TV shows that weren't cancelled early enough ?
The X-Files - should have been wrapped up in five seasons
Buffy TVS - should have called it quits after season five
The Wheel of Time - should have been cancelled after the first episode
I agree with you on the X-Files - they dawdled on the main plot, dragging their feet. Could've wrapped that up quicker.
That '70s Show - kill it after Eric and Donna get back together. It spiralled fast after that.
Friends - I'm a huge fan of this show, but even a huge fan like me knows that if you've got Rachel dating Joey, you're out of plotlines.
Californication - just did a rant on this show's board. Season four was the obvious end. The rest is fun, but there's a huge quality drop.
Downton Abbey - don't know exactly when, but this one feels very "autopilot" after awhile.
Misfits - end of season three wraps up a LOT of plotlines and S4 sucks. S5 is better than S4, but that's not praise.
Arrested Development - TV seasons are good, I couldn't make it through one episode of the Netflix seasons.
I'm sure there are more, but I can't think of them right now.
Here's a counter-list: I don't think these shows ever jumped the shark or wore out their welcome:
Mad Men
Breaking Bad
Seinfeld
Cowboy Bebop (the cartoon - haven't seen the live action one)
Shows like Californication and Weeds really need to have a plan rather than try and drag it out indefinitely. They just end up getting dumber and dumber.
sharePre-streaming, I think that's basically summing up 99% of US TV series. You don't see it as much with the more compact British shows, for instance. BBC employs one or two writers with a vision and an actual idea of what they want to do and how many plots they've got; the series is 6 episodes long.
Now, of course, shows on streaming services are more like that: tighter and more focused. You can't ramble your way through eight seasons of "There are sorta aliens and a conspiracy!" on the X-Files.
I never got into Weeds. I watched a couple episodes, and I dunno why, but I never got hooked.
I was going to reference Brit TV, they do run a certain story and then end the show. It could be only 1 or 2 seasons with not a great many eps.
I always hated filler eps with TV shows where they have 20 plus eps per season and some eps just have nothing to do with the story arc.
I liked Weeds a lot until the last season where they are in Europe. Something didn't feel the same. Maybe I just had enough of it.
We see less filler these days because the expectation is that everybody is binge-watching, so they know they can't get away with it. If it's been months since a plotline has been seen by a fan, that fan won't care if there's some toe-dragging.
The internet might also be a factor. Fans and online communities break stuff down rapidly, almost as soon as it's on the air, so more focus is needed.
Also, because we can pick what we want now (any show, any time) nobody's going, "What's on at 7:30 on a Thursday?" they're going, "What do I want to watch?" This made show producers shift focus from generic stuff that most people will mostly like (sitcoms, procedurals) and into more niche-market stuff.
The rise of geek culture has brought about a massive influx of shows that are sci-fi, fantasy, supernatural, quirky, or magic-real.
On the fringes are the international shows. If you were a kid in the '90s and you thought, "I wonder what kind of kids shows they watch in Egypt?" you could speculate and maybe get lucky meeting an immigrant and asking them. But now, you can just watch it (probably; I don't really care myself).
All this leads to shorter, more focused, niche-market, genre stuff coming on-air. Can you picture a show like Russian Doll making it to the airwaves if it was NBC, ABC, and CBS? (No spoilers, please - I've only watched season one!) That's a great show, but it's too focused to hit mass appeal.
What I'm saying is that I think we'll see fewer and fewer shows surviving past their "natural end points". More likely we'll see the FOX TV syndrome take over. Firefly and Arrested Development get the axe because they're too expensive to keep going. Netflix has a reputation for killing comedies after three seasons, leaving a lot of Netflix original series (comedy) fans annoyed.
Well, I've been gassing on longer than I intended, so... peace.
Yes I agree. It's no longer about watching once a week it needs to be compelling and relatively fast moving to enable the person to want to binge watch it. I think TV has become more disposable too, more TV shows to choose from, more genre's. People can be fussier than they used to be. So the standard has to be better.
I would love to see the return of the mini series. A tightly woven story over a few eps. You know going in it will only last for the set amount of eps.
One of the most interesting things about entertainment diffusion - this thing on the internet where we watch and listen to anything, any time, is that there aren't any "Everybody's watching this" shows anymore.
