hanging out— no, wait, I know many people who would love that. What about an episode of Severance where the gang goes off and— actually I think people would like that too much. Okay, how about Bridgerton? A show whose main plot has very little stakes, so to add upon it an extra insubstantial plot would feel redundant. But some shows would benefit from having even a few scenes where you just get characters talking to each other in a moment of levity.
Now you may be saying, “Hey, you just said Eddie barely got any filler content, but I liked him! I got sad when he died! So did he really need any filler? Are you just complaining about nothing?”
To this, I have two responses: one, if you went on AO3 or any equivalent website to find Eddie-centric fluff, you wanted filler. Stuff like that is what filler is made of.
Two, it’s hard explaining why a show needs filler when it was designed to be without filler and almost all character development is done through the main plot of trying to save the world. But consider the scenes of Will crying in the car, of him looking longingly at Mike (not at El, god, it’s like no one read the Byler PowerPoint) – ostensibly, those scenes could be removed from the show with little to no impact on the story, but they add a layer of complexity to Will. He’s not yet another kid whose story we have to sit through in order to get to the Winona Ryder parts. He’s “lil homie gay ass” and we love him.
There’s an old trick? saying? something to that effect in horror writing, about how you can’t have consistently tense scenes throughout. You need moments of levity in between, in order to make the tense scenes hit harder. How much would we care about Sidney’s boyfriend dying in Scream 2 if we didn’t see him do his gay little song and dance for her in between all the murders?
To have a balance between filler and substance, you’d have to start all the way at the creation of the show and the tone the writers want to set. You can’t just write your plot and then insert random scenes of levity and call it a day, especially when you have such a small number of episodes. When there isn’t enough time for everything, the first things cut is the plot irrelevant stuff – the filler. But when you get rid of all the filler, all you have left is, as I think I’ve made clear by now, a barebones plot where you don’t feel much for anyone no matter how engaging the story may be. The best example I can think of is Moon Knight on Disney+, which I and many others watched because Oscar Isaac was in it. (Spoilers ahead.)
Briefly summarized, Oscar Isaac plays a character who has dissociative identity disorder and thus two personalities – one Steven and the other Mark – who vie for control of the main body as they also try to stop the end of the world with the help of the ancient Egyptian god with whom they entered a pact of servitude. Normal Marvel stuff. One of the big conflicts the show pushes is a love triangle between Steve, Mark, and Mark’s wife Layla, who had no idea about Mark’s DID nor his alter ego Moon Knight nor the fact that apparently Mark was complicit in the murder of her father. If this sounds unengaging and kinda out of left field and you didn’t really care about it, then you’ve got a good idea of how it felt in the show. The show tried to make you care about the characters and their relationships with one another, as well as whatever lives they lead outside of the events of the show, but it was too much to cram into six episodes. The most interesting “filler” is shown in the episode where Mark and Steven try to escape the Egyptian underworld by uncovering their shared backstory. It finally gives Mark and Steven substance, enough to almost make you care about them as people rather than Oscar Isaac-shaped plot devices, but this happens in the penultimate episode where it honestly doesn’t really matter anymore.
To paraphrase Brandon Taylor, everyone who makes a TV show should be applauded. It’s hard, grueling work under difficult conditions that the industry often ends up encouraging. I mean just look at everything going on in the VFX industry. Maybe it is the writers’ fault for being unable to write a good six-episode story, but isn’t it also Disney’s fault for giving them only six episodes to tell this story?
There’s a separate problem to talk about, not necessarily started by Disney but certainly perfected by it, and driven by the same motivation that gave us six episodes a miniseries and three seasons max (hint: $$$): the ever expanding cinematic universe.
I’d like to say it started with the release of Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, but it probably started before that. Think of all the franchises with reboots and revivals airing in the past few years – iCarly, Sex and the City, Jurassic Park, Ghostbusters, Ocean’s, the list goes on. None of these stories needed a continuation, some of them received a better ending somewhere in the middle of their run than the last installment before the reboot/revival, and yet, here we are. Did anyone actually think iCarly was good enough to warrant a continuation? The Sex and the City movies were bad, but did we really need a TV show featuring even less of the original cast? Couldn’t we have made an original heist movie and not invented Danny Ocean’s sister just so we could slap on the Ocean’s name?
The biggest offender is, by far, Star Wars. I have enjoyed many Star Wars properties, mostly due to the fact that I grew up in a house full of nerds, but the fact remains that there is almost no period in the timeline left unexplored. We know what happens before Anakin became Darth Vader, we know what happened in the Clone Wars, we know how the Rebel Alliance got the Death Star plans, we know what happened in between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, we know what happened between A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back, we know what happens between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, we know what happens between Revenge of the Sith and Rogue One, we know what happens specifically to Obi Wan before A New Hope, there’s extremely little left to the imagination.
The thing about Star Wars is that there has never been a piece of the franchise (at least in the main films) to end on a cliffhanger. You can always wonder where a character will go after the credits roll, but it’s never the explicit intent of the film to make you wonder. The first Star Wars movie was meant to be a standalone!
Now, some MCU fans will argue that their franchise is special and needs sequels because their movies often end on cliffhangers. Here’s the thing: there are cliffhangers, only for the express purpose that you watch the next installment, which will also end in a cliffhanger, ad infinitum ad nauseum. Also they’re all based on comics so you can just read the comics.
