Ask Alan: In Defense Of The Commercial Break?

Happy Friday, everybody! Time for a new installment of Ask Alan, where I take your questions about the past, present, and future of TV.

I don’t often do themed episodes, if only because people ask me lots of different kinds of things, but for whatever reason, I got several questions recently on the kind of minutiae that only the geekiest of TV geeks (which, if you’re reading me, you surely are) care about.

First up, I was asked about the minor TV characters I enjoy most when they pop up on various shows. For the purposes of the question, I largely excluded anyone who was a regular cast member on a show, though I made an exception for Creed Bratton, because otherwise I was afraid of what Creed Bratton would do to me, given what he did to the last person to steal from him.

After that, I talked about what may be a dying art — the distinct TV episode title — as more and more shows (serialized dramas especially) shift to “Chapter 1,” “Part 1,” and similarly uninteresting monikers, and look into why that’s happening.

And finally, in response to my recent defense of the episode, a reader asked me to defend an even more basic part of TV: the commercial break.

As always, you can email me questions at [email protected] (we had server issues recently, but the address is working again), or tweet at me with the hashtag #AskAlanDay.