TV Show Mythology

As we’ve approached tonight’s final-season premiere of Lost, I’ve been thinking about the use of the word mythology to refer to the body of knowledge that is revealed over the course of many episodes for a TV show that has long-running story arcs. (I mentioned wanting to look into it a couple of posts back.) Not only has mythology developed a specialized meaning for weird TV shows, but that meaning is now spinning off its own idioms. Fans talk about “mythology episodes” of Lost, Fringe, and Alias (and their opposite, the “stand-alone episodes”). In last week’s issue of Entertainment Weekly, resident Lost analyst Jeff Jensen talks about showrunners Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof realizing that a main character needed to “download a huge piece of our mythological puzzle” as they wrote an episode, and in a sidebar, the collocation of mythology and download appears again.

But where and when did our language acquire the specialized meaning of mythology that gave rise to terms like downloading mythology and mythology episode?

I first became aware of this meaning for mythology in reading articles in sources like EW about The X-Files in the 1990s, and since that time, the term has continued to be used primarily in discussions of … well, let me quote from Glen here. I asked him his thoughts on the term, from the perspective of someone in the business, and he had some good stuff. He wrote:

I think it’s still restricted mainly to shows with a fantastical element (that is, science fiction or fantasy)* in the long-term story arc. Grey’s Anatomy and The Sopranos may have long-term story arcs, but I doubt they get many people referring to their “mythology.”

Glen also had, I think, a better, more precise definition of this kind of mythology than mine. In his estimation,

“mythology” is being used to mean what we usually call “canon” — that is, facts and history that are established in text on the show, hence constituting a constraint on future storytelling.

Put that way, the definition isn’t so removed from one of the extended uses noted in the OED

c. In extended use: the received wisdom concerning a particular subject; the collective or personal ideology or set of beliefs which underpins or informs a particular point of view.

By this point, though, we’ve shifted far enough semantically from the original (or at least, earlier) meaning of mythology that it could equally well describe any show with this kind of “facts and history”, and it looks like it may be starting to. I was able to find a few hits for “Seinfeld mythology” and “Simpsons mythology” (although The Simpsons so self-consciously ignores previous episodes that using mythology when talking about it is almost a joke). And in fact, Glen found a handful for “{Sopranos, Nip/Tuck, Law & Order} mythology”. However, he found zero hits for “Grey’s Anatomy” mythology”, and I found zero for “Days of Our Lives mythology”.

Soap operas have the longest-running TV story arcs of all, so why wouldn’t mythology have developed its specialized meaning for them? One probable reason is that mythology started out with such a strong connnection to stories of the supernatural and fantastic that more-or-less realistic shows like soap operas weren’t fertile ground for such a meaning to develop. Glen has another plausible reason:

I also have a sense that “mythology” is used most often for shows that also have stand-alone episodes. That’s because fans (and creators!) need a means of referring to the special subset of episodes that deal directly with the long-term arc. This hypothesis certainly fits The X-Files and Fringe (and yes, we do refer to “mythology episodes” around the Fringe writers’ office). Lost may be an exception to this rule, inasmuch as almost every episode relates to the mythology.

In searching the Google Groups database among the alt.tv.* newsgroups, it does seem to have begun when I started noticing it, with The X-Files, in 1997 or 1998. But suspect I may not be mining this database in a way that will produce all the relevant texts, so I’m interested in your antedatings, if you have them. Commenter Stan Carey said he seemed to recall talking about Twin Peaks in terms of mythology (or maybe even “mythos”) in the early 1990s. On the other hand, posts like this post from “Devious Weasel” on alt.tv.x-files.analysis seems to point more toward a mid-90s origin:

Just dug out an old issue of Cinescape from the end of the third season [NW: this would be 1996] where [Chris Carter] is referring to the fact that [Gillian Anderson]’s pregnancy forced 1013 to develop the mythology a little faster in the second season than they would have liked. For some reason I don’t think this is the earliest reference I’ve seen to the term, but it is the earliest I have available to me.

What are some other (scripted) shows you’d describe as having a mythology? What shows would you say don’t have one?

*Glen adds: “Interesting fact: in the industry, people commonly use the word ‘genre’ as an adjective that refers specifically to sci-fi, fantasy, and other ‘weird’ genres. Lost and Fringe are genre; Law & Order is not genre, even though you might think that ‘cop show’ is a genre.”