Scaling down for the small screen

I've wasted my life.

This week, The New York Times reported Sony Pictures Television plans to introduce "minisodes," which effectively whittle the studio's primetime hits of days past into three- to five-minute condensed versions created for distribution over digital platforms. All killer, no filler, in other words. And after considering the proposition, I've come to believe I've made a terrible mistake spending so much of my time on earth watching television. After all, if I only needed to watch five minutes of a show, why did I watch the whole hour instead? Deep down, I always knew Gilligan wouldn't make it off the island, that Kenny wouldn't stay dead forever and that Ralph Kramden wouldn't actually punch Alice in the face…and yet I insisted on watching every minute of every episode anyway. Idiot!  

What at first blush seems like an absurd admission on Sony's part--i.e., that any number of TV shows are so stuffed with meaningless subplots, cheap sight gags and gratuitous sex and violence that 90 percent of a given episode can be left for dead on the cutting-room floor--actually makes a lot of sense given the dramatic shifts in our collective viewing habits. We live in a highlight culture: NBC regularly assembles "Two-Minute Replays" of its most nuanced series, "The Office," for the show's official website. Any and all sporting events are routinely distilled into 30 seconds of frenzied "SportsCenter" clips and quips. Most movies are so neatly summarized by their trailers that viewing is almost redundant. Not even the classics are immune: Consider this extraordinary fan-produced YouTube clip that not only reduces the first six seasons of HBO's "The Sopranos" into roughly seven minutes, but does so with style, wit and insight, encapsulating every last one of the series' major characters, plotlines, themes and recurring motifs along the way.

Do I regret watching "The Office" or "The Sopranos" each week? No. But does anyone really need to sit down and relive full-length episodes of "Charlie's Angels," "T.J. Hooker" or "Starsky and Hutch," three shows slated for Sony's minisode platform? Of course not. Three to five minutes of Farrah Fawcett, William Shatner or Antonio "Huggy Bear" Fargas sounds about right, however. It's camp and it's nostalgia and it's dumb fun--bite-sized servings with no fat--and it seems like a perfect format for the mobile platform, where smaller is better anyway. Let's face it: This isn't about colorizing "Citizen Kane." It's about transforming dated, vapid entertainment and making it marketable for a new generation of viewers with neither the time nor the inclination to watch reruns on TV Land all night long. At least in this case, less is definitely more.  

Now if you'll excuse me, there's a "Three's Company" rerun starting in five minutes. It's the episode where there's a misunderstanding. - Jason