Why a miniseries lets its characters change, and a soap opera cannot
In 1977, 130 million Americans watched the finale of Roots, a 71 percent share of the audience and at the time the highest-rated programme ever broadcast. Its secret was partly scheduling: twelve hours split over eight consecutive nights. That was the miniseries at its peak, a story built to end.
A miniseries tells one story across a fixed number of episodes, usually somewhere between two and twelve. The historian Francis Wheen pointed out what that finish line allows. Soaps and ongoing prime-time shows cannot let their leads develop much, because they are meant to run forever; a miniseries has a beginning, middle and end like a novel, so characters can grow, change or die.
Britain got there first, by way of radio. In the 1920s the BBC pioneered dramatised book readings, and a 1939 radio version of The Prisoner of Zenda, which merged characters and simplified the plot, became the model for later serials. After the war BBC Television adapted Trollope's The Warden in six episodes in 1951, and in 1953 aired The Quatermass Experiment, the first serial written specifically for television. The Forsyte Saga, 26 episodes in 1967, was shown across the world and became the first BBC series sold to the Soviet Union.
In the United States the word miniseries first appeared in print in 1963, describing a five-week run of a music show, and The Blue Knight in 1973 is sometimes credited as the first American example. Rich Man, Poor Man in 1976 launched a golden decade of star-studded book adaptations. Terminology kept shifting: the Emmys called the category limited series in 1974, miniseries from 1986, and limited series again from 2015. British viewers still often say serial.
Other countries built their own traditions. Japan's television drama began with a 25-episode home drama in 1953. The Soviet Union, short of content as channels multiplied in the 1960s, produced multi-episode television films, starting with the wartime drama We Call Fire on Ourselves in 1965 and including Seventeen Moments of Spring in 1973.
Source: Miniseries
