The 5 Episode Rule: How To Determine TV Drama Greatness

Back in 2007, I started watching a show on AMC called Mad Men. It was the first original scripted series the network had ever done and I was excited to see a real television show on a channel that only played action movies of varying quality (True Lies of course being the most abundantly played of the bunch). Its surface elements immediately jumped out at me: its 1960s setting, the beautiful people dressed in amazing clothes, the allure of Madison Avenue, and the promise of real historical events woven into the narrative. As I began to watch the show and learn about these characters, my interest was still fairly high through the first four episodes, but the stories of these seemingly soulless people were not quite grabbing me by the lapel.  The only things that I knew I loved about the show other than its impeccable production design were Don Draper's suits and Joan Holloway's gravity-defying curves. However, come episode five, when a major secret about Don's past came to light, I immediately found myself completely hooked not just by the style of the show, but the substance as well. Cut to almost five years and 52 episodes later, and Mad Men is one of my all-time favorite television shows.

The fact that I can recall the exact moment I became hooked on the show gives credence to a theory that I did not form until well after I started watching Mad Men. After that first example, I decided to test it out on some other shows that were either getting good buzz in advance of their premier or had already received the critical acclaim but had slipped through my cracks until Netflix saved the day. After several successful trials (Deadwood, The Wire, Sons of Anarchy, and Homeland to name a few), I have come to the conclusion that one can determine whether a dramatic series can achieve greatness after five episodes have aired. No complicated mathematical equation brought me to this conclusion, but I do believe that these great shows all follow a formula: great fifth episode equals great show.

The greatest mistake most television viewers make is judging a show based on a pilot alone. While a pilot can often indicate the quality of a show, it more frequently gets burdened with the necessity of establishing the premise of the show and the rules of the world its characters live in. The best shows can do this while simultaneously creating well-developed characters who immediately appeal to the viewer and make him or her want to know what happens next. Some, like "Friday Night Lights," one of the best pilots of the last decade, are crafted as short films both in their visual style and mode of storytelling. Usually, however, pilots are merely the first pieces in a greater puzzle that requires the viewer to stick around in the coming weeks to see what happens next.

The second episode of a good show is usually not as well-done as the pilot, but still continues to add more pieces to the narrative. It's usually shot several months after the pilot after a network decides the show is fit to go to series, so the continuity of the show from episode one to episode two is incredibly difficult to maintain because a rhythm of production for the series has not yet been established. The cast and crew are just beginning to acquire a comfort level with each other and doing that takes time. The director of a pilot is usually a film director (i.e. Peter Berg on Friday Night Lights or Martin Scorsese on Boardwalk Empire) that may be a producer on the show but is not involved with day-to-day production.  From there, shows usually hire a small group of directors who become familiar with the show's process and allow for a visual and narrative coherence to develop.

This process also plays out over the third and fourth episodes. The main narrative continues to move forward, more side plots and secondary characters are introduced, and the world of the show slowly begins to establish itself. At this point, if a viewer is still watching, either the main character(s) are interesting or the main plot begins to show promise, yet still retains the potential to fall apart (see: another AMC show, The Killing). In most shows, the three episodes after the pilot deal with the fallout from the events that happened in that debut episode. The plot points established in the pilot remain front and center and have the undivided attention of the characters.

In my experience, episode five usually changes the game and demonstrates that a show can sustain a high level of quality going forward. A new plot point is introduced that could open up the general narrative of the piece and take it in several different directions. A couple notable examples of this would be the aforementioned example from Mad Men or the murder of the terrorist informant in Homeland. By this point in the series, a behind-the-scenes rhythm has been established and the confidence in the storytelling is stronger going forward and actors start to add more interesting layers to their characters.

Even though I call this self-discovered phenomenon the Five Episode Rule, like all rules, there are exceptions. On the one hand, my favorite show of all time, Breaking Bad, took only five minutes to hook me, not five episodes. Conversely, a show like Dexter took a little longer to give the audience a true game-changing moment (when Dexter discovers his mother's identity). However, the biggest exception to the five-episode rule is comedy.

Comedies almost always take longer to establish themselves (if they ever do) and I've come up with three major reasons why:

1. While most dramas are one hour, most comedies are half-hour show, which inherently restricts how much content each episode can have. Comedy is so reliant on rhythm in its delivery of jokes that when the time one has to deliver the funny is reduced, the pressure is on the show's writers to cram as many jokes in as possible to make the reader laugh and worry about establishing a plot later.

2. Because plotting on a comedy is perceived as less important than it is in drama, it's much more difficult for  comedies to find a hook for the audience to latch onto in the way of a premise. More often than not, comedies create jokes from the premise instead of the other way around, which is what the best comedies on television accomplish.

3. As countless comedians have said, comedy is incredibly difficult, and crafting good comedy is doubly difficult. Good comedy takes time to develop, and whether it's a stand-up set or a television series, there have to be some jokess along the way that don't land to determine what does and does not work.  A great example of a comedy show taking its time to develop is Parks and Recreation. The show's six-season first episode has some charm and several laughs, but one can tell that there was something not quite right about the show. The characters were not quite real human beings yet and an overall comedic rhythm was yet to be established.  However, midway through the second season and on, those who stuck with the show began to experience what many believe to be the best comedy on television. The beauty of not having to be a slave to plot allows for comedies to take their time in developing a joke-delivery cadence and play with the formulas of storytelling structure. It creates more pressure to be funny, but it simultaneously presents a challenge that any smart comedy writing staff should relish to make something both narratively compelling and hilarious simultaneously.

From this point forth, I present avid television watchers with a challenge. Pick a show that is about to premier or you have not seen, and watch the first episode.  If it looks promising, watch the next three episodes, but do not give up if the narrative seems slow.  Finally, watch the fifth episode, and from there you can decide whether a show is great or not.  If it's not, then you have dodged a bullet and it was never meant to be.  I currently am putting two new shows to this test: HBO's Luck and ABC's The River.  Both shows are coming off less-than-stellar third episodes, but I'm holding off judgment for another two weeks because I have faith in the formula.