Endless storytelling and decaying audiene interest

[Adam Reynolds]

Is it just me or do TV series almost inevitably get drawn out to the point that the audience is bound to lose interest. Looking at all of the TV series I have watched in recent years, I stopped watching all of them before their actual endings. Things like Burn Notice, in which the question of who actually burned Michael was drawn out through two additional seasons after it had been answered, before being dropped entirely for the final season. Or Person of Interest largely wrapping up all of the initial questions that it originally built up by the ending of the second season. Most recently Castle* had this problem in which after seven seasons setting up their romance and eventual marriage, Beckett leaves Castle because she was concerned about putting him in danger due to a new threat. This was after he had previously risked his life against serial killers and the conspiracy that had killed Beckett's mother. Including an incident in which he disarmed a nuclear bomb.

This is also to a lesser extent true with novels series, I can't say I have read them, but I have heard others complain about this with George RR Martin's fourth book in the Song of Ice and Fire. It was also very obviously true with the Star Wars expanded universe. Did anyone actually keep up with it after the NJO?

TV tropes refers to this as The Chris Carter Effect, based on the writer of The X-files. There is also the obvious classic examples of Lost and nBSG, which I personally never saw. Is this an inevitable process with TV writers being forced to drag out their series longer than they should and thus ruining decent stories?

* Ironically the fictional website for Rick Castle actually has a post that talks about exactly this issue. He coined the term Ponzi storytelling to refer to this idea, where the writers of a series set up all of these elaborate mysteries without any real payoff. The problem is that setup is easier than payoff.

He referred to an example of finding a key sitting on the street. Paraphrasing slightly, when you find a random key, there is always a nice sense of mystery as to what it goes to. Odds are, it goes to nothing in particular, like an apartment five blocks away. When you find that out, it is extremely disappointing. This is generally why many people don't like the resolution to mysteries.

[Simon_Jester]

Typically, the first wave of resolved mysteries are resolved in ways the audience (mostly) likes, or at least finds interesting- you can't please everyone but you can certainly make everyone care about what you are doing.

The problem comes when you stack the story up too far, when the first wave of good ideas is exhausted. THEN you start running out of ideas and having to string out more and more story until your audience gets bored.

And in some cases this literally never happens, usually in the context of a story with a serial, episodic format. Sherlock Holmes's fans never got tired of his stories, even to the point of pressuring Doyle to write more after he outright killed Holmes off. Even to the point where people write Holmes stories as tributes a hundred years later.

Soap operas are legendary for keeping audience interest for decades at a time, likewise. Somehow, they do it.

TV series are in much more danger of experiencing this than almost any other type of fiction, because they use up an average of one plot per forty-five minutes of content. By contrast, a book uses one plot in a book that takes several hours to read. While a movie uses one plot per two hours, the movies themselves take so long to create that there's plenty of time to generate more as a rule.

So by the time a TV series has generated, oh, sixty hours of content, it's cycled through 75 plots. A series of novels has used about ten, maybe fewer. A series of movies... are there any movies that have run through sixty hours of screen time? Maybe the James Bond series... well, that's about thirty plots. And it's taken them fifty years to get there, rather than three to five as would be required for a TV show.

It's a lot harder for novels or movies to just plain run out of interesting ideas than it is for TV.

[The Romulan Republic]

I find it doubtful that a show would ever truly run out of good things it could do. It comes down to how much creativity/flexibility the creators have (and/or how often the show brings in new staff).

What you need to avoid a show becoming boring is a willingness to shake up the status quo, a fan base that will at least somewhat accept that, and a fairly open/flexible premise.

Doctor Who is a great example of these elements, and its kept the show on the air for decades. Sure, the quality's been mixed at times, but I'd point to Day of the Doctor as proof that the show could still produce a truly great episode in recent years.

[Raw Shark]

On the subject of A Feast for Crows: the previous book in the series, A Storm of Swords, is the generally-agreed-upon hands-down fan favorite BY FAR. It was the book GRRM had planned the whole series around and he was on his A-game when he wrote it. A very hard act to follow. AFFC disappointed me at first, but I've warmed up to its merits on re-reads.

