My personal sign is when you start seeing awkward collaborations start cropping up. One time when I was thrifting, I picked up a graphic novel that had the Justice League, team with the Power Rangers of all things. I glimpsed into what the plot was about out of morbid curiosity and it was just a plain generic time and dimension thing.
Nothing ever connected between the teams at all. DC Comics, while fledgling at times with how they go about their series and movies, still have far more relevance than Power Rangers do. I think the Power Rangers are just grasping at straws to keep being relevant when people have largely moved on from them.
Sometimes you realize that the main story arc keeps finding new reasons to continue, after lots of surprise twists and turns that each give another episode. Like they finally find their killer, after a whole bunch of running around, escapes, shoot-outs, stunts, explosions, etc. but it turns out he’s been working for someone else all along, and now we have to find the Boss. It will never end, and all the plot manipulation doesn’t serve a better story, it just keeps us watching so we can consume advertising.
My son is always complaining that a lot of these series probably started out as a movie, but Netflix, et al, want constant “engagement,” so if you want Netflix to stream your content, you better stretch it into 10 episodes, with a cliffhanger. Quality isn’t important, just engagement, so a good movie concept gets beaten to death as a series.
That’s why a lot of British shows are so good. They’ll say right up front that this entire series is only going to be one season of 3-6 episodes, and that’s it. They take as much time as they need to tell the story, then quit. They don’t just keep screenplay masturbating.
Absolutely an issue for American shows. So many are built around a three season arc just trying to get on the air. Then if they make it big, they panic and have no idea what the fuck to do with season 4.
So many shows fail in season 4.
Probably the worst example is Game of Thrones. They started the show with at least the last third of it unfinished, and once that TV money started rolling in, GRRM basically lost his motivation to write.
When it’s based on a book/series and outruns the source material
Walking back character development/growth.
Joss Whedon is the executive producer.
When the main character(s) have a baby. When that happens it’s time to go.
They introduce a trendy sexual identity.
Shoehorning in a new main character
Shoehorning in a new main character to try to increase appeal
Shoehorning in a new main character to try to increase appeal to sell more merchandise
Shoehorning in a new main character to try to increase appeal to sell more merchandise because the higher ups made a decision to drastically change the original main character in an obvious cash grab
I’m looking at you, ya pop tart colored unicorn
When the potential long-term impact of the events keeps increasing, but the actual long-term impact keeps decreasing.
Sounds like life right now
Dude, put up a spoiler alert!
I’m afraid you’ve jumped the shark
I did.
Identical twins…trapped in the basement…winning the lottery…tonight, on a very special…cousin oliver
It’s less of an issue in comedies, but main characters becoming Flanderised in drama series is where it becomes obvious they’ve run out of ideas.
For example, at the beginning of Stranger Things, Hopper had basically given up on life, and over the course of the first two seasons he finds purpose again through helping find Will, and later, raising Eleven as a surrogate daughter… And then in season 3 he becomes ANGERY MAN WHO FIGHTS PEOPLE - and that’s about it.
It runs in parallel with a show getting too many characters to handle. It accelerates the Flanderization of characters who don’t have a lot to do. Stranger Things had that problem as well, with a far too bloated main cast by the end.
For me, Will: It’s when… Dustin: The characters in every scene… Max: Talk like… Steve: This.
There are too many characters, and the only way your audience can remember that half of them still exist is… Nancy: For them to start sharing lines.
Oh, yeah, the detectives are all gathered with the Captain, briefing him on what they’ve discovered, and each actor has a line that offers a fact in the case, and they go around the group, and each one tosses in their fact like it was rehearsed, which it was.
In reality, they’d all pool their info, and the main guy would brief the boss, while the others watched. Or maybe they’d brief the boss in private, while everybody else did their jobs, like a real workplace.
But I’ve never been in a meeting where everyone chimed in one line at a time, without interrupting, arguing, stammering, shuffling through pages, etc.
In real life, it would go:
Nancy: Of course! We need to-
Nancy and Steve: dfoi intd foruotm thhoe…
*awkward pause
Nancy and Steve: Go ahea-
*another awkward pause
Nancy and Steve: No, you go ahe-
I’ve seen this in video games. The Trails series builds itself on slowly assembling these big Avengers teams of heroes - but each dynamic only works when there’s like 2-4 of them.
Get as far as Sky the 3rd, and you get one lead saying “It looks like this next dimension will be tougher than ever” and then some 13-odd people giving generic barks of affirmation in turn.
When they have a contained shark that the main character decides to jump to keep establishing his cool.
Seriously though, when threat of the week escalates to such a degree that it becomes a potential universe calamity, it’s hard to be worried about Murderer McGee stabbing 13 people to death.
Loose ends start accumulating and there comes a point where you realize there’s no way they could possibly be resolved coherently in the time the series has left. I was feeling this in a big way during seasons 6 and 7 of Game of Thrones.
That pretty much sums up Lost for me. I probably watched longer than I needed to land on that conclusion, but I wanted to quit on a good point to leave the series behind.
I don’t remember exactly when I quit watching, but they managed to contact a ship and they were about to be rescued. My headcanon is that they made it home to live miserably ever after. I’ve since learned that the show got even worse.
