Slippin' Into the Future

Noticed something watching the first season of Scrubs on DVD (see my thoughts below). I remember when initially seeing the show that they seemed to do a good job of making the trio of main characters really seem to grow during the season, so that by the last episode, we believed that these doctors had progressed as far as they had; we believed they had gone from first-year interns to residents. But watching the show on DVD it seemed a bit forced, as if not enough time had passed for the transition.

The difference, of course, is that in "real time" we see a TV season over the course of nine months. The actual passage of time does a lot to instill the sense of time passing within the world of the show. On DVD, though, we often watch a season in the span of a week or so, or less. And without that real passage of time, the show's internal passage of time can feel less real. It'll be interesting, over the course of the next decade, to see if TV producers try to account for this. After all, the rough convention of TV show seasons equating to a year developed purely out of the fact that that's how they are produced and shown in real life. With DVD becoming stronger, will writers and producers be more tempted to disband with that convention?

Until Whenever