Well, maybe I'm the problem, because I missed most or all of The Office discussions and all of the Bleak House discussions. Natter's too big for my small concerns.

but the relative open/closedness of the narrative

Yeah, but my point is that HBO tv meets your consideration of closedness. Each season is completely thought-through and shot before the first episode airs. Most of the series have deliberate and finite arcs, and, the Sopranos excepted, some idea of when to end things. Actually, The BBC Office is a great example of this sort of movie-like planning and pacing.

Yeah, but my point is that HBO tv meets your consideration of closedness.

This is not my experience of HBO shows. (Now several years out of date; I watched things like Sex and the City and Six Feet Under and a couple others.) Several of these had end-of-season cliffhangers, or other key markers of episodic writing. Also, unless you're prepared to vouch for all the shows that HBO might have coming down the pike, I think it's too strong to say that HBO shows are all and will always be closed arcs the way you're describing. I consistently found Oz to be basically a giant naked man-neurotic soap opera.

I speak only for the shows that I admitted upthread to watching. Which isn't many.

To me, the real question is, is this narrowly-focused thread sustainable? And I have no idea since I don't watch any of those shows, and don't feel like there's been an overwhelming amount of conversation elsewhere. So I wonder if the people who would be involved feel like there would be enough discussion to sustain a thread.

I think that such a thread would be sustainable, because by the time the current shows run out of steam, there will be others. It's not really such a narrow focus in a group of people who watch a lot of tv.

Me, I wish we had a general-tv-talk thread, because like Corwood says, general-tv talk gets lost in the flood of posts in Natter. If all you want to do is W&P House or talk about TAR, wouldn't it be better to have a thread for that? Rather than making the people who can't/don't keep up in Natter wade though 500 posts to find where the W&P starts, or conversely, making Natterers who don't care about the tv show wade through 30 posts of whitefont.

Also, I don't see the point really in making a thread that excludes everything except HBO/Showtime, when after so doing, we'll still have tons of whitefont posts in Natter and some people (me) will still be wondering if we're posting in the right thread. If we could say, genre goes in Boxed Set, everything else tv goes in Glass Teat, that's simple enough even for me.

What Zenkitty said. I usually just skip to the end of Natter when something like House starts, but then I'm in the midwest and I'm viewing at the same time as the east coasters who will be posting. But for those on the west coast, they have to cope with trying to back track to where the conversation starts through all the natter. Having a TV thread would still have some of the backtracking, but at least it would be faster.

The threads have a lovely search function; I don't know why people keep having to wade through all the new posts to find a searchable term like Deadwood. Another easy way to find a discussion is to go straight to the first post the next day after airing, since the show probably aired about 3-6 hours before.

In any case, even if a general TV thread were on the table, it's not clear it would help with the problem of finding a discussion if you're not there when the show airs. One of the things mentioned when the general tv thread was proposed last year is that the discussions will just keep interrupting each other.

I don't know why people keep having to wade through all the new posts to find a searchable term like Deadwood. Another easy way to find a discussion is to go straight to the first post the next day after airing, since the show probably aired about 3-6 hours before.

My observation about online discussion dynamics is that this doesn't really allow for the close-to-real-time discussion that really generates its own momentum.

In dedicated threads it doesn't matter if different Deadwood fans are in different timezones. It's compressed enough to sustain a discussion. In Natter, though, the intervening chat kills off discussion.

Natter is, by definition, not focused. That's the problem with using Natter as the de facto TV thread.

Thanks, Hec. That's more or less what I was trying to wind my thoughts around to, but somehow they just never got there. And even with the search function, you still have to weed out the chaff from the exact post you're looking for.

The more shows involved, the more people who are going to want whitefont -- what if I can see show X on channel A, but don't see show Y on channel B until later? If everything's blackfont, I don't want to read the thread until I've seen show Y. This is the issue that has been discussed regarding a broad TV thread, and I think it still stands.