I was a ready for Lost, because I remember X-Files, which was the granddaddy of bullshit plots. We all thought there was something going on with the cigarette smoking man, the dark room full of weird old men, the tar, etc. and then they admitted that they had no plan, no plot, they were just making it up as they went, none of it made any sense, and they had no idea where this was all leading. That was the end of X-Files for me, and everybody else.
So when Lost started, I got the vibe that this might be like X-Files, and I think it was, to an extent. I think they had a general idea, but they definitely hadn’t written the ending first, and made their way toward it. I figured out that they were flailing somewhere around the middle of the 3rd season and bailed. When it ended, and everybody was irritated, I knew I’d made the right choice to bounce.
I remember watching early Lost promo videos where a very smug JJ Abrams swore blind there was a fully logical explanation for everything happening. And then a polar bear showed up. And I realised that whatever definition of “fully logical explanation” he was using probably didn’t align with my own definitions of those words lol. That show was pure hype with talented actors.
What pissed me off the most about Lost is that, very early on, I pegged onto the fact that they were naming a lot of characters after prominent social philosophers; all of whom wrote about things like inequality, the social contract, human nature, etc…
- John Locke (John Locke, Liberty and the social contract)
- Desmond Hume (David Hume, treatise of human nature)
- Danielle Rousseau (Jean-Jacque Rousseau, discourse on inequality and the social contract)
- Boone Carlyle (Thomas Carlyle, the importance of belief)
- Juliette Burke (Edmund Burke, Philosophy of Conservatism)
- Mikhail Bakunin (Mikhail Bakunin, Russian Anarchist)
And a few others. As they introduce these characters, they set them up in opposition to each other and I’m thinking "okay…this means something. They’re trying to say something about society in a Lord of the Flies type of way.
I remember myself and a friend of mine discussing the show endlessly after each episode wondering what it all meant in that context. And then…nope…they were all just dead all this time. It meant…precisely…jack…shit.
And it couldn’t have been an accident that they so many promininent social philosophers showed up. They CHOSE to name those characters that…for no other reason than a fuck-you-red-herring.
I can’t even begin to describe how much that angered me. I’ve despised JJ Abrams ever since.
And honestly, when they spend the last two episodes shoehorning all of those loose ends in as if it were somehow the plan all along, but in the process they create plot holes.
For example, Season 2 of Arcane having Heimerdinger being suddenly onboard for the dangerous time travel experiments just so they can have Ekko ready in time for the finale, but they also place a bunch of random restrictions on his powers such that they cannot actually alter the past but they somehow can alter the flow of fights in the present. That whole season was terrible, tbh, none of it made any sense they just wanted to rapidly take the characters from where they were in season 1 to what they are ingame with little to no explanations of how or why.
For example, Season 2 having Heimerdinger being suddenly onboard for the dangerous time travel experiments
Reading this wrong without having seen game of thrones confused me.
Until I realised I didn’t read the words “of Arcane”
Heimerdinger being suddenly onboard for the dangerous time travel experiments
As I see it, Heimerdinger was ready to give up, when he was removed from the PiltoverdCouncil by Jayce, his former pupil. He tried previously to dissuade Jayce from using Hextech like this.
Then he found Ekko creating a community in Zaun with an inspiring ingenuity despite pretty much everything else happening, so Heimerdinger decided stayed and helped out while teaching Ekko on how to improve on his designs. Heimerdinger wants to improve the world after all - but safely - and sees his opportunity here.
Then in season 2 they wind up in alternative dimensions due to Hexcore shenanigans, because Heimerdinger wants to help Ekko sustain his community. Jayce ends up in over where the “final battle” already happened. Heimerdinger lands in one where Hextech apparently does not exist at all and the city is better off because of it missing. One where Heimerdinger himself can probably be more relaxed as he has more time for his stuff and has to deal less with politics and betrayal.
Ekko arives 3 years later. And Ekko wants to go back no matter the cost. And this puts Heimerdinger in a pickle: the last time he tried to dissuade his his pupil the results were catastrophic. Ekko would have worked it alone (or would probably have roped in Powder) endangering not only himself but atleast Powder, probably even the Zaun/Piltover (mind you, Ekkos knowledge about Hextech is very limited, while Heimerdinger oversaw the research most of the time - and Hex is notoriously unstable).
So to protect the timeline/city/Powder/peace he liked as well as helping Ekko get back to his community the reasonable conclusion would be to help despite not being keen of the idea. The ~4 second limit of the Z-Drive comes from the instability of the Hexshards. Any longer and it goes boom, potentially killing people around. And this limit is what he uses to break Victors mask in the end for Jayce to intervene.
Everyone has that show they can bring up and they’ll tell you how one season derails the momentum a series has gone.
Changes in over or undertones. IE change in overtone being it suddenly turns into an action comedy when it was a gritty murder mystery. A change in undertone would be like if two characters that never had any romantic tension, or were canonically confirmed to not have romantic feelings for each other, suddenly were cofessing their feelings for each other.
Depending on the kind of show it is contextual, but here’s some.