[Elheru Aran]

I think as far as TV shows go, the best thing to do is to be committed to having a story that has a distinct beginning, middle and end. Not string it out after you finally hit your climax, because how are you going to top that. Yes, perhaps your characters are left in the middle of things. Maybe a few plot-points aren't resolved. So? That's life. Have a beginning, work your way up with a few interesting stories, and tie it all off in a nice bow after a few seasons.

Alternatively, be very open about the fact that it's going to be episodic like Doctor Who-- focusing on distinct short plots that wind up within a few episodes or each series.

Having an overarching plot like Stargate can work. Stargate notably began declining badly after the consistent Goa'uld threat was neutralized in Season 8; 9 was life support, and then they introduced the Ori in Season 10 and things just went south. They should have wound it up at the end of 8 (though admittedly we wouldn't have gotten one of the best episodes in the show period IMO, that one where they're stuck in time on the Odyssey for decades to figure out how to escape the Ori).

[Dartzap]

Surely it's a case of 'too many chiefs' or rather writers ?

Some of these shows have a dozen writers or more, each with their own ideas of how plot should progress over the course of 20+ episodes each 20 - 40 mins long .

By comparison with the standard British model, where the most you can expect usually are 10 episodes, each 25 to an hour long, and with a few exceptions like the soaps or Doctor Who, only last about three series before being wound up.also, they tend to only have one or two writers

HBO and Netflix seems to follow that model, and it shows in the overall quality of the shows produced. I can't even watch half of the shows coming out of the US networks, as they just drag on for eternity!

[Adam Reynolds]

Soap operas are legendary for keeping audience interest for decades at a time, likewise. Somehow, they do it.

The thing is, that soap opera writers are actually a part of the problem with the rest of TV. They are largely responsible for the problem I am referring to. That of juggling plots such that they never answer one without bringing in at least two more. As the traditional soap opera has been in decline, they have adopted these strategies to traditional TV writing.

Part of the appeal of this sort of thing is the sunk cost fallacy. Once you have sunk hours upon hours of time into a series and are obsessed with the characters, you keep watching regardless of quality.

TV series are in much more danger of experiencing this than almost any other type of fiction, because they use up an average of one plot per forty-five minutes of content. By contrast, a book uses one plot in a book that takes several hours to read. While a movie uses one plot per two hours, the movies themselves take so long to create that there's plenty of time to generate more as a rule.

This is part of the problem with shows becoming stale, but the problem that I was referring to was actually that of longer story arcs getting stale. In those cases it is more like two or three major plots per season at most. In theory that should be better than films, but it is generally worse.

So by the time a TV series has generated, oh, sixty hours of content, it's cycled through 75 plots. A series of novels has used about ten, maybe fewer. A series of movies... are there any movies that have run through sixty hours of screen time? Maybe the James Bond series... well, that's about thirty plots. And it's taken them fifty years to get there, rather than three to five as would be required for a TV show.

In case you were wondering, there have been 50.7 hours worth of James Bond films.

Doctor Who is a great example of these elements, and its kept the show on the air for decades. Sure, the quality's been mixed at times, but I'd point to Day of the Doctor as proof that the show could still produce a truly great episode in recent years.

Part of what makes Dr. Who effective is that it changes its cast through the use of different Doctors. Whenever this happens it serves to shake things up somewhat.

I think as far as TV shows go, the best thing to do is to be committed to having a story that has a distinct beginning, middle and end. Not string it out after you finally hit your climax, because how are you going to top that. Yes, perhaps your characters are left in the middle of things. Maybe a few plot-points aren't resolved. So? That's life. Have a beginning, work your way up with a few interesting stories, and tie it all off in a nice bow after a few seasons.

One of the best examples of this was Babylon 5. Despite the flaws with the fifth season and Crusade, that show did have a defined ending that made it far more effective in the long run. More shows should be willing to do this.

HBO and Netflix seems to follow that model, and it shows in the overall quality of the shows produced. I can't even watch half of the shows coming out of the US networks, as they just drag on for eternity!

