[How to: TV] Mild Continuity

Continuity is going to be the subject of a later post, but for the moment I'll define it as "a quality your show needs to have if you want to see your characters change". If a show has no continuity, then episodes can be played in any order. Strong continuity means there's a specific order they should be played in.

In this post, I'd like to talk about mild continuity; an idea I came up with while thinking about different ways we could have approached lovebites. lovebites was an unproven concept by first-time creators that locked itself into a reasonably strong continuity that meant episodes had to be shown in a certain order. That meant we couldn't necessarily play our best episodes up front.

Perhaps a better way to have approached it would be to have no continuity in the first half of your show's first season, so that episodes can play in any order. Episodes in the first half focus on the show's Situation and starting relationships. There are 2 advantages to doing it this way:

*You get a chance to figure out the feel of your show.
*You have the flexibility to play stronger episodes at the beginning, which'll help win over your audience.

Mild continuity focuses on creating fun episodes with low stakes early on and then introduces a major Plot Point mid-season (such as, in lovebites, Mary Anne deciding to go overseas). If you want, you can tweak in another Plot Point at the three-quarter mark.