Start with a well-made show with the intriguing premise that a diverse group of ordinary people discover they have super-hero-like powers. Make the characters relateable and mostly likeable. Include a few mysterious characters and a great villain. Craft an intelligent, complex season-long story arc with a coherent beginning, middle, and satisfying end.
Then, from the second season on, change “complex” to “utterly friggin’ incomprehensible.” Add a shitload of characters who don’t help to advance the plot. Make most of the cast related somehow. Change bad guys to good guys and vice versa. Liberally sprinkle in “alternate timeline” plot devices so that things that happened before didn’t really happen, and people who died aren’t really dead, thus removing any real stakes.
The West Wing: Let’s get rid of the creator/writer - we can sail this ship ourselves! Everyone loved the way he had everyone pedoconference - let’s ramp that up. And to emphasize the seriousness of it, let’s have no one talk above a whisper. And turn off all those lights! This isn’t some place where people are expected to work - this is a serious, somber environment, and the viewer needs to be emersed in that! No more fun, no more light-hearted banter to counteract the main story lines.
See, I was confused about waiting a few months for a half season. With The Sopranos, I think they went something like 13 months between two seasons once, but we DID have an out of place classic rock song.
Sorry for the hijack, but these books are wonderful. If you like historical fiction, procedurals or are a Sinophile you should try to find as many of this series as you can.
Cal, did you know that the character of Judge Fang in Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age was based on Judge Dee?
No.
I have the entire Van Gulik series, along with his “Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee”, which isn’t part of the series. I also have Deception, which is a non-van Gulik book with Dee, still as a detective. There are two other authors – one French, one Chinese – that have written Dee stories, but they haven’t been translated into English yet.
I’ve always suspected that Judge Dredd was influenced by Judge Dee, myself.
The X-Files is probably the masterwork of how to ruin a show.
Take two popular characters with great chemistry.
Take out one popular character and replace with a heretofore unknown boring character.
Then replace the other popular character with another unknown character.
Also, “resolve” the major plot arc of the series (missing sister) with a completely nonsensical and patronizingly, insultingly stupid finish that just ticks off everybody who ever liked the show.
??? I know it was a cash grab, but what the heck? They might have kept a hold on a successful franchise if they hadn’t driven it into the ground so badly. Maybe then they would have kept some decent talent to write movie screenplays that were, you know, not shitty.
Mulder’s sister was never really kidnapped. Instead, her soul was whisked away by star fairies in the splitsecond before she was kidnapped because star fairies hate it when people have to be in pain.
Read this. It completely contradicted the clues in previous seasons… so much for the conspiracy, “the truth is out there”. It also didn’t really resolve much of anything.
She was getting some sort of tests, for some reason. The Cigarette Smoking Man was involved in some unspecified way. The tests hurt so much that angels, I mean “walk-ins”, took her away to a beautiful place forever.
Apparently the fans of the show were mistaken for 5 year olds who wanted to know what happened to their pet fish that flopped out of the bowl. Corny, out of theme and just plain bad.
[spoiler]The whole thing was resolved by Mulder having this “vision” that resolved everything. However, this vision contradicted his earlier vision of his dead father, who said that his sister was alive [specifically, he said she wasn’t among the dead]. So why is this vision credible when the other one clearly wasn’t? She either died in 1979, as was “revealed”, or she wasn’t dead when Mulder met his father in his vision with the Native Americans.
You’d think meeting the soul of your dead father who gave you critical information about the central quest of your entire life would prove memorable. Apparently not, since Mulder didn’t consider this at all and promptly completely abandoned looking into his sister’s disappearance.[/spoiler]
I’d say stop pushing the characters to grow and change with the show. I am thinking of MASH, which, while it was not exactly ruined, did suffer from Hawkeye becoming rigid in his righteous indignation. Hot Lips was allowed to grow, though, so there is that.
Another show that got lazy was Quincy (yes, I’m old and don’t watch any TV nowadays. This is back from when I did watch TV). Quincy also did righteous indignation to a fine art–and it got really old…
Anytime there is romantic tension between 2 characters, don’t marry them off. Have them have times of “togetherness” and times of isolation, but marrying them off changes the entire dynamic and usually doesn’t serve the show. Can’t really think of an example, but I’m sure they’re out there.
I don’t know if I’d call it a ‘great’ TV series, but I direct your attention to the remake of The Bionic Woman. What slim interest this series held for me can be summed up in three words: troublesome. little. sister. Is there any lazier way out for a writer trying to think of things that will mess up the heroine’s life? The dumb bitch did nothing but drag down the heroine, get in the way, get in trouble and have to be bailed out, ‘act out’, buddy up to the villain, get kidnapped and need rescue, etc. etc. etc. Please! No one is interested in the trials and tribuulations of the troublesome little sister! (see also: Jericho). Send her to a foster home, ship her off to Aunt Gert in Omaha, give her a one-way bus ticket to Orlando - just please get rid of this useless twit.
I guess I had some of the details backwards. She was taken by the star fairies in 1979 (even though other characters confirmed she was alive in later years) after the aliens had performed a variety of tests on her and they took her soul and her body.
Wikipedia lists all of the problems with Samantha’s story…