If it is a tight self contained story that ends…and then more things happen. Stranger Things for example pretty much perfectly ended in season 1. There was a tiny dangling mystery regarding Eleven’s fate. Such things do not need to be a sequel hook, they can simply exist to tantalize and never be expanded on. This is like if Inception 2 was made and it answered the questions about Cobb’s spinning totem; it would utterly miss the point that the story was over and the ending was intentionally ambiguous.
If the actors or voice actors are simply getting too old for the part. Personally I have a good ear for animation’s voice acting. It drives me absolutely crazy when I hear noticeably aged actors reprising role or continuing them as if nothing has changed. Obviously some performers can last longer than others but for example modern Simpsons is unwatchable to me entirely on the basis of the voices. Even if somehow the writing turned around I simply can’t get past the voices. Similarly I could barely sit through The Incredibles 2, which supposedly picks up right as the first movie ends but all the voices are aged 14 years and I can hear it.
The last Simpsons season is actually fairly decent, but the obvious older voices are pretty distracting.
Modern Marge sounds like Julie Kavner’s been fronting a death metal band for the last 30 years. Let the poor woman rest.
I mean her net worth is estimated around 90million (and she makes about 400k per episode.), she could easily quit if she wanted to. She’s also in her mid 70s.
She’s making money for the grandkids now.
I’m kind of ambiguous about the first point. I think you can expand on a tightly-written, concluded story… but not repeatedly. Furthermore, it requires you to - to some degree - shift the focus of the following stories. Continuing the meta-story is all and just fine, but the immediate story can’t be about the same theme/issue/encounter indefinitely.
Normally when I see that, it is a signal to me that the show as intended ended but it was so popular/lucrative that moneypeople demanded it keep going, so the writers have to take an already concluded story and and un-conclude it. I’m sure shows in this situation have worked, but I’m struggling to think of one.
I suppose certain animes, especially shonen essentially do this, but they are designed from the outset to be nearly endless if successful. I’m thinking about shows like Stranger Things which clearly had one intended season, and then four seasons of whipping together something to put on screen.
Like I disclaimed at the top, it is contextual to the type of show, but I get a Spidey-sense when a show essentially restarts. Even Stargate SG-1 did it near the end, and it was overall a pretty weak few seasons.
Yeah, I 100% get where you’re coming from. (And I agree with you; the Ori seasons weren’t the strongest of SG-1. Babylon 5 had a similar problem where they wrapped up the entire show’s myth arc, only to be told there’d be a sudden fifth season. It showed.)
I think for me a lot of it depends on whether they decide to “un-conclude” the existing story or branch it off in an entirely new direction. Like, looking to Stargate again, the Ori seasons struggled, but Atlantis was a great way to propagate the concept with a new cast, characters, and story.
Atlantis was, if I recall correctly, intended for a while to be the successor. The plan was for the SG-1 show to end with the Atlantis mission beginning, and then the Atlantis show to be the next stage of the Stargate franchise. What ended up happening was the Atlantis mission kicking off but then also TV people in charge wanted to keep the SG-1 show going so you had the shows airing at the same time. That is partially why SG-1 mildly turned into a zombie version of itself. Certainly not as bad as other shows, but I could still feel it.
That’s why young boys are usually voiced by women
That’s not really what I’m talking about. I’m talking about actors that have already been cast who then play the same role for decades as if nothing about their voice has changed.
Have you heard Bart Simpson’s voice recently?
It seems like you’re both saying the same thing! The other person might have been suggesting that women’s voices tend to change less dramatically than men’s as they age. And hey, Bart Simpson is voiced by a woman!
That’s why I specifically mentioned Bart. Bart sounds absolutely terrible now.
I’m well aware adult women are often cast to play boy children. That has less to do with longevity compared to casting men as it does their ability to better mimic the higher pitch of children. Over a significant time period though, the voice talent ages no matter the gender.
By the powers of pedantry, I have been summoned!
That has less to do with longevity compared to casting men as it does their ability to better mimic the higher pitch of children.
What the heck are you talking about?
they were saying “that’s why child characters get voiced by women instead of men”, they said “that’s why child characters get voiced by women instead of children”
Because that choice absolutely does have to do with the longevity of the voice.That’s a wild way to misunderstand them lol.
women’s voices tend to change less dramatically than men’s as they age.
Point to the child actor being discussed in this sentence.
Not cosmOS, Crunchy. The person who said “that’s why young boys are voiced by women” to which you replied “that’s not really what I’m talking about”
I could have replied directly to that but I didn’t wanna fork the thread, since it’s more or less the same convo. Although in hindsight I should have.
But generally I feel like y’all are talking past each other
When the characters are talking about something and say “oh this is like that time when…” and a flashback scene which is just copy and pasted from old footage is used. Then they do this 5 more times in the episode. So annoying and cheap.
A clipshow episode. These were used as cheap fillers when the shows still had 20+ episode seasons, if the production needed to save money this was the easiest way to do it.
For all its other issues, Rick and Morty did this right. They had a clip show episode, but of things that had never aired. Others too, but Rick and Morty is the example that came to mind.
