'Legion' shows us what television has to do to become truly novelistic

Throughout its first season, I've been doling out episodes of "Legion" to myself like bonbons, unwilling to gobble them down too quickly and be left with the empty box and the long wait until next year.

Noah Hawley's striking Marvel Comics adaptation has sometimes felt precision-engineered to be something I would like. "Legion," which ends its first season on FX Wednesday night, is an ambitious expansion of the superhero genre, full of mid-century modern furniture and clothes, lush green landscapes and the occasional riff on silent movies.

It's brilliantly and inventively cast with "Parks and Recreation" veteran Aubrey Plaza as a horror villain, "Downton Abbey" star Dan Stevens stretching his image as a schizophrenic psychic, "Fargo's" Jean Smart as superhero team leader Dr. Melanie Bird and "Flight of the Conchords'" Jemaine Clement as her astral plane-dwelling husband, Hamish Linklater as a gay superhero-hunter and Bill Irwin and Amber Midthunder as two radically different people inhabiting the same body.

Even in shows I love, though, there are often moments or even whole episodes that drag. It's the highest compliment I can give "Legion" that the show is one of the most propulsive viewing experiences I've had in ages. I was regularly boggled when the end credits came up on episodes, not because they cut off abruptly but because I was convinced only 15 or 20 minutes could have elapsed.

After this happened to me a few times in a row, I tried to figure out what about "Legion" made me feel this way; after all, the episodes vary widely in setting, tone and design. Ultimately, I decided it's because "Legion" feels like something that's still somewhat rare in television: a story that fits exactly into the number of episodes it occupies.

During the Golden Age of Television, when critics or fans wanted to indicate that a television show was doing work that surpassed the expectations normally assigned to the medium, it became common to compare a series to a novel. David Simon's "The Wire" provoked hot debates about whether it was reasonable to describe the show as Dickensian. David Milch's "Deadwood," a sweeping chronicle of the rise of civilization in the American West, was another show that frequently earned the same sort of praise.

Insisting that television can meet the same high standards of craft and intellect as literature is an important insight. Not only did this conversation make it possible for audiences to recognize what artists like Simon, Milch, David Chase and Lena Dunham were doing, the possibility that television could clear a higher bar than the cultural establishment previously recognized also sharpened the criticism aimed at the medium. Taking a shot at the television pantheon now requires not just great characters, plotting and dialogue, but outstanding cinematography, big ideas and the ability to craft both great episodes and a season-long arc.

It's in those latter two categories where television's similarity to the novel breaks down, or at least, where television hasn't become as much like the novel as boosters of the medium might claim. Part of what defines a novel is its flexibility: its chapters and the book as a whole can be as long or as short as the story requires. Jenny Offill's slim "Dept. of Speculation" is told in small collections of sentences spread over 192 pages, and it's as well-calibrated to the narrative Offill has chosen as the 354 pages of "Song of Solomon" are to Toni Morrison's tightly plotted epic or the 1,048 pages of "Gone With The Wind" are to Margaret Mitchell's sprawling one.

The area where television's seen the most variation is in episode length. Premium cable networks like HBO and Showtime have always had more freedom for episodes to run close to a full hour for drama or a full half-hour for comedies, because they rely on subscriptions for revenue rather than advertising, and as a result didn't have to make room in episodes for commercial breaks.

Streaming outlets like Netflix and Amazon had even more freedom not to fit episodes into neat hour or half-hour blocks because they weren't actually scheduling anything: viewers were coming to shows directly, rather than tuning in to them at a specific time, and no one else was at risk of being upset if an episode of another show ran long, delaying the program they'd tuned in to watch. FX, which does have commercials and airs traditional programming blocks, has been flexible enough to allow shows like "Louie," which is nominally a sitcom, and the drama "Sons of Anarchy," to run anywhere from 19 to 41 minutes in the former case, and 39 to 90 minutes in the latter.

But in general, even the most ambitious shows on American television outlets have tended to stick to fairly standard season lengths. (The exception is the final season of ambitious dramas, which networks have tended to shoot as a whole, then air as two shorter seasons in an attempt to maximize audience excitement.)

"The Wire" ran between 10 and 13 episodes each season; the first five seasons of "The Sopranos" were each 13 episodes long while the extended final season was split into 12- and nine-episode runs; "Mad Men" had six 13-episode seasons and a 14-episode final season split between two seven-episode runs; "The Americans" has, so far, always aired 13-episode seasons; "Breaking Bad" started with a seven-episode first season, followed by three 13-episode seasons, and concluding with a 16-episode fifth season split into two parts; and "Girls," with the exception of a 12-episode third season, has always run for 10 episodes each year.

Sometimes, having a standard season length works beautifully. Artistic freedom can also lead to artistic indulgence, and one of the exciting things about television's constraints is that it encourages artists to do great work within them. Commercial breaks can force writers to produce more disciplined scenes, just as a 22-episode network run can encourage shows to mix compelling procedural elements with more emotionally complex character arcs. Different types of television shows deserve different episode orders and different approaches.

But in other cases, as has often been true for Netflix's Marvel shows, a proscribed season length can prevent an ambitious showrunner from telling a tightly plotted, genuinely novelistic story without jumbling it up with a whole lot of filler. Cable and streaming shows have been able to do things that network series can't because of the recognition that a lot of stories are 13-episode stories or 10-episode stories rather than 22-episode stories. Some of these series might be even stronger for the recognition that some stories are five-episode stories, others are 17-episode stories, and the story a show in a given season is telling might require wildly variable episode orders from year to year.

Telling a show with the kind of economy "Legion" has shown in its first season has its costs, of course. A number of the show's supporting characters, particularly David's love interest, Syd Barrett (Rachel Keller), remain underdeveloped. In a more capacious show, "Legion" might have devoted space to shading in Syd, or explaining the organizations alternately pursuing and protecting David more fully. But the show's been renewed for a second season, and after a year spent reckoning with the nature of David's powers, it has the opportunity to do something extremely different the next time around.

Let's hope that FX, which has allowed so many other creators so much leeway in the past, gives Hawley and his colleagues as many, or as few, episodes they need to tell whatever story they choose next.