Castle’s female lead may be comelier (although I find Ms. Tunney not at all un-comely), BUT, the secondary female on The Mentalist (Amanda Righetti, aka Grace Van Pelt) is about as close to the perfect woman as I have ever seen!
Oh, Robin Tunney is quite the cutie; it’s just that the brief snippets I have seen of the Kate Beckett actress show her to be an absolute knockout.
As for Amanda Righetti – sorry, not seeing her as actually hot. I’m sure she has a nice body (not that the series shows it off, which I am actually glad for); certainly her clavicles are nice. But her face is just…so so … and she doesn’t rev my motor.
Oh I’m with you there. She is amazing. And her husband is some ugly shlub who is my age. Go figure.
As for the Mentalist, I’ll spoiler since it seems a few in this thread are catching up with the series:
I thought the Red John story came to a nice well done conclusion with Jane killing him (Bradley Whitford). Coming back into the next season and finding out that Jane didn’t think it was Red John. Arc continues. I lost interest in Red John after that.
So there’s hope for me yet?
YAY!!!
In The Mentalist and Castle, I hate, HATE, HATE the story arc. Both seem to be dreamed up by failed soap writers. Worse, they seem to take us away from the very thing that made us like the show in the first place.
B5 is what came to mind immediately for me, and the threat of cancellation forcing JMS to wrap it up in S4. These days when a “season” can be nine episodes, it’s a miracle there are any arcs at all.
What was the first series to start using arcs? At the time B5 aired I remember being astonished at such a concept, but I was in my twenties and pretty dumb so it may not have been the first.
From the series I’ve seen, BSG was the most successful at utilizing their arc. They must have had a very firm commitment from the network.
I would disagree with this. I think that the key thing is that at the beginning of a show, the writers have a clear idea of the main players, their motivations, and to a lesser extent what resources they have at their disposal. They can of course obfuscate some or many of those details from the viewer, so long as they have things in order behind the scenes. Battlestar Galactica and The X-Files ended up having unsatisfying resolutions largely because while the heroes had well defined motivations, their antagonists did not. Their motivations were given more or less retroactively to fit (often poorly) with what came before. If you have an ending predetermined from the start, though, that can be massively restrict a show’s flexibility. You can’t get rid of an actor who isn’t working out or drop a boring plotline if they’re central to the ending of the series, after all.
White Collar does the arc thing right. Each episode moves the arc along, and most of the threads of an arc are wrapped up each season, with maybe just one or two left hanging to help form the next seasons arcs. This is far better then Castle, or most other procedurals, where they milk a single arc for multiple seasons with little or no progress on it each episode.
I really liked DS9 as well. They struck a good balance between episodic episodes and arc episodes, with the setting and character changes even in the episodic episodes effecting the show.
And they did something I’m not sure I’ve seen anyone do since. That is: have a really large stable of recurring guest-characters that would keep recurring and developing their own arcs through entire seasons or even the entire course of the show. I think that did a lot to make the course of the series seem “real”, and I wish other shows would pick up on it.
You need some kind of maguffin to drive a procedural show into interesting directions, but I do agree that sustaining a thin mystery too long can get frustrating. I think the conclusion of Monk’s arc should’ve been a warning sign that you shouldn’t build them up to ridiculous proportions that won’t satisfyingly pay off.
The head honcho at The Mentalist swears the team is going to make a big breakthrough on the Red John case this season. (I hope that he doesn’t mind if I decide I’m NOT going to hold my fucking breath on that one.) I don’t really hate the Red John mytharc so much as I marvel at the breathtakingly wide difference between how much the head honcho imagines I care about it and how much I actually do. He’ll look at a Red John-based episode and say, “This is the heart of the series,” while I’ll look at the same episode and say, “Jesus Christ, not this shit again.”
Agree that Red John has become too mythologically powerful, and that that story arc should be wrapped up. What I like most about the show is the dissection of the con artist techniques of manipulation. And that, even though Jane usually behaves obnoxiously, he has a good heart underneath, and mostly improves the lives of the victims and even those of random bystanders. He could keep working with the CBI after the Red John arc is wrapped up because he finds it entertaining, and it keeps his active mind engaged.
Hated the Castle arc…that show needs to stay as a light-hearted romantic comedy with mystery.
NCIS does story arcs pretty well – they are mostly wrapped up in a few episodes or within a season. They may come up again in later years, but in a way natural to the characters.
I think a good thing to do is to have a secondary character maintain the arc. Like on Royal Pains – you have Boris with his clandestine trips to Cuba or wherever and his possibly sinister Euro connections which may explode into a !conspiracy!, but Boris is not around all the time, and the main characters aren’t saddled with this shit on an ongoing basis like Beckett is on Castle. “Oh, I’d love to have a normal life, if only I could figure out who killed my mother . . .”
Notice how much better this week’s episode was, without any arc, without the Captain, without the family…just the two couples and their problems. Plus Beckett in just a bra! And a line that proves ABC doesn’t have a Standards & Practices department any more.
I am now convinced, after said assassionation, that they are just making it up as they go along. I still watch it tho because I love the characters.
Yeah. I mean, I’d watch Burn Notice if it were just 42 minutes of Bruce Campbell drinking mojitos.
I’m Sorry. I had no idea you were such a fan of Evan Almighty.
I was thinking of the interminable “Rory gets a rich boyfriend/drops out of college/moves in with her grandparents” arc. I was cool with other character stuff and don’t really think of that as “arc”, but that one felt like it was, and it would have been better dealt with in just a couple episodes. It went on too long and made me hate Rory a little bit, whereas before I quite liked her character.
True enough.
I agree with both of these points.
Well don’t keep us in suspense man, what naughty things did ABC let the characters say? (I don’t watch Castle on a regular basis)
It was a line that probably sounded ok on paper:
*Castle: “She’s like the Terminator of sexpots.”
**Beckett: *“What, she just keeps coming?”
I agree–they do a really good job of mixing the main arc in with the episodic stories.
Breaking Bad is all arc, and it’s one of the greatest shows ever, IMO. It remains to be seen if the conclusion will live up to the journey, but I have faith.
Fringe is an interesting example, as an X-Files grandchild. It started off with fairly episodic, Monster-of-the-Week stories, and they were very well done. It was a good show as it was. But it has become almost entirely “arc” and I think it is much better for it. (I know peoples’ mileage varies on this.) Of course, its ratings are abysmal and perhaps it might have been able to draw more viewers and a longer run with episodic stories, but then again maybe it wouldn’t have. As it is, we are getting a great multi-season arc and–hopefully–a satisfying conclusion.