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overkill—we’ve already internalized the rules of the slasher genre enough to know that nubile-babysitter-in-suburban-house inevitably leads to unwanted visitors. Heist movies traditionally deliver a full walk-through of the future crime scene, complete with architectural diagrams, so you’ll know what’s happening when the criminals actually go in for the goods.
    These hints serve as a kind of narrative handholding. Implicitly, they say to the audience, “We realize you have no idea what a particle accelerator is, but here’s the deal: all you need to know is that it’s a big fancy thing that explodes when wet.” They focus the mind on relevant details: “Don’t worry about whether the babysitter is going to break up with her boyfriend. Worry about that guy lurking in the bushes.” They reduce the amount of analytic work you need to make sense of a story. All you have to do is follow the arrows.
    By this standard, popular television has never been harder to follow. If narrative threads have experienced a population explosion over the past twenty years, flashing arrows have grown correspondingly scarce. Watching our pinnacle of early eighties TV drama, Hill Street Blues, there’s an informational wholeness to each scene that differs markedly from what you see on shows like The West Wing or The Sopranos or Alias or ER. Hill Street gives you multiple stories to follow, as we’ve seen, but each event in those stories has a clarity to it that is often lacking in the later shows.
    This is a subtle distinction, but an important one, a facet of the storyteller’s art that we sometimes only soak up unconsciously. Hill Street has ambiguities about future events: Will the convicted serial killer be executed? Will Furillo marry Joyce Davenport? Will Renko catch the health inspector who has been taking bribes? But the present tense of each scene explains itself to the viewer with little ambiguity. You may not know the coming fate of the health inspector, but you know why Renko is dressing up as a busboy in the current scene, or why he’s eavesdropping on a kitchen conversation in the next. There’s an open question or a mystery driving each of these stories—how will it all turn out?—but there’s no mystery about the immediate activity on the screen.
    A contemporary drama like The West Wing, on the other hand, constantly embeds mysteries into the present-tense events: you see characters performing actions or discussing events about which crucial information has been deliberately withheld. Appropriately enough, the extended opening sequence of the West Wing pilot revolved around precisely this technique: you’re introduced to all the major characters (Toby, Josh, CJ) away from the office, as they each receive the enigmatic message that “POTUS has fallen from a bicycle.” West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin—who amazingly managed to write every single episode through season four—deliberately withholds the information that all these people work at the White House, and that POTUS stands for “President of the United States,” until the very last second before the opening credits run. Granted, a viewer tuning in to a show called The West Wing probably suspected that there was going to be some kind of White House connection, and a few political aficionados might have already been familiar with the acronym POTUS. But that opening sequence established a structure that Sorkin used in every subsequent episode, usually decorated with deliberately opaque information. The open question posed by these sequences is not: How will this turn out in the end? The question is: What’s happening right now?
    In practice, the viewers of shows like Hill Street Blues in the eighties no doubt had moments of confusion where the sheer number of simultaneous plots created present-tense mystery: we’d forget why Renko was wearing that busboy outfit because