TV series - which is better: quitting after a couple of seasons, or going on for ages and ages?

Hit it or quit it

guess it kinda depends, I can name lots of series where the later seasons aren't quite as good but they're still watchable. I wouldn't wanna just take those episodes away

then again, there's nothing worse than giving up on a show when it really starts to suck. cuz that kinda ruins the illusion a bit. it makes me retroactively dislike the earlier episodes and not wanna watch them.

of course, if we're talking "better" as in what kind of show would you rather make, obviously you want the latter? I think of that kind of longevity as sort of a prize for being so good in the first place. 100 years from now when people are discussing The Simpsons one of the first things they'll say is "it lasted 50 years" or whatever. that alone is insanely impressive.

Quit in five seasons or less

In Hollywood, the money side of the business always gets paid first. The longer a series pulls in a big audience, the more leverage the talent side has for getting paid when their contracts are renegotiated and from residuals when the series enters syndication. My sympathies are generally on that side, so... the little dogs eat.

Not many maintain a high quality longer than five years, ime, even the ones I love. Five seasons seems to be a barrier of some sort. The Dick Van Dyke Show was great for 5 then folded. All in the Family was great for 5 but kept going. The original Hawaii Five-O was great for 6 imo, and above average for another 4 or 5, but that’s rare. Bewitched was great for 5, useless for 3 more seasons. I say quit at your peak and let your viewers get on with their lives.

Otm

I dont agree with either answer, because my take is the best approach is a cohesive, overall story told in however many seasons that takes, but write it all out first and stuck to the whole thing. If you're going to have a story for 3 seasons and then start making shit up as you go and writing yourself into a corner, stop it.

This of course doesnt apply for shows that have no long running story - but a couple seasons is far too low and its one of my pet hates of British comedy. 2 6-episode seasons and then done? Sure, if you have a good single story (Fleabag) but if its just weekly silliess (eg Blackadder or the Young Ones) let it keep going! At least for a few more years.

Imagine if the Simpsons had stopped in season 2 or 3?

Oh and I forgot to add, my standard-bearer example is Babylon 5.

To stop at season 4?

Five seasons of an episodic show or sitcom seems like a good delimiter. I can't think of many that went on much longer and managed to keep it tight.

yeah for anything with an actual story 5-6 is basically the limit. I stuck it to the end with House M.D. and it really seemed apparent after Season 3 that you still had the same talented writers but there was just nothing they could do to breathe new life into it. The story just wasn't meant to go on that long. It didn't make sense for anything else that interesting to happen to these characters. ditto for Arrested Development.

best case scenario is something like Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul which I think is about as good as it could be done but even still looking back at that show holy shit there were so many ridiculous parts that I had almost completely forgotten about. the train heist? the thing were they used a giant magnet to wipe out DEA hard drives? the laser tag/car wash stuff? everything with the underground lab and Werner Ziegler? when people say "it's so good it's basically a 50 hour movie" I know they mean it as a compliment but think about what a 50 hour movie would actually entail. I can't even remember some of the crazy shit that's literally happened in my own life.

Five seasons of an episodic show or sitcom seems like a good delimiter. I can't think of many that went on much longer and managed to keep it tight.

Simpsons & Seinfeld were incredible up to Season 8. S9 of both shows have some great episodes. I haven't kept up with South Park but they've ebbed and flowed a bunch, becoming relevant and critically acclaimed at several different points, in between which were some truly awful episodes. Most will probably disagree but I think the later seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm are full of great bits. King of the Hill got a lot odder over time but I think every season is basically as funny as every other season. ditto for It's Always Sunny

The Mary Tyler Moore Show is perhaps another exception, arguably no dip in quality for a 7 season run.

Wow, you didn’t think it lost something with the spin-offs?

I was thinking about Alan Partridge as a successful long-running tv character who I think has benefitted by being long-running, where the audience's knowledge of what came before makes the new stuff funnier, although that's not across a single tv show. In some long-running sitcoms you can sense that the creators are struggling to think of new things for the characters to do, but with the recent Alan Partridge stuff it never feels forced, just like Alan being put in a particular situation and responding the way that Alan naturally would, I don't know if this is because of skilled writing, or the character being well-developed or both.

Having long breaks between AP shows really helps, the only time it looked tired was parts of S2 of I'm Alan Partridge, and they gave him a long rest after that, it was a whole 13 years until Mid Morning Matters.

sorry, it was only 9 years. Still, that's a decent break.

