A decent team of writers can only come up with so many new and interesting situations. Then they start to get into repeat situations that no one wants to see, or absurd situations, like jumping over a shark on water skis.
Depends on the show. There are a lot of reasons why this happens.
They ran through their ideas.
Changes in the writer’s room. (Community’s infamous “gas leak year”)
Cast changing or wanting to leave. (Jason Siegel wanted to leave How I Met Your Mother, so they compromised on letting him do most of that last season remotely.)
If you get off to a good start, your corporate overlords will demand that you milk it for as long as possible as long as viewer loyalty will hold up. So you have to keep making more of the story even though you have run out of story. (And the opposite is true: if you don’t get enough viewers initially, your show can get killed even though the quality is fantastic.)
Because they start with a good/great idea but no road map to an ending. They just want to milk it as long as possible then wrap it up when they’re forced to.
This is why limited series work so well. They go in with a plan for a beginning, middle, and an end.
In my opinion it’s like lightning in a bottle. You see this phenomena with a lot of companies, music albums and of course shows. You have this great idea but trying to elaborate on it becomes very difficult.
It is easy to have the idea of a scenario for the start of the season. It is much more difficult to continue from the starting point.
Some tv shows start to repeat themself or they get written very bad (characters do things they would not do or behave strange).
This is why Breaking Bad is the best tv show for me. Great starting scenario, great storytelling and perfect ending without dragging it into endless seasons.
Prolonged storytelling without a clear, defined plan for the series.
Take for example, Supernatural, which had a defined five year story arc with a planned ending. The network discovered that the series was their cash cow, and drove a dump truck full of money up to the homes of everyone involved to keep it going.
However, the story that was intended to be told, was told. So the next 10 years of shows just kept adding more and more crap on top of things season after season. There are some fun episodes in seasons 6-15, but nothing that really feels as tight narratively season wise as the first 5 seasons feel.
A great idea can and should play out in a couple of seasons. i loved Reacher but season 3 was a total let down. At this point he is really just putting himself into situations to murder people.
The Walking Dead was a total drag out. Neegan and the Governor should have been dead in 3 or 4 episodes.
Seriously, every great tv show almost always becomes slow AF after a couple of seasons… they spend too much time on painfully slow character developments and you waste hours of your life with the plot line barely moving.
There’s also a LOT of very lazy writing that happens…
Stupid reactions to situations are created just so it creates drama, people react in frustratingly stupid and hard to understand ways.
I’m not a writer, but it’s quite easy to think of better plot lines in many cases..
Every reason I see here is correct. It’s usually a mixture of running out of original and interesting ideas and money. Another thing that sometime occurs is that for whatever reason, the “showrunner” (usually the person who came up with the idea for the series) leaves the show, and now someone who wasn’t as interested in the show is now in charge.
Often, the series was originally supposed to be shorter. One, two, maybe three seasons. That’s how much was needed to tell the story that the writers had in mind. But when a show is popular, the studios don’t want the cash cow to disappear, so they often forcibly renew the show for additional seasons, forcing the creative team to come up with novel and often sub-part plot points. The show suffers, viewership drops, and only when the series has become really bad and despised is it finally allowed to die.
My personal theory, the original creators were on fire at the beginning with their new idea. Eventually different writers, people come on board and it just turns into generic slop, lacking that original fire.
Comments
There’s two things that are almost universally true about television shows that will affect the quality of later seasons:
A decent team of writers can only come up with so many new and interesting situations. Then they start to get into repeat situations that no one wants to see, or absurd situations, like jumping over a shark on water skis.
Telling a long story is very hard. Not many people have the creativity and the skill to craft a story that actually works for that long.
Depends on the show. There are a lot of reasons why this happens.
Often they didn’t understand what made the show good in the first place
It’s easier to start something than to finish it.
If you get off to a good start, your corporate overlords will demand that you milk it for as long as possible as long as viewer loyalty will hold up. So you have to keep making more of the story even though you have run out of story. (And the opposite is true: if you don’t get enough viewers initially, your show can get killed even though the quality is fantastic.)
They run out of interesting stories, but they don’t want to stop the cash from rolling in, so they push on.
The creator had their entire life to come up with one story. Now it’s popular and someone says “Do more, and do it in 6 months.”
Same reason most bands had a big letdown with their sophomore album.
Because they start with a good/great idea but no road map to an ending. They just want to milk it as long as possible then wrap it up when they’re forced to.
This is why limited series work so well. They go in with a plan for a beginning, middle, and an end.
In my opinion it’s like lightning in a bottle. You see this phenomena with a lot of companies, music albums and of course shows. You have this great idea but trying to elaborate on it becomes very difficult.
It is easy to have the idea of a scenario for the start of the season. It is much more difficult to continue from the starting point.
Some tv shows start to repeat themself or they get written very bad (characters do things they would not do or behave strange).
This is why Breaking Bad is the best tv show for me. Great starting scenario, great storytelling and perfect ending without dragging it into endless seasons.
Prolonged storytelling without a clear, defined plan for the series.
Take for example, Supernatural, which had a defined five year story arc with a planned ending. The network discovered that the series was their cash cow, and drove a dump truck full of money up to the homes of everyone involved to keep it going.
However, the story that was intended to be told, was told. So the next 10 years of shows just kept adding more and more crap on top of things season after season. There are some fun episodes in seasons 6-15, but nothing that really feels as tight narratively season wise as the first 5 seasons feel.
A great idea can and should play out in a couple of seasons. i loved Reacher but season 3 was a total let down. At this point he is really just putting himself into situations to murder people.
The Walking Dead was a total drag out. Neegan and the Governor should have been dead in 3 or 4 episodes.
Because the storylines get stale and the show ends up in “milk it” territory.
If you have shows that also have death or jeopardy, the writers are generally too scared to kill off main characters for fear of losing viewers.
The writers run out of ideas.
They drag out the story lines too long!!!
Seriously, every great tv show almost always becomes slow AF after a couple of seasons… they spend too much time on painfully slow character developments and you waste hours of your life with the plot line barely moving.
There’s also a LOT of very lazy writing that happens…
Stupid reactions to situations are created just so it creates drama, people react in frustratingly stupid and hard to understand ways.
I’m not a writer, but it’s quite easy to think of better plot lines in many cases..
Every reason I see here is correct. It’s usually a mixture of running out of original and interesting ideas and money. Another thing that sometime occurs is that for whatever reason, the “showrunner” (usually the person who came up with the idea for the series) leaves the show, and now someone who wasn’t as interested in the show is now in charge.
Because Americans love to beat a dead horse. The British and Europeans have no problem ending highly popular shows after a couple of years.
They run out of new material.
Often, the series was originally supposed to be shorter. One, two, maybe three seasons. That’s how much was needed to tell the story that the writers had in mind. But when a show is popular, the studios don’t want the cash cow to disappear, so they often forcibly renew the show for additional seasons, forcing the creative team to come up with novel and often sub-part plot points. The show suffers, viewership drops, and only when the series has become really bad and despised is it finally allowed to die.
My personal theory, the original creators were on fire at the beginning with their new idea. Eventually different writers, people come on board and it just turns into generic slop, lacking that original fire.
Because they run out of compelling ideas but there is momentum in the viewership so they keep making it.