Even some of those shows have this problem. Burn Notice was closer to this model with only 15 episodes each season. As was The Americans, which I also enjoyed and ultimately lost interest in as it lost its narrative clarity. Or Homeland, which might be among the biggest failures in this regard. Despite seasons only lasting 10 episodes, by the third season, it had gotten completely lost in trying to transform into a commentary on real life events(including having the gall to create a fictional covert operation by the CIA that led to sucess in the Iran deal, as opposed to the real life case of true diplomacy).

Thinking about this I believe that might be the biggest problem. As a show goes on, it is more likely to introduce additional characters and subplots only tangentially involved in the main one. Over time, this is problematic as it reduces the narrative clarity.

Looking at both Homeland and The Americans we see this. Homeland started off as the duel between Carrie and Brody in which the questions of whether he was a traitor and whether she was crazy were somewhat open ended. Similarly, The Americans was also directly a battle between the deep cover KGB officers and the FBI. Over time both shows developed additional plots that lacked the power of early ones. The Americans is better overall, as the additional plots worked far better, but it is not as good as it was in the first season when it was more of a two party conflict.

[Elheru Aran]

Bear in mind that soap operas are taking advantage of a niche. They broadcast at a fairly set time, to a fairly set audience, who they can count on. They know they can string things out because, while this audience may not be very large, it's fairly committed and willing to follow all the twists and turns that the plot takes. It's no coincidence that they're a byword for lame scripting and contrived plots.

Really the best shows seem to be the ones that are willing to shake up the format, be unconventional, and challenge preconceptions. Of course, I've been binge-watching Firefly lately, so I may not be the best judge of television quality right now...

[RogueIce]

TBH I think in quite a few cases it's the networks extending things beyond what the writers want to do. Or, in other cases, shortening things but then extending them at the last minute when the writers tried to wrap things up (B5 being a famous example of this). SG-1 also had like what, two or three "grand finales" but ended up getting renewed until season 10, when they didn't do a grand finale?

The DCAU also had that happen to them, with "Epilogue" clearly intending to be the series finale and even a coda to the entire DCAU itself...but then Cartoon Network wanted a new season. IIRC even JLU itself was kind of like that after "Starcrossed" ended things for JL.

IIRC some of nBSG's issues were also larger than expected episode counts per season, and the writers having to figure out what to do with them.

Of course the whole issue of whether a show goes "stale" is one of subjective opinion, of course. I really liked where Burn Notice went in Season 6, and felt that it gave Michael the ending he really deserved. And I loved the Ori arc in SG1 - Ben Browder was no Jack O'Neill and it had some issues (co-command, really?) but I felt like in the end it was still some good TV. Ironically as I mentioned before, they didn't even get to end their series properly when SyFy cut the rug out from under them.

So yeah, I'd put a lot of this on the networks moreso than the writing and creative staff, in general.

[Alferd Packer]

Yeah, I'd agree with that. Usually a show creator has to sell the rights to the show to the network to get it on the air, even if he or she retains creative control. So if the ratings stay high, the show stays on the air, regardless of what the creator says or does. The network can just shitcan the original writing staff and get a whole new creative team.

About the only thing a showrunner can do is go completely off the rails and end the show by killing off the central character or characters, or changing the entire premise of the show. Famously, Dinosaurs' creators did this in the series finale: their contract was up, but ABC was probably to keep the show going without their involvement. So, they killed every single character permanently and irrevocably in the last episode, and that was that. I also recall hearing of some show that was cancelled after 5 episodes, but the remaining 8 of the 13-episode run were still to be filmed. When the network insisted that they continue, even though the show was cancelled (presumably for DVD sales?), the writers changed the tone from a light-hearted workplace comedy to a serial killer drama with the main character being revealed as the killer. Wish I could remember the name of that show.

[Elheru Aran]

The networks are definitely responsible for a lot of the issues with television series. Stargate definitely had a lot of moments where it could've ended-- IIRC they said at one point that almost all of their season finales were filmed as though they were series finales (cliffhangers notwithstanding) until Season 10, which ended inconclusively and needed a couple of movies to really finish the series. But largely that was due to budgetary fuck-ups; 10 was the last season where they actually had all the budget they wanted, ironically.

