Recently I discovered The Mentalist on TNT, and I thought about making this thread an insane Rhymer-rant in which I feigned fury at all of you for not telling me about the show earlier and swore revenge on at least sixty-eight of you. Then I got bored, and I decided I’d rather talk about TV shows and long-term story arcs, as Mentalist is a good opening for that.
For anyone non in the now, The Mentalist’s main character is one Patrick Jane, a reformed fake psychic & con man now working as a consulting detective. Jane abandoned the con game when his wife & child were murdered by a serial killer yclept Red John, whose attention Jane had drawn by doing a phony reading on television, and whilel Jane clearly wants to atone for his past misdeeds, his primary motivation for working with the police is to hunt down Red John and give him a nice lead injection in the forehead.
The show’s in its fifth season, and Jane still hasn’t caught his family’s killer. I, for one, think they’d have been better off having him do so early on. The problem with Red John is that he’s so improbably powerful that he breaks the suspension of disbelief. He has multiple acolytes willing to kill and die for him; he is always ten steps ahead of the police and two steps ahead of Jane; he once brainwashed a woman into believing he was a ghost. For Red John to do all the things he does, he’d have to be Professor X, MacGyver, and Jack Bauer all rolled into one. Watching the show on DVD, I grew to dread the arc episodes.
But that’s just me. Is The Mentalist better for its continuing central story? Worse? What other TV shows can you think of that are significantly helped or harmed by their myth arcs?
BtVS and Angel were much better as arc shows than they ever were as Monster of the Week shows. OTOH, Castle has been crippled by the conspiracy arc for way too long.
The poster child for arc-bad is, of course, X-Files.
It is stating to get a little absurd. My personal theory is that “Red John” is a government conspiracy. The victims all share some rare genetic trait/defect which the government is trying to eliminate from society. No one person is the Red John. His army of assistants/lackeys/people willing to betray their friends all believe that they’re acting in the country’s best interests.
And that might well be true.
As for the OP, I grew bored with the X-Files after a while, for precisely this reason. The alien conspiracy stuff got way too paranoid; they were so advanced and obviously far ahead of Mulder and Scully; it was like the police force of Monoco trying to defeat the entire United States military.
It depends on the arc. Heroes is noted for it’s fantastic long term arc in the first season, but they didn’t know where to take the show from there and quality fell of significantly after that. Simmilarly, Smallville improved when the arcs were introduced but degenerated when they decided to make Lana Super Ninja Girl™ with special Mysterious Tattoo Powers™.
A good arc can take a show a long ways and make it more interesting over the long haul, but a lousy arc can kill a show fast. It’s one of those great balance things that most shows struggle with once they get into multiple seasons.
I have to slightly disagree with you about Buffy the Vampire Slayer – not because I dispute your basic thesis, but because I neglected to make a slight distinction in the OP. *Buffy *had season-long arcs, but not a long term one; there was no central mystery or quest Buffy was on that the majority of the series. It is a multi-season arc that I wanted to talk about, but since I did not make that clear in the OP, it is reasonable for responders to talk about single-season arcs.
I’m of two minds about Angel. My favorite season of that show – hell, of any show ever – was that show’s fourth season, which was basically one long-ass episode and which also tied all the random crap that had happened to the FangGang over the years into a single plot; but I think the best episodes of the series were three or four of the monster-of-the-week episodes from the first two years.
I don’t watch Castle because of my Nathan Fillion boycott, which frankly I just made up but which is as good a reason as any so I have decided to make it policy. What I have heard of it makes it sound quite similar to The Mentalist, though (except that Castle seems not to be the asshole that Jane superfically is, and clearly the female lead is comelier). The only X-Files episodes I ever watched in total was a non-arc episode, the one when Scully (Mulder? the guy, anyway) met the genie; it was mildly amusing, but otherwise I can’t comment.
Skald - I always knew we were on similar wavelengths. Not too many months ago I started a very similar thread. If my searching/linking mojo is working, here it is
For me, the cardinal sin for a sitcom is to be not funny. It doesn’t matter if you have an episode that has lots of character development – if it’s not funny then that’s not a good episode. I’m thinking of shows like Friends (I don’t care if Ross ends up with Rachel or if Monica and Chandler have a baby) and Futurama (I don’t care if Fry ends up with Leela).
Of course, you also have the definitive arc shows like BSG, B5 and Lost, which exist solely for the arc. Each had a distinctly different outcome. BSG pulled off the conclusion to its arc “successfully,” in that the conclusion fit the parameters of the show as defined by the creators. Some of us may have felt the the ending was less than successful, of course. Babylon 5 suffered from network jerking around, but was quite successful at integrating the arc into each season and concluding things in a satisfactory manner that fit with the thrust of the show.
