In Defense of Episode Titles

I have no complaints with Dear White People. Zero. Justin Simien’s Netflix adaptation of his own feature film is a beautiful, sharply observed, urgent, and addictive season of television, one that I wolfed down in barely two and a half days. There is nothing wrong and everything right with it.

Except.

Dear White People is merely the latest TV show to fall into one of my least favorite tropes of the current binge-watching era: generic/nonexistent episode titles. Each episode of Dear White People is titled in sequence, “Chapter I,” “Chapter II,” et cetera. In this way, it’s the most honest of the untitled TV shows, in that it acknowledges that it’s a show that doesn’t want to be seen as a collection of episodes but rather a season to be consumed as a whole, broken up into smaller units, like chapters in a book. Shows like House of Cards and Legion also do the “Chapter [X]” thing. Others, like HBO’s The Young Pope or ABC’s American Crime opt for “Episode [X].” So it’s not just streaming series. Cable and even network series are just bowing out of the TV episode title game altogether.

I blame all of this on 24, of course. The influential FOX series decided to draw an arrow to it’s round-the-clock gimmick by titling each episode as the hour of the day when it takes place. “12:00AM – 1:00AM,” and so on. It was cute and, at the time, distinctive. But the problem with it is the problem that I have with all numbered-episode-title shows: it tells me NOTHING about what happens on this episode of television! At their best, TV episode titles provide a bit of explanation or clarification about what happens in a given episode, and if they’re really good, they even provide a bit of entertainment value. Look at some of the great TV shows: Friends titles all their episodes under the “The One With/The One Where [XYZ]” rubric, a clever and succinct way of tipping the viewer off while staying distinctive. Seinfeld operated similarly, using a gimmick — “The [X],” “The [Y]” — to communicate the idea that the Seinfeld universe was all about picking apart mundane minutiae.

Beyond losing a descriptor of the plot, losing episode titles means losing just one more element of creativity in a TV show. We’ve already lost the war on opening credits. Streaming has made post-credit tags a casualty of the auto-player. Episode titles seem insignificant, but they’re just one extra chance for a show’s personality to shine through. Think of how many TV shows put their own stamp on episode-title formats. Scrubs with “My [This],” “My [That].” Desperate Housewives with its Sondheim song titles. The Good Wife with its weird geometric symmetry in word count. It wasn’t much, but it was a way to put a show’s stamp on something.

The irony of a show like Dear White People devolving to chapter titles is that it’s one of the rare streaming series that does a good job making its episodes feel distinct and unique. Each episode focuses on a different character, giving their unique perspective on events. Another Netflix series, 13 Reasons Why, focuses on a different character in each episode (though it’s less effective at getting the episodes to feel distinct from one another), yet also opts to Dewey Decimal its episode titles. Remember that thing that happens in episode “Tape 4, Side A”? OF COURSE NOT, HOW COULD YOU POSSIBLY?

Of course, in the streaming era, little attention is paid to things like episode titles. Or even episodes, really. When you’re binging a four-hour block (or more) of auto-playing episodes, do you much care what the next auto-started hour is called? Do you even notice when one episode ends and the other begins? Maybe not. But a huge part of the experience of engaging with TV shows comes not while you’re watching but afterwards. There’s discussion, thee’s enthusiasm, there’s obsession. When I was younger and getting massively into Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you could throw out an episode title — even something vaguely generic-sounding like “Checkpoint” or “Entropy” — and I’d know exactly the events being discussed. The generically-cataloged era of TV episodes is only contributing to a sense of disposability for TV shows in general. It communicates an indifference to ever revisiting these hours and engaging with them as anything but bricks in a wall. It’s not episodes that matter anymore, it’s plot developments and cliffhangers and whatever else it takes for you to keep your binge going.

Which makes it doubly crazy that Dear White People went in this direction, because if any show is doing streaming right — with distinct episodes that feel like individual pieces of art that can both stand alone and move the greater vehicle forward — it’s Dear White People. Like all great TV, it’s a show that deserves to have its episodes recognized on their own merits. With their own names. Help stem this tide in season 2, Dear White People! You’re our only hope.*

*Okay, not really, but it would be GREAT.

 

Where to stream Dear White People