X-Files also suffered from this, IIRC. Really any popular show will suffer from network interference-- when the creator is ready to be done, if the show is popular, the network will demand that they come up with new plots and keep it rolling. You can see this fairly clearly in Buffy as well; from what I understand season 8 was mostly tacked on the end, and Angel was canceled as to not interfere with Buffy even though it was arguably the better show at that point.

[Channel72]

* Ironically the fictional website for Rick Castle actually has a post that talks about exactly this issue. He coined the term Ponzi storytelling to refer to this idea, where the writers of a series set up all of these elaborate mysteries without any real payoff. The problem is that setup is easier than payoff.

I think the X-Files is the classic Ur-example of that happening. I always called this problem something like "X-Files syndrome", but Ponzi storytelling is much cooler. I guess a more modern example of this is Lost, which I've never seen, but you know... I hear things. Twin Peaks also probably would have ended up like this, if it lasted more than a season.

Star Trek: Enterprise also did this - they setup all these stupid mysteries about time traveling villains and future wars and whatever, and none of it panned out. But I think the X-files, by far, is the most guilty of this sort of crap. It was a show built around shadowy mysteries, government conspiracies, and tin-foil hattery... except the reality is that nobody writing for the show was really clever enough to have any of it add up to anything.

I mean, I think the problem is pretty straightforward: it's really easy to setup some kind of compelling mystery that hints at something really interesting or other-worldly. But it's really difficult to actually come up with what that really interesting or other-wordly thing is when you shine a light at it or look at it in detail under a microscope. And any attempt to do so will likely disappoint a lot of viewers... so it's easier to just keep compounding the mystery.

But really... ultimately you have to actually show the fucking Shark at some point... Spielberg knew that.

[Elheru Aran]

The problem with X-Files was that it showed promise-- it had an overall plot arc of 'find who's behind everything' which culminated in the movie with the aliens and everything... and then fell flat because they couldn't be arsed to tie everything together, and it turned out that Chris Carter never really had any real plan for the series after he started it. The fact that there was an arc was accidental.

Buffy, Stargate, etc, avoid that by at least having a serious background to what they were doing. There's a Goa'uld threat in the galaxy to keep fighting while we explore the Gate system and meet new people. There's an ancient evil plot to conquer the world that only the Slayer can defeat, while high-school romantic shenanigans happen. It was there, the episodes worked (more or less) towards that, and in both cases, when it was finally defeated, neither show had much of anywhere to go. X-Files never really had that to start with, just a general vagueness of 'there's secrets and we wanna know them, oh, here's a new secret every episode...'

[Adam Reynolds]

* Ironically the fictional website for Rick Castle actually has a post that talks about exactly this issue. He coined the term Ponzi storytelling to refer to this idea, where the writers of a series set up all of these elaborate mysteries without any real payoff. The problem is that setup is easier than payoff.

I think the X-Files is the classic Ur-example of that happening. I always called this problem something like "X-Files syndrome", but Ponzi storytelling is much cooler. I guess a more modern example of this is Lost, which I've never seen, but you know... I hear things. Twin Peaks also probably would have ended up like this, if it lasted more than a season.

TV Tropes does call this phenomenon The Chris Carter Effect. Though I agree Ponzi storytelling is a much better title.

[Simon_Jester]

On the subject of A Feast for Crows: the previous book in the series, A Storm of Swords, is the generally-agreed-upon hands-down fan favorite BY FAR. It was the book GRRM had planned the whole series around and he was on his A-game when he wrote it. A very hard act to follow. AFFC disappointed me at first, but I've warmed up to its merits on re-reads.

It doesn't help that A Feast For Crows and A Dance With Dragons are the books where Martin's plot... delaminated, in that the sheer size and scale of what he was doing ran away with him so that the usual rotation of viewpoint characters broke down.

