In which we discuss currently-running TV shows that, while once enjoyable, have lost their way.
I’ll start with NCIS. While still better than its spin-off, it’s off its game this year. In a lot of ways they seem to be just going through the motions, painting by the numbers, pick your own cliche. To solve this, I propose radical surgery: Get rid of Tony, and possibly Abby or Ducky as well..
Why those three? Well, the best case can be made for DiNozzo, I admit. After allowing him a good bit of character development during Gibbs’ mini-retirement and his falling-in-love-while-undercover story arc, they’ve pretty much undone all that. That’s annoying in itself, but more importantly, the guy’s got to be in his late 30s or early 40s by now. His fratboy behavior is long past charming, and it simply can’t be good for his career to still be Gibbs’ number too. So replace him in-story; assign him to another NCIS office with his own team. McGee (who also needs a change for the good of his career) becomes the new number two on the team, and gets his own probie. McGee won’t abuse the new guy the way Tony abused him…but Ziva might.
Abby needs to leave, oddly enough, because Gibbs will hate whoever replaces her. And Gibbs needs more conflict. He and Vance have gotten chummy, which is not a bad thing; it’s impossible to imagine Gibbs keeping his job in the long term if his relationship with Vance hadn’t improved. It’s established that Abby is a forensics rock star, so it’s easy to imagine her getting a job elsewhere, and her absence wil provide Gibbs with someone else to fight with. Alternatively you could replace Ducky (simply by having him retire) with similar results.
But that’s just me. Anybody else want to retool a favorite show?
I’d take the opposite approach to NCIS - lose all the human interest kerfluffle and get back to decent plots. The cast really clicks, let it alone. Adding another character to add some tension would be fine, but no major changes.
The way to improve NCIS is make the killer somebody who wasn’t introduced in the first scene. It’s now so predictable that the peripheral character that the casts notices in some way at the beginning of the show is ALWAYS the guy who did it at the end. Get away from all the Agatha Chrisitie/cozy plotting and back to scenarios that are a little more gritty.
Freely ignoring the “currently running” clause of the OP, because, hey I’m Oak, and I do that sometimes…
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Battlestar Galactica**. Season Four never happened. All fraudulent episodes broadcast purporting to be Season 4 are seized and destroyed. I’ll write the final season. And I’d do it right.
The killer isn’t usually someone introduced in the first scene; it is, however, someone introduced in the first half hour. This is called “playing fair.”
The show you propose would no longer be NCIS. NCIS is not Law & Order, where the case is king. It is half The Leroy Jethro Gibbs Show and half character-based comedy with drama and action thrown in (and occasionally predominating). The cases are the excuses for the ensemble to interact.
That is, incidentally, why I want Tony gone, because they’ve pretty much exhausted new ways for him to act that are consistent with him still being on the team.
How so, Oak? We watched the whole series recently, and while I share you distaste for the woo-woo ending, I’m not sure what I’d change. Admittedly I haven’t thought about it in detail.
Burn Notice= fewer episodes per season might actually be better because they all blend in.
Stop having every episode begin with “I’ve got a job, it should be real easy, just involves helping an old lady cross the street” that ends up involving two helicopter explosions, Fiona playing bloody-eagle with a Danish crime lord, Sam/Chuck getting punched and Michael posing as a one legged sheik- have a flat out “This job is going to be one hell of a bitch”.
A change of pace comedic episode might even be nice. Develop some characters or interesting backstory: bring in Sam’s heretofore unmentioned kids or flashback to Fiona’s childhood or learn that Madeline’s husband was in the CIA or something.
Get Madeline a boyfriend. I liked the eps where she and Sam’s Navy Seal buddy hooked up.
I’ve mentioned before that I think they should get James “Roscoe P. Coltrane” Best, who lives in the Miami area somewhere anyway, to play Sam’s father as to me they look alike. They could have fun with that one: my plot would be he’s a JFK/Cold War era spook who’s been blackmailing people for years with his info and now somebody’s trying to kill him and he has no idea which one because there are so damned many.
Doctor Who - look, you have to earn my emotional involvement, okay? You can’t do like you did in the last episode of the season and give me ten things that should have broken my heart, only you took them all back within four minutes. Also, no shitting all over your previous best episodes. And consider writing real characters. “Spunky” is not a character. Neither is “the last guy only in a different outfit”.
Just my own personal preference, but - Dirty Jobs aren’t so much ‘dirty’ any more. Kind of stretching the concept, some of them… And more animal dirty jobs! There’s nothing so hilarious as Mike Rowe doing something terrible to an animal for its own good! (Maybe it should be a spinoff show, with veterinarians…oh, maybe not)
House — start making the episode of House again. You went a good four years only having one episode, which people either liked or they didn’t, and more than enough people fell into the first category to make you a smash hit. Now that you’re trying out this whole “having multiple episodes” thing, you’ve become much more hit-or-miss, and with your utter lack of depth, character development, or empathic audience response that might be used as ballast against weaker offerings, you’re starting to capsize. I realize some people laud your more wonky episodes for doing something different, but if I want something different from House, I will seek out one of the many, many, many shows out there that are not House, and watch that instead. Simple, really.
While The Shield is off the air, and no show I watch is currently doing this, it’s a very common theme and I’m going to bitch about it anyway: disempowering every single one of your characters, ruining their lives beyond repair, and turning them all into depressed loathsome amoral jerks who hate each other, is not interesting. In fact, it is the exact opposite of that. If I wanted to watch a bunch of mopey assholes with no real power to do anything about their terrible situations, I’d go bar-hopping. (See also Buffy: Season Seven.)
Spartacus. Lighten it up!Dump the explicit violence, keep all the gladiatorial combat but dump the gross aspects, make it all about cool moves with the weapons and so forth. Keep the T&A, of course, in fact, ramp it up by keeping the slavegirls all naked, all the time, even when they aren’t having sex, which they should be doing a lot. But most of all, lighten the tone. Turn Batiatus into a more of a comic book villain, lots of implausible schemes and so forth, with his wife Lucy Lawless aiding him so they are kind of a, well, Roman Boris and Natasha, only working for themselves. Bring in a character like the detective from “Age of Treason” (a movie about the equivalent of a private investigator set in Roman times) to add some spice and humor to the plot. Have some fun with it!
GLEE- keep it light. We mainly watch it for the music and the comedy anyway, don’t preach to us about bullying and teen pregnancy and all that. More skin, more music, less “special episodes of Blossom” and less “this episode devoted to the music of _____” eps (because if we don’t like that singer we don’t like the episode). Let Kurt get laid as I think it’ll make him a lot happier and I’d kind of like to watch.
I have no interest in chicks, of any ethnicity. How about putting some more ordinary looking women into shows, for the women viewers to feel good about?
Law & Order: Bring back the original series, dump most of the spinoffs. If we absolutely MUST have SVU, get rid of the female detective. I’m tired of watching her Empathize with the victims. I don’t object to her because she’s female, and I’d be happy to see another female detective. But I want to watch a cop who is a COP, not a nanny.