This may belong in IMHO, but since it concerns the arts, I’ll put it Cafe. I’m hoping someone who has studied “theory of screenwriting” might have addressed this in school. Apologies if it needs moved.
We’ve all watched the sequel to a movie that we liked the original and came away disappointed. Its easy to write that off as “the novelty of the first movie is gone.”
But that begs the question, if we tend to get more attached to characters in a long running television series, why don’t we get more attached to them in movies? It seems like the opposite happens, like the audience gets bored with them. Is this just because of our expectations from different media?
Movies are like novels; tv shows are like comic books.
In the first set, the presumption is that a complete story arc will occur: we find out all we need to know about the characters, they solve their problems/go through their crisis/find true love, and there is a resolution that completes the emotional resonance.
In the second set (which includes mysteries with a central character and similar book-type series), we find out just bits and pieces of their lives in any given episode. The characters continually change. They may go through episodes, just as we do in life, but these don’t define them. They just pick up and keep going.
Movies and novels are heightened realities. Every scene has importance, every incident contributes to the whole. Nothing is extraneous, nothing is just life, lying around, wasting time, responding to message boards. If a scene isn’t crucial it shouldn’t be there.
That’s why sequels feel lesser. If the movie has done it’s job correctly it’s already wrung all the emotion we can give to these particular characters. Anything after that is forced and phony.
But a TV show just builds familiarity. We keep learning more as the character becomes more fully developed and three-dimensional. Even cartoonish characters have to become deeper after a few seasons or be written out altogether. Major Houlihan on MAS*H was a good example of the first, just as Major Frank Burns was of the second. The audience doesn’t want to get close to cartoons. They want to live with the characters for as long as possible.
I feel it’s more because sequels are generally just a redux of the original film. Not every sequel is of course but very few seem to expand on the first one. The studios and filmmakers like to take the easy way out, doing something fresh and original is just too hard. Most sequels probably shouldn’t be made in the first place for lack of anything new to say.
As far TV shows go, if you do the same story each and every week, you lose your audience. No matter how good the story was in the first place.
I take House as a good example. It had the same formula structure every week -
person gets sick for unknown reason,
goes to hospital,
House and other doctors look at him/her,
gets misdiagnosed,
almost dies,
House and doctors save the day.
It worked well for a few episodes but people got tired of the same story told over and over again. It might have been new diseases and new people each week but it was the same story each time. You could almost tell what’s going to happen next by looking at the clock. They changed the structure of the show somewhat and people seem to be more interested.
If a scene isn’t crucial it shouldn’t be there.