I think as far as TV shows go, the best thing to do is to be committed to having a story that has a distinct beginning, middle and end. Not string it out after you finally hit your climax, because how are you going to top that. Yes, perhaps your characters are left in the middle of things. Maybe a few plot-points aren't resolved. So? That's life. Have a beginning, work your way up with a few interesting stories, and tie it all off in a nice bow after a few seasons.

The biggest problem with this is commercialism. There is intense pressure to create sequels or to stretch things out for 'one more season.' At the same time, artists may not know their work is on its last season until halfway through the last season. This makes good pacing and plotting difficult at times.

Soap operas are legendary for keeping audience interest for decades at a time, likewise. Somehow, they do it.

The thing is, that soap opera writers are actually a part of the problem with the rest of TV. They are largely responsible for the problem I am referring to. That of juggling plots such that they never answer one without bringing in at least two more. As the traditional soap opera has been in decline, they have adopted these strategies to traditional TV writing.

Part of the appeal of this sort of thing is the sunk cost fallacy. Once you have sunk hours upon hours of time into a series and are obsessed with the characters, you keep watching regardless of quality.

In fairness you have a point. On the other hand, this isn't a new problem. And even episodic shows can experience a serious decline in quality over time; witness third season Star Trek from the original series.

TV series are in much more danger of experiencing this than almost any other type of fiction, because they use up an average of one plot per forty-five minutes of content. By contrast, a book uses one plot in a book that takes several hours to read. While a movie uses one plot per two hours, the movies themselves take so long to create that there's plenty of time to generate more as a rule.

This is part of the problem with shows becoming stale, but the problem that I was referring to was actually that of longer story arcs getting stale. In those cases it is more like two or three major plots per season at most. In theory that should be better than films, but it is generally worse.

Thing is, a major plot in a TV series requires a lot more work (several hours of screen time) and uses up a lot more of the artists' bag of tricks. It's like, imagine if every James Bond movie were paced the same way, except it was six hours long, and they were released at the same rate. We would have seen James Bond do three times more stunts, use three times more gadgets, seduce three times more women, and so on.

How much harder would it be to keep Bond 'fresh?' How much harder would it be to come up with a new plot without someone complaining that this sounds exactly like what Bond did in the middle part of a movie sixteen years ago? The franchise has enough trouble with that as it is.

If James Bond were a TV series and each movie were converted into a major plot that consumed several episodes, this is exactly the problem the series would have after, oh, five or six seasons. The character has done it all before, has done nearly every possible variation on "it" before. He's explored nearly every possible variation on their own character development ("too old for this shit," "too traumatized for this shit," "has a cool sidekick," "has to work as part of a team," etc.). There's no place left to go.

The sheer volume of stuff a character does in sixty or seventy hours of content, spread out over only a few short years, can be like a chain restricting the artist's freedom of maneuver. For a character a bit less two-dimensional than James Bond, that's less of an issue... but it's still in play.

So by the time a TV series has generated, oh, sixty hours of content, it's cycled through 75 plots. A series of novels has used about ten, maybe fewer. A series of movies... are there any movies that have run through sixty hours of screen time? Maybe the James Bond series... well, that's about thirty plots. And it's taken them fifty years to get there, rather than three to five as would be required for a TV show.

In case you were wondering, there have been 50.7 hours worth of James Bond films.

Yes- and if it weren't for the fact that Bond has been played by several entirely different actors, with some pretty sharp rethinkings of the franchise once a decade or so, it would be very much stale by now. A TV series has a harder time doing that because it doesn't get the luxury of waiting two or three years to release the next batch of content. If they change the tone of the series drastically between seasons they don't get "I like the new cool Bond," they get "I tuned in for wacky sci-fi hijinks and I'm getting gritty crime stories? This sucks!"

[The Romulan Republic]

The problem with X-Files was that it showed promise-- it had an overall plot arc of 'find who's behind everything' which culminated in the movie with the aliens and everything... and then fell flat because they couldn't be arsed to tie everything together, and it turned out that Chris Carter never really had any real plan for the series after he started it. The fact that there was an arc was accidental.

