The Genre Serial
What Star Trek, which began in 1966, left to television may be less the show than its audience. The broadcast ended after three seasons and 79 episodes, but reruns carried it to younger viewers, conventions grew out of it, and it became a culture that is still going. People who had been sitting in front of the television started gathering outside it.
What this band invented was the continuing world. Not a story closed in one episode: the show holds a world, and the audience learns its details. The X-Files, in 1993, turned that into a double structure — episodes with a different strange case each week, and episodes that moved the larger alien storyline forward. The oral history record shows that its creator, Chris Carter, used the label "monster of the week" himself.
One writer spent seven years on that double-track show: Vince Gilligan. A man who wrote the weekly strangeness while watching a larger story move a little at a time would later make a drama whose subject was change itself (→ The Age of the Antihero). The science-fiction and fantasy vein and prestige television meet at this one person.
Lost, in 2004, went further. Mysteries piled up, audiences theorized, message boards filled. But the show also left the question of whether everything should be answered. Ten years later, its producer Carlton Cuse put it this way: "Trying to answer all the unanswered questions was a recipe for disaster." It becomes like a textbook, he added, and stops being interesting. Damon Lindelof, for his part, said he makes no apologies for being drawn to questions that have no answers — because that is life.
The culture of an audience theorizing runs straight from here to Game of Thrones (→ Television Spectacle).
The myth, corrected
A fan letter-writing campaign is what got Star Trek its third season
The campaign itself is real. Bjo Trimble and others mailed out newsletters using lists from science-fiction conventions, and asked each recipient to write and pass it on to ten more people. Even NBC reading out, in prime time, a request that people stop writing because the show had not been cancelled survives in her own account on the official site. But recent research points out that NBC had been sending fans letters implying a renewal before one had been decided, and that a move to Monday nights and budget cuts had already weakened the show — so how far the campaign moved the renewal is described as not entirely clear. That it contributed is certain; that it made the season happen is the received account.