Lost was us all getting fucked over by the producers and writers, may they all rot in Perdition.
I like having the Red John thing in the background, but I also like that arc episodes aren’t that frequent (so far, just on Season 2, 4 or 5 episodes after a certain :eek: incident in the CBI offices, the new director lady has just come in - I hope it doesn’t get more dominant)
In contrast, I really like the arcs for Supernatural and generally prefer those to the MoTW episodes there.
Gilmore Girls, could have done without any arc stuff.
Buffy, of course, worked because of the season arcs but I could have stood to see a multi-season arc, yet conversely I would actually have preferred Angel to be less arc-y at the end. Ditto X-Files.
Scooby-Do could seriously have used an arc. Talk about your Monster-of-the Week shows.
The central story of The Mentalist was a boon in the beginning, but now Red John is a comic book style super-villain in a theoretically mundane crime procedural. I don’t know whether to blame the producers or the writers, but this arc has definitely become a failure.
The conspiracy arc on Castle had a similar failing. They kept building up the conspiracy with characters saying things like “This is so much bigger than you know/can imagine” and omnipresent assassins.* Then it turned out to be the work of one U.S. senator angling for the presidency. They had a two-parter that had a far more impressive conspiracy. :smack:
In writing this, you were, of course, not aware of Rhymer Rule # 19834 (prohibiting any express or implied criticism of Lauren Graham and/or Amy Palladino) because I just made it up. But the rule is retroactive and violating it is punishable by being empty threats and slanderous cants, so I will expect you to apologize or face being stung so many times by radioactive bees until you are exposed as a murderous fascist.
I don’t think you can eliminate the GG arcs and have it be the same show. They’re all character arcs anyway: just the things that are going on in Lorelei & Rory lives (and to a lesser extent the lives of Sookie, Luke, Lane, Paris, & Emily as well), rather than being an ongoing quest. Character arcs bother me not; they’re the best sort.
On review, I’d say that while Buffy had no myth arc, it did have one multi-season one: seasons five and six are pretty much one long story.
I feel like I should say something in praise of Velma and critical of Daphne here, but I’m feeling lazy. Somebody else do it.
I agree with the assessments of both the Mentalist and Castle, I’ll also throw in Burn Notice, even though it’s kind of a stupid show, they keep getting to the head of the conspiracy only to have guy get killed by the “real” conspiracy head. Seriously, this last time it looked like some rogue unknown agent type pulling all the strings for his own personal benefit (which hardly made any sense) and now some mystery man offed him just when he got caught.
Now that I think about it the Castle thing is really starting to piss me off
Really, nobody could have just said “so and so took money, and now he wants to be president” Nobody could have just copied and mailed the documents to a reporter or two, once the murders started? What a crappy resolution to the big conspiracy.
I agree that the Red John stuff got ridiculous. There have been other TV shows with the omniscient serial killer but The Mentalist is one of the biggest offenders. It would have been a pretty good end to the arc with the episode when Jane killed the guy who was supposedly Red John. The show could have easily continued on with the case of the week and maybe sometimes showing Jane feeling a little aimless now that he has had his revenge.
But instead of leaving the somewhat ballsy season finale alone and continuing from that, the next season started with that wasn’t actually Red John that Jane killed and it was too ridiculous for me and I gave up watching the new episodes. I might watch the reruns on TNT, but I just got too annoyed by the show to bother keeping up with new episodes.
X-Files ‘arc’ would have been better had it actually been treated as an arc, rather than a thrown-together hash of whatever ideas happened to cross their minds when they wrote a mythology episode.
I think that the criterion is, in order for a series-long arc to work well, the end of the show has to be planned right from the beginning. Take Babylon 5, for instance: JMS knew going in that the show was only going to last 5 seasons, and after that, the story would be wrapped up, and it would end. But when you’ve got a series-long arc without that level of preplanning, you end up having to either stretch the arc implausibly, like the OP is complaining about in The Mentalist, or you have to put in a lot of low-quality filler, like in the post-rescued-from-cancellation 5th season of Babylon 5.
I also think that most TV shows would be improved by use of the word “yclept”.
Returning to the topic, I think Star Trek: Deep Space Nine got much better once they brought in the Dominion (at the end of the second season, I think), and slowly the show became the story of the Alpha Quadrant’s version of World War II. Makes me forgive the loads & loads of characters, something I ordinarily dislike. By contrast, Voyager was ultimately an artistic failure* because it refused to commit to what should have been its believable arc: the slow breakdown of the ship & crew as they attempt (and fail) their hopeless voyage home.