Obviously, the main motivation for any sequel is money but sometimes, rarely, you’ll find someone whose primary motivation is their artistic vision. Or at least it’s a definitive driving factor. Was Better Call Saul made in order to profit off of the success of Breaking Bad? Probably! But the product that’s being delivered shows care into creating an original (or original enough) story that can be enjoyed in a way that enhances its counterparts and can be enjoyed completely without them. I don’t think the world needed Matt Reeve’s The Batman, and I personally hated it for many reasons – it could’ve been an hour and a half shorter, the mystery was nonexistent, the moral dilemma was extinguished as soon as it was introduced, everything was handed to the audience and Bruce without making either of us work for it, the characters were underdeveloped, each hour of the movie felt like it belonged in a different movie, I could go on. But, I can acknowledge that the director had something he wanted to say about Batman, and although I can debate its effectiveness, he did say it.
(Just gotta quickly add, why did the police so willingly agree to work with Batman right after he punched the shit out of Gordon in front of all of them? Why was he working with the police from the beginning when a central part of the ethos of Batman and Gotham is that Gordon is the only person he can trust and the rest are bastards? Especially in today’s climate why would they make this decision!!!)
On the other side of the spectrum, while I enjoyed Avatar: The Legend of Korra, I can acknowledge that there’s really no need for it to exist. The story wrapped up at the end of the original Avatar: The Last Airbender, and while there were some loose ends, a) it’s fine to sometimes leave things for the audience to think about after your series is over and b) those loose ends were solved in sequel comics and are not at all mentioned in Legend of Korra.
Now take the iCarly reboot: again, there is absolutely no way this was made because people thought there was some untold story or message that needed to be said. And you can’t even say this one is for the kids because it’s made for grownups – specifically, those who grew up watching iCarly. Due to the troubling nature of the original show’s production (for no reason let me plug Jennette McCurdy’s memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died), not to mention the actual content, it’s hard to say that iCarly is a good show. So why did people watch the revival? Why was the revival renewed for a third season, when plenty of good original programming has been cancelled?
If the answer is truly nostalgia, what is it that people are nostalgic for? The show itself, or the person they were when they used to watch the show? Did people actually care about what happened to Carly and Freddie, or did they just miss sitting in front of the TV on Saturdays watching reruns of iCarly episodes while pretending to do their homework and thinking about what they’re gonna wear on Monday to impress their crush and who they’re gonna sit next to at lunch and blah blah blah you know. It's not about the pasta.
The answer can’t always be nostalgia, though. People who grew up reading Marvel comics aren’t the only MCU fans, and neither they all children. And, oh boy, it definitely isn’t because they genuinely enjoy the content Marvel is putting out. My theory is that it’s for the same reason there’s a group of people online who vehemently defend fanfiction over all other forms of literature: familiarity.
It’s well known that Marvel productions follow a strict template and creatives are more or less asked to pick whether they want the background character in a certain scene to wear blue or red but definitely not green. Just like in fanfiction, certain conventions must be met, certain characters will appear and they’ll act in a specific way (whether or not they should based on prior characterization is an entirely different matter), things can get dire but certain people are already signed on to appear in sequels so they can’t die, there can be maybe one or two surprises but for the most part the audience will always know what to expect. In a way, one can argue that the MCU is Marvel comics fanfiction.
Why would I mention fillers and franchises in the same newsletter issue? Is it because I didn’t want to write two long newsletters on both issues separately? Maybe so! But I can tie the two ideas together.
Seldom, if ever, will you see filler side plots in MCU content that isn’t a running gag they’re trying to make work. For example, there’s a lot that can be done about the fact that half of the world’s population disappeared and then reappeared five years later while the rest of the world moved on, stuff that can explore changed relationships between characters and how they view themselves and the most they do with it is have Joe Russo show up as a gay guy in Endgame.
Like in Stranger Things, most characterization in the MCU is done in service of the saving the world plot. This makes more sense for a movie than a TV show, as a movie has a significantly smaller runtime to do everything. Due to the way movies are written, writers are usually good at this. However, in the MCU, characters are essentially cookie cutters that take whatever shape the plot requires of them. For example, Captain America in The Winter Soldier has moved on from his past and tries to find his place in the present, whereas in Endgame he’s suddenly adrift from time and just wants to go back and date his ex and do nothing to stop 9/11. What good is any character development when a character is just a puppet that does whatever you need it to?
There’s comfort in familiarity, in knowing who all the players are and exactly how the story’s going to play out, especially when everything in the real world feels like shit. I’m with you guys, I received a bunch of rejection letters these past few months, I ended a longtime and deeply personal relationship, I found out someone close to me was diagnosed with a terminal illness – not to mention everything else happening in the world. It’s easy to go back to the things you know and avoid the challenges of the future.
But of course, the more we stick with what we know, the less we can experience something new, both in life and in media. What we as a society put our time and money into is what studios and executives will put money into in order to get more money.
Without spoiling the plot, the final Neon Genesis Evangelion film ends with an understanding about how important it is to move on, to keep living life and fighting for the future instead of lingering in the past; about how it’s okay to grow up and not know what the future holds, but to keep moving forward into it. There will be no more Evangelion after this, and that’s okay. That’s how it should be.
According to Box Office Mojo, on the weekend of July 22nd to 24th, the top five movies were Nope, Thor: Love and Thunder, Minions: The Rise of Gru, Where the Crawdads Sing, and Top Gun: Maverick. Three of these are franchise films, one is based on a popular book, and one is an original story but it did just open that week. The previous entry in the top five was Elvis, a biopic of a very popular and very successful musician – not really a studio gamble on an original story. Just yet another story everyone already knows.
It’s been a while since I’ve done this, I hope I’ve made my point and you understand the point I’m making. If not, well, I’m not getting paid to write this and you didn’t pay to read it.
love the idea that studio execs are also yearning for familiarity in media, not in a comfort way but a consistent capital gain way, just the idea of similar desires manifesting so differently. also love "If the answer is truly nostalgia, what is it that people are nostalgic for? The show itself, or the person they were when they used to watch the show?" we love companies trying to sell our past back to ourselves
loved how many examples you used