Shows Such As The Duffer Brothers' Hit and The Survival Drama Have Become Bloated. I Strongly Prefer the Single-Season Program
It's an all-too-familiar feeling. Season two of your top TV show has just begun streaming, and optimism runs high. Season one ended flawlessly: future plotlines were teased tantalisingly, and a protagonist met a mysterious end – or so it seemed. In the months since the finale, you scoured online forums with other hardcores to find some Easter egg clues pointing toward upcoming twists.
Unfortunately, the return episode disappoints. It seems as if the creative team was swapped for algorithms. Cut to the second episode, a key performer makes a choice that viewers recognize as jarringly uncharacteristic. By episode five, it’s clear that the showrunners have had collective amnesia around the storylines aggressively signposted in season one. By the lackluster conclusion, you silently wish that the show had just been cancelled.
The Downside of Prolonged Runs
Regretting a show's continuation is hindsight; viewers usually oppose premature cancellations. Take Kaos, a delightfully satirical take on Greek mythology starring Jeff Goldblum, axed by Netflix because of weak audience numbers. Yet audiences can console themselves that the show's quality wasn't tarnished by a weak follow-up.
Considering the thriller Yellowjackets, I prefer it had remained a self-contained narrative. The first season boasted an inventive concept, and its 10 episodes were note-perfect. Aircraft disaster leaves a teen girls' team isolated in 1996. Skilled performers (with Juliette Lewis, Lauren Ambrose and Sophie Thatcher) depicted the survivors in dual eras. Several prize nominations followed, creators confidently planned five seasons to tell the story in necessary detail. However, a season four finale was just confirmed. This news brought me relief.
The Stranger Things cast returns for season five.
Plot twists have diluted the essence. Rather than leading with the girls’ return home, and their coping with awful experiences, we were taken in directions that bloated the original premise. That included the show’s tiring habit of bringing in and focusing on new characters (such as Shauna’s two-dimensional daughter Callie) with minimal impact on the main narrative. It’s frustrating, and as a viewer, it is depressing to see your favorite show morph slowly into a hate-watch.
An Increasing Pattern
But it’s not only Yellowjackets. Series like Emily in Paris, House of the Dragon, Squid Game and Stranger Things have lost the shock of the new, and settled into familiar patterns. At times, programs must stop while successful.
Actually, benefits come from self-contained series. From Sharp Objects to I May Destroy You to Adolescence, producers recognize appropriate conclusion points. However, the magic fades with series like Big Little Lies, first conceived as self-contained, come back for more and more with diminishing returns. Maybe Adolescence's creators hesitated about continuing.
The Supreme Instance
I preferred Yellowjackets as a limited run, living rent-free in our imaginations, mysteries intact. The best program I've seen succeeded this way. The classic teen series, the ideal adolescent show, ran for just one year yet felt epic in scale: the personalities were complex and inconsistent, the filming captured a fall aesthetic, and the dialogue was untethered from the normal “teen speak written by a 35-year-old” trope. The conclusion provided no neat resolution, yet this mirrors real life accurately of youth queries staying forever open. Following 18 excellent installments (plus one weak one), I mourned its end and drafted follow-up stories to resolve lingering mysteries. It might only live on an old hard drive, but it speaks to how deeply TV shows can chime with us.
The Special Relationship
When producers honor the special viewer-program bond, more programmes can bow out when the time is right.
- Priya Elan covers entertainment and style.