Sex AFTER “I love you”?? What Christian News Network show is this??
Some shows try to keep the sexual tension going indefinitely because finally getting together is the death knell of the sexual tension. They prolonged that on Moonlighting for an absurd amount of seasons before they finally hooked up in the final season, maybe the very final episode, I don’t quite recall.
Friends seemed to come up with a solution for what to do about sexual tension between two leads who will clearly get together at some point. Ross and Rachel hooked up relatively quickly, after a couple seasons, then broke up and the sex tension turned into ex tension for many seasons after that, until inevitably getting together again at the end.
Ted McGinley redeemed his reputation as show- killer when he joined the cast of Married With Children. It went another 7 seasons with him.
Andy Griffith too.
Barney Miller was a great show. I honestly don’t remember what the last year was like. I know I didn’t like the bad plot about Harris’ book but that may just may be me. Half the year one cast was gone by then, which forced change.
Five years is probably the optimal length for a series. It’s the next five years that are problematic.
Barney Miller finished strong with very little or no loss of quality. It is a true rarity.
I don’t think there is such a thing as “the optimal length for a series.” Any number you give is going to have plenty of counterexamples, probably in both directions.
Cool. I get to disagree with someone. Best part of my day.
That happened during the first season, and by the second season Elizabeth was an other-end-of-a-telephone-call character. Even when she and Barney separated and then they got back together, Liz did not appear (except twice in season 2, once in season 4 and once in season 5).
I’ve been watching reruns in recent months on one of those nostalgia channels, and it does hold up right until the end. But I think the last few seasons suffered from a smaller cast – only three detectives, plus Barney, and then Levitt, who was so annoying. I think the show lost a step after Jack Soo left (and died). But it didn’t succumb to any of the usual sitcom development problems because there was never any romantic interest to speak of. Only Barney was married (after Fish retired), and Wojo seemed to have tamed his libido quite a bit in the later years, without meeting and settling down with anyone. So a pure workplace comedy with a huge predominance of only one gender in the cast could be the ticket.
Hate to rain on your parade but someone agrees with you.
For the most part, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: most shows target a 5 year plot-line hoping to make it to syndication. If it’s a hit, the studio will either derail the original plotline (My Name Is Earl) or you get the sitcom version of 2nd-album syndrome, where the show flounders because they’ve already said what they wanted to.
The other part is often the actors/characters “age out.” Twenty-something behavior by people in their mid-30s is less funny, which is how Joey and Phoebe went from carefree to clownish.
I thought Mad Men was an interesting variant on this.
Don Draper was done by the end of season 4 but it soldiered on for the sake of the secondary characters .
This is the point I was going to make. It’s not an issue that characters getting married and having children will kill a show. There are popular sitcoms where the characters are single, popular sitcoms where the characters are childless couples; popular sitcoms where the characters are families with children, and popular sitcoms where the characters are divorced or widowed. Audiences seem fine with any variation on the characters’ marital status.
What audiences don’t like is change. They want to be able to tune in to any random episode and have the characters be the same as they were in every other episode.
The absolute inability to write for a female detective was always the glaring weak point of the show, which otherwise was a favorite. The attempts to shoehorn one in are an embarrassing reminder of how difficult it must have been for real-life women to enter police work (or any other type of male-dominated work).
Actually, they had one working with Wentworth. But Linda Lavin got the offer to Star in Alice and smartly took it. None of the other attempts worked out.
In fact, she was one of the only short run Detectives to be shown in the Finale. Her name never left the chalkboard. She was going to be a regular apparently when she got the better offer.
My memory tells me otherwise. We may simply disagree about her success.
Fair enough, I thought she was an excellent addition and the writers handled the real world issues involved fairly well. Right down to accidental sexism by Capt Miller of all characters.
From memory, first episode she appears in, she complains the Captain isn’t sending her out on calls (she’s right) and the captain replies with something like “We all think your a lovely cop”, he emotes a realization that he’s being an ass and insulting. He even mocks himself a little at the end of the episode when he repeats the line after she hauls in an armed robber.
Apologies, in the last 10 years I have rewatched this entire series 3 times. I consider the Hash Brownies episode one of TV’s best ever.
Another thing about the “will they won’t they” arc is that in many people’s minds, that narrative whether it leads to “yes they do” or to “nope, never gonna happen”, once the question gets a final answer, that is it. Someone is riding into the sunset. Keeping it going upends the expectation. “They lived happily ever after”, full stop, end of story, go to sleep, ANOTHER story tomorrow.
Which does not surprise me for the late 70s/early 80s. And I too find Wentworth was the best shot they took.
I feel your memory is good. Lavin only appeared in five episodes.
To be fair, they tried showing Wojo’s home life in the fifth season like they did with Barney during the first season. Apparently it was supposed to be a backdoor pilot that didn’t go anywhere.
That was cringe-making to me. I never wanted to think about Wojo’s personal life, even after it stopped being so, well, lustful.