One Season Too Many

Mikayla Leskey | Arts and Entertainment Editor

Family Relaxing Together and Watching Television at Home. / Photo by 'choreograph', licensed by Envato.com.

Have you ever been watching an episode of Grey’s Anatomy or Supernatural or Law & Order or some other long-running TV show and realize that the magic and intrigue from the first few seasons is just not there anymore? Because same, and before you come after me about dissing these shows, I’ve binged Supernatural so much I can tell you exact episodes for certain scenes or songs.

I understand why networks continue to promote these shows, why they continue running them even though they’ve long since done their time. They’re making money, but at what point do they start to lose a new audience? I mean, Grey’s Anatomy is at season 22, an overwhelming amount of episodes and storylines for brand-new watchers to get into. Not to mention the countless spoilers they’d have to avoid.

Sure, some TV shows do it well, but most commonly they don’t have a set storyline like in the comedy or children’s genre. For drama shows, it gets trickier. For the most part, they have a set storyline that takes place over an entire season, sometimes even more. But when a show runs for too long the main cast from season one ends going through so many character arcs and developments they often end up back where they started.

More on that, a lot of the time when shows go on for years on end the writing goes worse. I hate to say it, especially as a writer myself, but they lose that intrigue that captivated the audience in the first place. When it’s shows like Grey’s Anatomy or 9-1-1 the writers have to create increasingly absurd scenarios that are just enough to be considered real, but otherwise almost nobody has ever experienced before.

Or, as I mentioned before they refuse to let their characters be happy. So many times I see characters in a relationship with who will be their forever partner, but something happens where it’s the slightest miscommunication that could be righted by just talking or y’know, they kill off the partner and they either haunt the narrative or they don’t ever get brought up again.

Also, at some point, the main cast from season one will be replaced. As I said before, there’s only so much you can put a character through before it’s too much, or before an actor decides to leave the show for one reason or another, and suddenly almost the entire cast is replaced. The only one from the original cast that’s left is often the main character who’s promoted to be the mentor for the newbies.

There’s only so much content and storylines that a show can produce, they need to find the sweetspot, and if they want to continue making money then make spin-offs, where there’s a new focus and where the writing doesn’t degrade or characters don’t go through so many arcs they forget their origins.