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The historical change in television duration can be coordinated by two shows. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Joss Whedon devised multiple-season trajectories of character and story development in advance: a seven year arc toward apocalypse beneath which individual episodes had, as well, relatively discrete narratives — as did each season. In The X-Files, individual episodes strobed between entirely discrete and playing a part in the "master narrative," which was not entirely planned in (...)