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there something apples-to-oranges in comparing a boutique HBO program like The Sopranos to a network prime-time show like Hill Street Blues ? Isn’t the increase in complexity merely a reflection of the later show’s smaller and more elite audience? I think the answer is no, for several reasons. First, measured by pure audience share, The Sopranos is a genuine national hit, regularly outdrawing network television shows in the same slot. Second, Hill Street Blues was itself a boutique show—the first step in NBC’s immensely successful attempt in the early eighties to target an upscale demographic instead of the widest possible audience. The show was a cultural and critical success, but it spent most of its life languishing in the mid-thirties in the Nielsen TV ratings—and in its first season, the series finished eighty-third out of ninety-seven total shows on television. The total number of viewers for a Sopranos episode is not that different from that of an average episode of Hill Street Blues, even though the former’s narrative complexity is at least twice that of the latter. ( The Sopranos is even more complex on other scales, to which we will turn shortly.)
    You can also measure the public’s willingness to tolerate more complicated narratives in the success of shows such as ER or 24. In terms of multiple threading, both shows usually follow around ten threads per episode, roughly comparable to Hill Street Blues. But ER and 24 are bona fide hits, regularly appearing in the Nielsen top twenty. In 1981, you could weave together three major narratives and a half dozen supporting plots over the course of an hour on prime time, and cobble together enough of an audience to keep the show safe from cancellation. Today you can challenge the audience to follow a more complicated mix, and build a juggernaut in the process.
    Multithreading is the most celebrated structural feature of the modern television drama, and it certainly deserves some of the honor that has been doled out to it. When we watch TV, we intuitively track narrative-threads-per-episode as a measure of a given show’s complexity. And all the evidence suggests that this standard has been rising steadily over the past two decades. But multithreading is only part of the story.
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    A FEW YEARS after the arrival of the first-generation slasher movies— Halloween, Friday the 13th —Paramount released a mock-slasher flick, Student Bodies, which parodied the genre just as the Scream series would do fifteen years later. In one scene, the obligatory nubile teenage babysitter hears a noise outside a suburban house; she opens the door to investigate, finds nothing, and then goes back inside. As the door shuts behind her, the camera swoops in on the doorknob, and we see that she’s left the door unlocked. The camera pulls back, and then swoops down again, for emphasis. And then a flashing arrow appears on the screen, with text that helpfully explains: “Door Unlocked!”
    That flashing arrow is parody, of course, but it’s merely an exaggerated version of a device popular stories use all the time. It’s a kind of narrative signpost, planted conveniently to help the audience keep track of what’s going on. When the villain first appears in a movie emerging from the shadows with ominous, atonal music playing—that’s a flashing arrow that says: “bad guy.” When a sci-fi script inserts a non-scientist into some advanced lab who keeps asking the science geeks to explain what they’re doing with that particle accelerator—that’s a flashing arrow that gives the audience precisely the information they need to know in order to make sense of the ensuing plot. (“Whatever you do, don’t spill water on it, or you’ll set off a massive explosion!”) Genre conventions function as flashing arrows; the Student Bodies parody works because the “door unlocked” text is absurd