Alf Garnett was another example of a character running for years across different programmes, I think there was something compelling about seeing him age and his circumstances become gradually more wretched, becoming an OAP and a widower etc, almost like a sitcom version of those 7 Up documentaries - the first movie from 1969 goes back in the other direction, showing him as a young man during the war - if sitcoms are inherently about a character trapped in a situation they can't get out of, doing the same things again and again, there's something about showing them over the course of their entire life that makes it more effective.

There's also the same thing with Partidge where the character is well-developed enough that you feel there's a 'correct' way they would react in any given situation, so it made sense to see Alf responding to new political and social developments. Alan Partridge hasn't really aged in the same way that Alf Garnett did, when Coogan started playing the character he was a young man playing a middle-aged man, and now I get the impression that Alan is meant to be about the age that Coogan really is, maybe a little older? But they fudge the timeline a bit I think, the current Alan doesn't seem 28 years older than the Alan from the first series of Knowing Me, Knowing You. With Alf Garnett they had his grandson who was born in the early 70s appear as a teenage punk rocker in 1981, so they also fudged a bit, but Alf was always from a specific generation, I would guess that original On The Hour Alan was born approx 1945, current Alan was born around 1960.

1945 is bit to early, maybe more like 1950-52

I was thinking after hearing that 12 episodes was a really good policy of sticking to a small number of episodes and quitting while one was aheraad that Fawlty Towers actually had a sizeable gap between the 2 series. Think I saw a documentary on the show that gave me that info.
Which maybe puts another slant on things.

Coogan had said in a DVD commentary that Partridge was to be about five years older than himself, but I don’t know if that pertains to the “On the Hour” or “The Day Today” era.

I think of Justified, which had a really rough fifth season, followed by a great sixth and final series.

Even short shows can go on too long: The Good Place is about 20 episodes too long.

Happy Endings had two great seasons, probably would've worn out its welcome for more

Shows that start off abrasive and become more heartwarming (e.g. a lot of sitcoms in the 2010s, especially Mike Schur ones) always seem to lose their way when the characters become too nice, or too annoyingly bland

Once characters change (i.e. become better people), the drama just becomes a series of fake obstacles designed to keep the show running (the original Gossip Girl comes to mind)

DS9 had a great long game: start abrasive, become more heartwarming, then dramatically raise the stakes in the later seasons

It's a good sign when shows don't really change from week-to-week and you never notice for years, or at all.

I think of Justified, which had a really rough fifth season, followed by a great sixth and final series.

The Shield kinda had the same problem. Great start, really good second season, but in 3, 4, 5 and 6 it started to get really ridiculous like that tweet re the former president: "Well, I'd sure like to see Vic Mackey wriggle his way out of this one!...Oh, OK, well, they'll get him for sure next week!" But then season 7 was amazing and the series as a whole has one of the best, most crushingly bleak endings ever.

How do people feel about the last season of the Wire?

Weird one - nothing really changes about the writing, acting and direction in the final season, but something's just missing. Bubbles has a good fifth season though.

It's a good sign when shows don't really change from week-to-week and you never notice for years, or at all.

last season of The Wire was OK. generally considered a little disappointing I think.
i remember it felt like kind of a weak wrapping up, and the McNulty storyline was just bad

Wow,, you didn’t think it lost something with the spin-offs?

(this re: Mary Tyler Moore) Well personally I don't often look at the last couple of seasons, so maybe it did, but it seems a lot of people rep for the final season and you often hear it said that the show stopped at just the right time. "No dip in quality" could be overstating it, I admit.

Another 2000s-2010s trend with mixed returns: killing off major characters. This didn't always work! E.g. I kept thinking, for the last seasons of The Good Wife, "this would've been better if Will was still in it".

nope can't get on board on this at all. i feel like that era of TV is done

maybe, but watching a lot of old shows on streaming, i never think "what's the season arc???"

Strange New Worlds has been v good at the soapy developments vs. single episode storytelling balance, can't think of many others like that

Going on for ages and ages, but you have to commit to the bit and lose all dignity. Introduce annoying child characters, have a season where they all travel Europe, bring back supposedly deceased characters.

“The gang goes to the Old West.”

It's a good sign when shows don't really change from week-to-week and you never notice for years, or at all.

― Chuck_Tatum, Wednesday, September 7, 2022 8:35 AM (twenty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

There may be something to this. One show I can think of off the top of my head that exceeded five seasons without ever wearing out its welcome is Rockford Files, and, aside from callbacks when guest stars like Rita Moreno or Isaac Hayes make a return appearance, you can for the most part jump in pretty much anywhere. They lost Gretchen Corbett and gained Tom Atkins over the course of the series but it's otherwise pretty immutable. And it probably could've just kept chugging along that same track at least until Noah Beery, Jr. died.

one season and done is best for shows with serialized writing. tell your story and then move on

good episodic tv can go on for as long as it wants but they should probably wrap it up before the original writing staff turns over completely

I don't think I've ever watched any TV drama that has more than three, possibly four, seasons. Comedies, yes.

