I only know of a few examples where writers escape this. The first is to have the episodes be essentially disconnected from one another (e.g. Star Trek). The other is what "The Wire" did by having each season have its own plot that is properly resolved at the end of each season.
They’ll set up what feels like a season finale in most episodes, then instead of resolving it in the next, quickly toss it aside or even just ignore it. It’s not good, and I would not recommend it at all, but it’s maybe the weirdest show I’ve seen.
I remain unsure whether the writers were aware they were writing one extremely-long joke about television writing, or if they thought it was actually good.
Watching without the cliffhanger/socializing "what's next" discussion, and seeing them discard 87.3% of all plot points with reckless abandon made me hate the show after watching 2-3 seasons.
It’s nuts. If that sounds awesome, I assure you, it’s not, nothing ever matters in that show. Fascination at its commitment to a particular way of being terrible, and a little bit of joy from trying to describe the show to people who haven’t seen it (often they think I’m making stuff up) is what got me through.
I get that Lost is a show with a lot of problems, but this is a show dedicated to having a lot of problems. It’s swinging for the fences of having-problems. It’s astonishing. It’s… an achievement? It’s terrible. It’s the inverse of a miracle that it exists.
Some people like episodic TV, some people prefer serialized.
There are lots of mini-series which do book adaptations but it's hard to come up with examples that span multiple seasons: "My Brilliant Friend" did it I think and maybe you could argue early "Game of Thrones" but the story was never finished in book form either so it couldn't be said to be telling a complete story.
I don;t think "The Wire" gets enough credit for creating a format that conformed to the constraints of TV production while still being able to tell stories that spanned many episodes. You could have ended the series at any season (had it been cancelled) and it wouldn't have felt incomplete and yet the final season did feel like it completed an even larger story arc.
I watched a couple episodes of The Diplomat and couldn't get into it. I'll give it another try.
If that show had aired on a real broadcast network (as JJ Abrams' next shows were) and not on The WB, she would have been nominated for Emmys out the wazoo. As it was, she won the Golden Globe for that first season, but she should have at least been nominated for the Emmy for her work on that show, because she was every bit as good or better than her peers on cable or network.
I have a running theory that The Americans and The Diplomat are in fact set in the same universe. Keri Russell is still playing the same character, a deep-cover Russian agent, and now she has infiltrated the upper echelons of the US government...
It's a fantastic show and while there are certainly some smaller arcs that could have been written better as is the case with any long-running show, especially one made for cable, it doesn't spend the two seasons completely destroying its reputation like most do. It ended at just the right time.
Strong advice for any show.
I now follow this advice with all shows. I’ll give it a full season to see if they develop something I’m interested in following.
Is he the hunchback brother of Bob Iger, Disney CEO?
We're at season 5 atm and up until this point, I can confirm the ratings.
...I just wish I could find that reddit post again. Can't remember if there were others good shows on it.
- take a year or two to find their footing or
- have a large cast (some mediocre) that get their own story lines of no consequence occasionally or
- introduce cast members that don't make it or
- implode towards the final season.
I have done this for many series that are somewhat uneven:
- The Americans
- How I Met Your Mother
- Fringe
- Orphan Black
- Halt and Catch Fire
- House of Cards (watching the ratings allows you to miss all of season 6)
- Arrested Development
- Bojack Horseman
- Veep
- 30 Rock
- Jane the Virgin
- Black Mirror
- The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
- Suits
- Six Feet Under
- La Femme Nikita
- The Blacklist
- Peaky Blinders
- The Romanoffs
- Ozark
- Westworld (sometimes dropping episodes does not matter)
- Succession
- Borgen
And all of these series have lots of strong episodes.
Series I would not do this with:
- The Bear
- Breaking Bad
- Money Heist
- The Serpent
- Fleabag
- Chernobyl
- The White Lotus
I'll go through this list and start from episode 1, though, so I appreciate the list of good shows!
Albeit, we got bored of money heist after season 1.
- outstanding performances by Spanish actresses Ursula Corbrero, Itziar Ituno, Alba Flores, and Najwa Nimri and
- humming Bella Ciao to yourself for two months.
There were always a few "filler" episodes that didn't move the story forward much, if at all.
But sometimes those filler's are just good tropey fun! :-)
I did watch half the first season years ago and wasn't too captured, will give it another go.
Then, a couple years later, I needed something to watch during long exercise sessions and I checked it out again. It was getting much more interesting by the end of the first season.
And every season got better and richer. By the very end, I experienced it as actually deep, especially in the way the Keri Russell character unexpectedly evolves. It was a real pleasure and I'm very glad I had the chance to enjoy it. Recommended!