Season 1s are great, setup, some payoff, a bit of lead into the overarching story. Then season 2 to X. The heroes win and then lose in the final episode, cliffhanger to next season. People get bored. Final season is announced and they wrap up the show.
It can certainly seem that way sometimes. Shows like The Handmaid’s Tale have been circling the drain of their own premise for a few years now. A big part of it, I think, is that they want to keep their main cast for as long as possible, which limits the options of what can happen.
Give me a mini-series, or even an anthology series, any day.
I love the limited scope of British TV series. They even managed to do only a few seasons of Law & Order, for crying out loud.
It’s not a creative or artistic choice; British channels simply have minuscule budgets compared to their American counterparts.
Sherlock proves it. It was given too much budget and time and what we got was overproduced bullshit.
Shows like The Handmaid’s Tale have been circling the drain of their own premise for a few years now.
As far as I’m concerned, that show ended when the first season did (which corresponded with the ending of the book).
When I heard a season 2 was happening, I thought it might be based around the book’s epilogue. Instead, it’s the same story dragged out long past where it was supposed to end.
I still don’t get why so many were relating handmaids tale to real life. Just as annoying as those who think everything is 1984. Its a YA series, and not a particularly great one at that.
Not sure about the show, but Margaret Atwood has been at pains to point out that pretty much everything in her books has a real life precedent (albeit in different places at different times).
Do you really not see the parallels to real life of a religiously-ruled country who has enshrined in law ways to take control of fertile women’s reproductive rights? Really?
The US is becoming more and more Giléad with every passing day.
I don’t see anyone taking away rights of women, and America is secular.
You can draw parallels between anything, thats not really pertinent.
I think the shows with long term success either have multiple independent or semi-independent story arcs or they have a well defined story arc that lasts for the entire run of the show. The characters grow and change as the show progresses which keeps the audience interested.
Where they run into trouble is when the constraints built into the structure of the show limit the number of possible stories, but success leads to them trying to keep the show running after all possibilities have been used. At that point, the show becomes repetitive and boring.
Writing this, I’m reminded of the show, Scrubs.
Scrubs was an excellent show for the entirety of it’s 8 season run. The concept allowed for a story arc that lasted the whole run, specifically the story of JD and his friends learning and developing as doctors from first year residents to attendings. There is a natural progression during that process that allows for individual growth of the characters and accommodates natural shifts in storylines to allow for new topics for episodes. In addition there are countless opportunities for different individual smaller story arcs to make each episode able to stand alone as it’s own tale.
Because there was a built-in plan creating a structure for the life of the show, they were able to maintain quality and audience interest for all 8 seasons.
If the producers had foolishly tried to squeeze more seasons out of the show after they had exhausted the original concept, they would have inevitably failed. The result would have been a weak and pathetic shadow of the previous seasons and would have rapidly lost the patience of the audience.
Eh, Scrubs suffered a lot from trying to find ways of keeping the characters somewhat together and on the hospital. Also, even if not relevant to the topic, flanderization utterly fucked Scrubs from season 5ish onwards.
Flanderization? And in what way regarding Scrubs? Genuinely intrigued by your point.
I’ll leave you with two links:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Flanderization
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Flanderization/LiveActionTV (search for Scrubs there)
Careful, don’t get sucked into the TVTropes website, it’s a black hole.
Hot take: Scrubs Season 8 was weak. Dr. Cox as chief was lame, the new interns were lame, the Janitor’s wedding was lame.
Season 9 was actually a bit of a dead cat bounce.
Once they realize they have a potential cash cow on their hands they do whatever they can to ensure that they can milk it as long as possible. S1 has no gaurentee of being a hit when its made so show producers put their all into crafting an enjoyable show. Once it becomes purely about extending its life as much as possible. Usually turning the story to crap in the process. I call this 'the Dexter effect"
You see it pretty clearly with Stranger Things. In S1 each character has a specific purpose or role they fill in the story to back up the themes the show wants to explore, and they excel at that role. S1 is great, and they weren’t expecting to get an S2. But they did.
Now those same characters, with their specific roles? Well now they need to change (because you’re telling a different story), and they aren’t a super great fit for the new roles they have to play. It still kinda works, but the show’s themes become muddled and you’re banking a lot on the audience’s love of the characters now. Still a success.
Now we get to S3 and we have to change the characters’ roles even more! Entire storylines from S2 have now gone to waste, and many characters are far from their initial roles and don’t feel as interesting or compelling as they used to be - because they were never meant to get this far. They’re cogs jammed into new and unfamiliar spaces to try and get this machine to keep running. And it lurches and jerks its way forward, but it’s a far cry from the efficient, effective show it was in S1.
Stranger Things doubly suffers because it’s horror. In the first season, neither the characters or the audience know what’s going on. The monsters are new and scary. The concepts are new and scary. The first season is incredible because it’s all unknown, and because there’s an almost cosmic horror quality to it.
However, by the end of the first season, both the characters and audience are experienced. The monster has been revealed and killed and, while it was tense and scary, the characters and audience know what to expect next time. The upside-down has been revealed and, while there’s a lot about the idea left to explore, there’s and understanding of what it is, how it works to some degree, how it’s linked to the real world, etc. Everyone has knowledge and experience. And with knowledge and experience, the horror dissipates.
So where do they go from there? Well all they can do is to make bigger, scarier concepts or to throw more of the same at the characters. More of the same can make for good action - see Aliens - but the horror element just doesn’t work any more, and it loses a sense of intimacy that a single monster brings. So the only way to try to maintain that feeling of horror is to go bigger and scarier.
Of course, the issue of intimacy remains. How do you have a huge, scary monster - far bigger and scarier than the first one - while still keeping it feeling both personal and intimate to our characters and having it feel “beatable”? And, well, you can see how Stranger Things struggled with that in season 2.
S4 was less of a mess than S3, and the worst parts of S4 were the cleanup from S3 — namely, the Hopper/Russia plot.
S4 could have leaned much more into the “Satanic Panic” theme. Dig into the “spiritual warfare” literature of the period — Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness (1986) or the Mike Warnke “Satan Seller” scandal (exposed in 1985).
I like the idea that a lot of series are repeating Act II over and over. I had never thought of it that way, but it makes a lot of sense.
Showrunnners are never absolutely sure how many more seasons they’ll get. If a show is popular, they could end up having to continue it after a conclusion. Or the show could be popular but corporate priority could be elsewhere, and they’ll be forced to wrap up promising storylines quickly. Even for shows that announce they have plans for a beginning, middle and end, it’s possible that they’ll be cancelled before end planned ending, or else have to stretch after the ending has been reached. Safer is to try to just coast along, being non-committal about major plot elements, until something happens that pushes the show to resolve things.