7 seasons is best (if Melrose Place can be the ideal)

one of my pet hates of British comedy. 2 6-episode seasons and then done?

One of the only good things about British comedy tbh.

Things like Grey's Anatomy which have basically mutated into a soap opera are fine - the entire premise of the show allows for the cast to rotate indefinitely. But when you milk an idea beyond where it needs to go and what should be its natural end (why, yes, Community, I *am* looking at you), then yes, less is more.

The thing about British sitcoms is that they're nearly always written by one writer or a writing partnership - I can't think of any that aren't - whereas US sitcoms are written by teams of writers. The US model means you can keep going on and on and on.

Two seasons may not be enough for the story, but I am all in favor of shows coming to an end. So few of them seem to be able to stick the landing, though. "The Wire" was so-so, but "Game of Thrones" was pretty egregious. On the other hand, "Sopranos" and "Breaking Bad" had very satisfying conclusions.

I'm not of the camp that believes a tv show needs to have its story planned out from the beginning. There are just too many variables--actors leaving the show, network pressure, writers finding a new direction that feels more interesting. Just keep it good and I'll watch.

my pet hate about british comedy is when one of the comedians involved turns into a giant fucking transphobe and makes their whole show look like an unfortunate mistake in retrospect.

sorry, question. um, if you're going to go longer than five years you might as well mix up the story engine. send the entire cast to space. make them babies. i don't know, people hate it when they do that but it's very very rare you can take one situation and stretch it out longer than five seasons. i mean, the simpsons made barney an astronaut and that episode was fucking great.

They could have had the Cheers characters enter rehab

two seasons max

Just keep going until I lose interest, so I guess 3 episodes max for most things.

I don't know. Could you really do without Season 14 of Bonanza?

maybe one 2-2.5 hour episode once every four months, that is weirdly enough the right format for keeping my attention somehow, even when the episode quality is very uneven.

my pet hate about british comedy is when one of the comedians involved turns into a giant fucking transphobe and makes their whole show look like an unfortunate mistake in retrospect.

I could have done with more seasons of "Prime Suspect," although even the great Mirren seemed to become disengaged during the last season or two.

xp i assumed it was Glinner or Gervais but let's be real the world of comedy is not short of hateful bigoted morons

Gl*nn*r would be a pretty decent tragicomic sitcom character himself, a self-important twat who destroys his career and family and ends up in a dismal flat on his own, trying to make friends with nazi channers who have nothing but contempt for him, and all just because someone told him he was wrong on the internet once.

Surprised to vote keep going - for all the shows that I would have been happy to have them exit at 2-3 seasons there are more where 5-6 were still worth watching. I'm also prone to just bailing on series when quality declines - The Good Place was one season IMO, can't remember how deep I got past that but I lost interest.

Streaming also points to limitations on episode count and seasons not generally improving quality. The X-Files might have just started to suck earlier.

X-Files was like 4 seasons of a British show in before it started getting good

The quality was a bit uneven in the first season of the X-files, but there were some fantastic episodes right from the start

Gl*nn*r would be a pretty decent tragicomic sitcom character himself, a self-important twat who destroys his career and family and ends up in a dismal flat on his own, trying to make friends with nazi channers who have nothing but contempt for him, and all just because someone told him he was wrong on the internet once.

― link.exposing.politically (Camaraderie at Arms Length)

my second favorite episode of _black mirror_ ever, behind the lesbian one

xp i assumed it was Glinner or Gervais but let's be real the world of comedy is not short of hateful bigoted morons

― seo layer (Noodle Vague)

that's the thing, there are _so many_ british comedians it could be. in addition to the ones already mentioned, throw in john cleese.

in _completely unrelated_ news, i've noticed lately that the Three Transfem Careers (beautician, sex worker, IT) have lately expanded to include a fourth career - stand-up comedian. (every trans stand-up i've heard, by the way, is _really really funny_).

Well you need to know yourself and continually reexamine day to day events don't you or are it least made to do so by current societal circumstances. & are therefore likely to find where the humour lies. Like what the variables are and how absurd the other person is etc.
So may be along the lines of a thicker skin one needs to develop. Though being an actual stand up is a very vulnerable position until one gets good. It is a release too. Helps you feel seen possibly others too.

you = trans stand ups if that wasn't clear

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