Partly Cloudy, 64°
Praised for its commitment to a complex, serialized narrative, television drama “Promontory Point” features a “previously on” segment that covers almost all of recorded human history. The show, which follows the impact of a mine closing in a close-knit Utah town, spends nearly 40 of its weekly 44-minute run time glossing over major developments since human beings started practicing agriculture nearly 10,000 years ago.
“Our story changes a lot week to week, so we want to make sure viewers can keep up,” said Executive Producer Mike Spencer, acknowledging that the systematic recap of thousands of years may not be for everyone. “It’s important to us that people are reminded of the show’s context: Viewers are going to react differently to Sheriff Daniels drawing his gun on little Jimmy Fisher if they know what a gun is, and that gunpowder was first invented in the 9th century by the Tang dynasty. We don’t want anyone to be lost."
Before the episode starts, viewers are reminded of the development of Clovis hunting technology, the birth of modern religions, the black plague and the rise of the nation state, all moments in history that Spencer considers vital to the show’s world-building efforts. “We’re trying to tell a complex story,” added Spencer. “In the changing television landscape, that means we can’t let anything fall through the cracks. Earlier this season we forgot to tell people about when spoons were first used and you should’ve seen what people were saying on Twitter.”
Each episode is introduced by a tightly-edited overview of the migration of humans across the continents, featuring primary texts and interviews with historical analysts, as well as a brief thirty-second recap of the previous week’s episode. Spencer thinks that both of these are important to the development of an engaging plotline which is shunted to the final few minutes of the time slot and interrupted frequently with advertisements.
“It seems like every episode I’m reminded of something I once knew about 13th century France that I didn’t quite remember,” said longtime viewer Malcolm Hendricks, who keeps a notebook where he charts characters’ developing relationships, themes the show explores, and the growth and fall of industry in the Western world. “It’s awesome. I can’t imagine trying to watch this show without being told first what kind of knowledge might’ve been lost when the library of Alexandria burned down and how it might’ve changed the world and the show if it hadn’t. It’s one of those things that proves the showrunners really respect their audience."
Hendricks added that he does get kind of sad each week when they play the entirety of the Zapruder film in the introduction, but admits that the repeated re-showing of the video of Kennedy’s assassination does help him put Sheriff Daniels and Marge Halliday’s on-again, off-again relationship into perspective.
At press time, the show’s intro segment was just getting into the personalized part where it talks about each viewer’s birth and personal journey to watching this very episode.
