The historical change in television duration can be coordinated by two shows. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Joss Whedon devised multiple-season trajectories of character and story development in advance: a seven year arc toward apocalypse beneath which individual episodes had, as well, relatively discrete narratives — as did each season. In The X-Files, individual episodes strobed between entirely discrete and playing a part in the "master narrative," which was not entirely planned in advance but rather shifted to account for a changing set of details and revelations — necessarily supposing a conspiracy at the highest metaphysical level. This conspiracy at once ordered all possible events and concealed that order from us, revealing them as if accidentally, in uneven dollops (this conspiracy is, of course, nothing other than Chris Carter and "authorship" as such). In both these situations, the fundamental drama of the series is in the tension between episode and arc.

From this coordination, two developments present themselves. One is the hypertrophy of the "conspiracy" model, now exaggerated to the point of farce — such that each increasingly absurd episode might somehow not be absurd, but part of a greater logic. The promise of completion is displaced onto the fantasized master narrative or conspiracy which is deferred season after season, so that the rote revelation/confusion/revelation/confusion sequence of each episode can make some claim beyond its own tawdry manipulation. This farce is called Lost: basically The ReduX-Files with all the lightness gone, with much more expensive production values, worse writing, and much much worse acting.

The other possibility is that the multi-season arc will seize control of the show entirely: a version of Buffy which has jettisoned the device of having discrete episodes within the long trajectory. The risk, obviously, is that the show might get canceled before concluding, leaving all in ruination, since the long story is all. It was against this that Whedon hedged relentlessly, which is why his show remains a half-measure. And it is to this risk that The Wire commits itself absolutely. It could have been a disaster, rather than the greatest show in television history.

The greatest consequence of The Wire (and its companion long-arc shows, many of them having seized the advantage of cable programming to risk the experiment) is a historical inversion. For a long time it was the case that movies were long and television was a short form. The TV show had 23 or 46 minutes for a narrative to complete itself; a movie had 90 minutes, two hours, three! Movies haven’t changed (indeed, uncoincidentally, the Hollywood length creep of late-century seems to have begun to reverse itself), but The Wire is about 65 hours long, divided graciously into five location-based chapters. Movies are now the short form, television the long form. About the experience of narrative duration in video games, the results aren’t yet in.

Even this is not the greatest achievement of The Wire; that is its incomparable casting of African-American actors (and in at least one case, African-British). It remains a mystery why Hollywood, with its vast budgets, reach, and expertise, can’t catch up or even approximate the show’s achievement. Except that it’s no mystery at all, but rather a fact inseparable from that of duration: because the actors on The Wire will have many hours to develop their characters, they have no need to employ telegraphic acting devices to define their characters within a brief few minutes — a set of stock signals known to every Hollywood performer and ticket-buyer, and in the case of non-white actors, generally referred to as "stereotypes."