Buffy, Stargate, etc, avoid that by at least having a serious background to what they were doing. There's a Goa'uld threat in the galaxy to keep fighting while we explore the Gate system and meet new people. There's an ancient evil plot to conquer the world that only the Slayer can defeat, while high-school romantic shenanigans happen. It was there, the episodes worked (more or less) towards that, and in both cases, when it was finally defeated, neither show had much of anywhere to go. X-Files never really had that to start with, just a general vagueness of 'there's secrets and we wanna know them, oh, here's a new secret every episode...'

Um... what are you talking about?

Buffy never had one single overall evil plot for the entire series. The First Evil may have ended up being portrayed as such, but it was only introduced in season three and pretty much untouched after that until season seven. Generally, they'd have a major threat each season (often with an initial threat early in the season that was supplanted around the half-way point), with the consequences of that threat carrying over into the start of the next season (a touch I really like, as it showed the long term effects of events on the characters).

Also, while its more fleshed out than you describe, I'm not sure Buffy's basic background was much more fleshed out than the X-Files, either. Buffy basically started with "Comedy/horror/action hybrid about a teenage girl who wants to be normal inheriting supernatural powers/mission to fight evil forces that represent various real world/youth issues". That's pretty much it. Sure, their were some other details beyond that, but that's the gist of it. It eventually evolved into "Epic apocalyptic modern/urban fantasy" without the specific high school focus, due to the characters aging. X-Files, on the other hand, was basically a supernatural cop show with a focus on aliens and government conspiracies that eventually developed a major sexual tension/romantic subplot.

I have heard that Buffy would plan out plots over multiple seasons, though. That probably helped.

[Zixinus]

A massive part of the problem is that as far as most people are concerned, a TV series doesn't end. They just can't. Networks want a successful series to run as long as it is successful, not how long the story should last.

This makes managing the main story impossible. Good storytelling is managing different story components so they work well together and tie each other together. But if you do it right and end the season well, you run into the problem that the series is suddenly successful because it attracted old viewers back who lost interest earlier. The network then demands that the show be continued.
Then you have to retie things in the last minute for another story's beginning, which is hazardous and going to end up clumsy. You weaken the show overall and you have two ways of working things: a, unravel finished sub-plots or other aspects that were essential element to the show or b, try to make a completely new sub-stories (with new characters with new dynamics) that can substitute that somehow and risk altering what viewers already like about the show.

Which leads to another problem: you want a TV show to be stable. You want what viewers like in the first season to be somehow present in the sixth season. Meanwhile things that made the show genuinely interesting in the first season was neglected in favor of audience-pleasing moments. I find this a good example with House, that initially was about the medicine and diseases with the workplace drama of the characters on the side (that occasionally included some good comedic moments by House). By the end of where I watched the show the medicine was diluted down to barely-comprehensible, semi-sensible hogwash that was used mostly as an excuses for the characters to do their drama, to torture the patient either physically or psychologically or socially (reveal the sins or embarrassing thing about the patient or use them as commentary) and House's antics.

[mr friendly guy]

I most likely have mentioned this before, but this "endless storytelling" seems a symptom of Western television series. I am going to guess some other nations also do this type of method, but its far from universal.

For example Chinese television series, at least with the ones I have seen have a clear beginning, middle and end. If they are successful, they sometimes tend to make a sequel with some vague connection to the previous series, but in effect is like a separate show or a spin off. This way the series hopefully ends on a high note before becoming stale. An episode of some of these series is around 45 minutes, and series range from 20 episodes to 80 (if you use Romance of the three Kingdoms). Thus 20 episodes is similar to one season of American shows, and definitely one season of British shows. Most of them I have seen are around 40 to 50 episodes, so equivalent to two seasons of American shows.

That being said, a lot of the ones I have seen are adapted from novels, although some are inspired from short stories (so are for the most part, original aside from the use of characters), rather than a bunch of individual stories strung together. Novel adaptations tend to be made into movies over here. Obviously movies have the advantage of bigger budget and higher production values, while television series have the advantage of not cutting out too much from the source material (and even adding or fleshing it out).

[Thanas]

There are a few great Japanese television series (NOT Anime or Manga) who have the same concept and in general are quite high quality.