The best example comes from music. Can you picture The Beatles happening again? I can't, and it's because nobody *must* tune in to the Ed Sullivan Show to see what the heck all the screaming is about.
The last show I can remember "everybody" watching was Squid Game, and while it got huge for awhile, it's not like it re-directed the cultural landscape.
I'd like to see more mini-series, too. I've got a lot of fond memories of some great TV mini-series, like Ivanhoe and Merlin.
I think there was still “It” bands up till the 90’s, there was the Spice Girls who I didn’t like but they were huge.
Once streaming and MP3’s etc got going you no longer had people following the same things. Some of the most common downloads are classic rock so that tells me a lot of people aren’t big on modern music.
One my gripes with tv shows is they are run into the ground so you get 2-3 decent seasons and then it gets stupid. So mini series to me is the answer. You could even create a mini series -series around the same character. Where each series focuses on a particular adventure etc
You're right. Sorry, I didn't mean to say The Beatles were the last of the mega-phenomena. Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead were both pretty universally-watched. But I'm not sure how many more of those there will be, or maybe it'll just be that those pan-cultural events will happen less frequently.
The MCU is one that's left over, still going, but it began before streaming took off in a big way.
I think we're saying the same thing. Your point about classic rock being a big download is part of what I'm talking about: modern bands aren't taking off the same way classic rock did.
Could some of this be related to internet "criticism"? There are SO MANY people eager to tear something apart as soon as it gets huge.
Maybe BTS? BTS is pretty huge. I'm pretty sure I've got that name right - the Korean pop group.
Yes, TV shows get burned out. It's such a common occurrence that we invented Jump the Shark for it.
It's cool, we are saying the same thing, it just made me start thinking of big acts after the original rock n roll era. Rock music also splintered into different genres after the 60's too, so you had rock, hard rock, metal and then punk and later on grunge. It all starts to water down the market as well.
I noticed older music is still used a lot in films and TV even if it is set in our current time. I think there is more personality in it. Now a lot of stuff sounds the same, even in the 80's you had all the Hair metal bands which people poke fun at but most of them sounded quite different from each other.
I think there is a fun element that has been lost in general with the current TV/Movie and music. That also doesn't help.
I think online forums and people ripping things apart doesn't help as well as the die hard fans who support something even though it's crap.
I know Korean pop is big but I don't follow it so can't comment. Yes, there are some key elements of JTS, adding a baby or young kid, a wedding etc or having a character water ski over a shark!
"Rock" is definitely a multi-genre genre, and yeah, big splintering after the '60s. But even before that, I think of '50s rock as *very* different from '60s rock. Within the '60s, there were lots of rock groups with different sounds, too. Compare the Beatles to the Animals, for instance.
Older music in film and TV is a point of minor curiosity for me. Have you ever noticed how many "cool" characters or characters we're supposed to think of as "cool" have tastes in music that include 1940s jazz or blues from the '30s? If not one of those two genres, they're certainly into '60s or '70s rock 'n' roll. I don't object - I love all that music, so when I hear it in movies I love it - but I find myself wondering if this is a hallmark of "cool" or just what the filmmakers like?
To me, I think a lot of the biggest artists are more generic. I think to appeal to enough people to sell out a stadium, an act has to be flashy and tolerably good for most people. But that means that they can't be great for a few people. If you go hunting around a bit, there are still present-day artists who make the good stuff. If you dig the old rock, blues stuff, I recommend to you Larkin Poe. They've got blues-rock on tap.
Can you expand on the lost fun element?
It's internet polarization: die hard fans and haters doubling down, going for hot takes, trying to be "f1rst!", looking for re-tweets... It also means that casual viewers watch a film and hear about so many flaws so quickly that the movie doesn't have time to be loved before it's brutalized. Older movies have tonnes of flaws - most forgiven because we got to "know" them before somebody pointed out the plot holes (which is overused anyway). That's if we even make it to the movie before hating it. I didn't watch it, but how could anybody have gone to see the 2016 Ghostbusters with an open mind after all the quacking about that movie, for and against?
I'm not a Korean pop fan, either, but they are pretty internationally huge. Maybe they're this generation's "Beatlemania" and maybe I'm just not part of it?