Question: Do all series go downhill

Movies, novels - Seems to me the more sequels, the worse a “franchise” gets. The authors are no longer restrained by publishers and/or editors and the books get longer and longer, duller and duller. The movies never (well, almost never; there was a thread that listed some movie sequels that triumphed) retain the freshness of the original.

So, if we go into a bookstore or video store and see the numerals II, III or higher can we agree that the original was probably better?

If you disagree, can you tell me a book series that got better as it went on?

Note: I’m disqualifying Lord of the Rings, book or movie, as it was meant to be one long story.

I agree with the OP. With very few exceptions (X-Men 2) I have very bad luck with sequels. I thought Blade and Shanghai Noon were very well done, and concentrated on the character development and a coherent plot. The sequels, however, sucked. The character and plot driven gags were sacrificed in favor of a few, hurried scenes serving to set up explosions and stunts that didn’t advance the story. More and more, I’m looking forward to foreign films that show some intelligence.

Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books. Nightwatch, which is the last one published that I’ve read (I’m reading Monstrous Regiment now) was in my opinion, the best of the series, and I know I’m not alone thinking that.

While I personally liked the first couple (The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic), I know a number of people who think they were the weakest of the series.

And I’ll also throw in the True Game series by Sherri Tepper. It was 9 books, consisting of 3 trilogys. The first and third were wonderful, but the second one was kind of dull.

Beyond that, you’re mostly right.

. . . well, there was that one series about the Little Engine that Could . . .
:stuck_out_tongue:

It depends a lot on what you mean by sequels and series. I can think of a number of writers who get better with experience, though even they peak after a certain point.

Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct mysteries were basic grind-'em-out paperback originals for the first half dozen in the 1950s, but then started to dig deeper into the characters. His work in the the 1960s and 1970s was absolutely superb. Becoming a bestselling author hurt his writing. Instead of turning out perfectly-paced and plotted taut 200-page novels, he started writing bloated, padded, slow-moving 400-page books because the idiot bestseller audience wanted heft for their dollars. For whatever reason, he’s been able to shake off this curse and his recent books have been shorter and better.

Except for the last part, you can apply exactly the same scenario to a dozen or twenty other mystery writers. Dick Francis, Len Deighton, Gavin Lyall, Donald Westlake, Ross Macdonald, even Tony Hillerman.

Even before this particular bestseller syndrome kicked in, you could find this patten. Most good mystery writers who do one major character over a lifetime have a somewhat similar arc, with the first books feeling around to establish the character; the middle period being the glory days; and the last set of books a gradual diminishing from doing the same thing for too long. Pretty much any name in the field you want to pick out of a hat, from Ellery Queen to John Dickson Carr to Rex Stout has this pattern.

I use mysteries for my examples because you can see this going back to the 1920s. Until the past couple of decades, no sf writers worked over one character or setting for decades and dozens of novels. It happens a lot today, though, so I’m sure that we’ll be seeing any number of examples in the field as time goes on.

Pratchett’s example is interesting. No question that he went from mediocre to extraordinary and that he has kept up this high level of distinction. But he does it by writing several different character-based series within a larger world rather than 80 novels about one hero. We’re seeing somewhat diminishing returns with some of the series and I’d be surprised if he didn’t start introducing new series characters and more one-shots in the future.

This illustrates the huge difference between sequels and series. You can’t do anything different in a sequel. You can squeeze a lot of experiments into a series, if you’re good.

You can’t do this with movies because you’re not allowed the learning curve. Many directors obviously do get better over time, but they can’t sit on one single character.

Blackadder. IMHO, the Blackadder series generally speaking improved from season to season (most significantly from Blackadder to Blackadder II), apart from a few peak episodes (“Beer” in Blackadder II, for instance) that broke the curve by being “absolutely friggin’ awesome” instead of merely “great”.

My mystery examples have already been stolen, cruelly, by Exapno Mapcase.

I think it’s pretty common in a book series for there to be unevenness in quality, so that might mean the early books are better, the later books are, or it might mean that there isn’t a pattern at all.

I would say that long series that continue to improve are rare.

