Later, John Reith, wanting to use radio waves to "part the clouds of ignorance", came up with the idea of a classic serial, based on a "classical" literary text. In 1925 it broadcast A Christmas Carol, which has become a holiday favourite. In the 1920s the BBC pioneered dramatic readings of books. The British television serial is rooted in dramatic radio productions developed between the First and the Second World Wars.
In a miniseries on the other hand, there is a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end (as in a conventional play or novel), enabling characters to change, mature, or die as the serial proceeds. In Television: A History, Francis Wheen states:īoth soap operas and primetime series cannot afford to allow their leading characters to develop, since the shows are made with the intention of running indefinitely. In Halliwell's Television Companion, Leslie Halliwell and Philip Purser argue that miniseries tend to "appear in four to six episodes of various lengths", while Stuart Cunningham in Textual Innovation in the Australian Historical Mini-series defines a miniseries as, "a limited run program of more than two and less than the 13-part season or half season block associated with serial or series programming." Still, with the proliferation of the format in the 1980s and 90s, television films broadcast over even two or three nights were commonly referred to as miniseries. Several commentators have offered more precise definitions of the term. In Britain, miniseries are often still referred to as serials. Before the term was coined in the US in the early 1970s, the ongoing episodic form was always called a " serial", just as a novel appearing in episodes in successive editions of magazines or newspapers is called a serial. A miniseries is distinguished from an ongoing television series the latter does not usually have a predetermined number of episodes and may continue for several years.
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