For many things I’ve noticed a tendancy for a rise in quality at the beginning, a good amount of time spent at high quality followed by a long slow decline. Calvin & Hobbes, The Far Side, Garfield, Dilbert, The Simpsons, Aqua Teens, and others all follow that in my ever so humble opinion.

There has been no decline in quality in A Song of Ice and Fire by George R R Martin. Sadly, the has been a significant decline in the speed at which said series is being written, as A Feast For Crows is now something like 2.5 years overdue, and still not done.

There are a number a series that have managed to reinvent themselves over time:

MAS*H, Cheers, Roseanne, even Gunsmoke, not to mention just about every long-running soap opera.

Whether we think they were improved by the process is a matter of opinion, but at least they weren’t the same exact thing over and over.

I would say the reason that books in a series tend to decline in quality isn’t anything nherent about sequels but rather that there are not too many authors who would quit writing at their peak. The last book in the series is usually by definition the worst one because that is the last one an author does before the public reject them.

I think it all depends on what you’re trying to do with a sequel–if you just want to capitalize on the first or actually create a new story.

That figure is somewhat inflated, as Martin never originally intended to write it. He was going to pick up the story five years later, but then halfway through writing A Dance With Dragons realised that he was having to include a very large number of flashbacks in order to explain everything and decided instead to write an extra book. Nice idea with regard to keeping the story flowing, but it meant having to write a 700-page novel mostly from scratch after having spent eight months on a different book and having to ensure that nothing he wrote for AFfC conflicts with ADwD.

I agree with your assessment of McBain. He seemed to grow board with the 87th Precinct in the 1980’s. I thought his Matthew Hope books were much better (we’ll ignore “Mary Mary”), but he has abandoned them and returned to the 87th Precinct. Part of this might be McBain’s recent bout with larynx cancer–after a brush with death, he’s returning to what he likes to do most, and what he does best.

If he continues to write until 2013, he’ll surpass P.G. Wodehouse as the author who has written about the same characters for the longest length of time.

Star Trek springs to mind. Each new series is worse than the one before and before long too many episodes are shoot em ups or techno-babble and the quality goes downhill.

Disclaimer, I am a Trekker and not a Troll

I disagree. I thought TOS was very good, even if it’s incredibly cheesy at times now. TNG? Not a fan. DS9? Back to good. Voyager? Ack. Enterprise? Never saw it.

The movies have been uneven as well. 2, 3, 4, 6 were quite enjoyable for me. The others? Not so much. Of course, I skipped two of them entirely and the only TNG character I give a damn about is Data, so I’m definitely biased.

Which touches on the fact that, oftentimes, a novel franchise gets extended past its prime because of pressures from the fans. There are numerous occasions where an author wants to put a series to an end, but gets enough of a backlash from the fans that he continues to extend it, to the detriment of the series (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes being IMO the classic example).

Why do (some) writers keep grinding out crap? Because the audience wants him to.

Star Trek has been very uneven. TOS was good, but could be rather cheesy at times. TNG was generally good, but they were at their worst whenever they tried to deal with social issues. (They usually fell flat on their faces, with the characters arrogantly dismissing 20th Century humans as stupid barbarians.) Overall, however, TNG was good.

Frankly, the series got better after Roddenberry died, because the writers didn’t have to religiously follow his neo-communist view of the future any longer.

DS9 was extremely uneven. At the beginning it was quite boring, and I soon lost interest. I returned a few seasons later, and by that time the stories were more action-oriented, and generally better. Also, we got to see something of the dark side of the Federation – Starfleet admirals abusing their positions, fear of changelings causing a histrionic “witch hunt,” and the Federation abandoning the Maquis settlers. This was good, because it no longer felt like the show was being produced by the Federation Tourism Board.

Then there was Voyager. It never really got “good.” The best episodes were only “above average.” Overall, it was quite disappointing.

I’ve never watched Star Trek: Enterprise, but from what I’ve heard it’s no better than Voyager.

By which you mean, “By that time Babylon 5’s arc was kicking off and they had something to plagiarise”.

rjung - some of the better Holmes stories postdate His Last Bow, including (IIRC) The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Sherlock Holmes, especially the Jeremy Brett BBC/PBS series, have no real decline.