I think a lot of sitcoms get worse as the seasons pass. The current poster-boy for this is How I Met Your Mother.
I just saw a 2005 episode (before I started watching the series, so I’m not biased towards those early episodes) and it is so much better than the latest episodes it’s unbelievable.
What are some causes for this?
[ol]
[li]The original writers left[/li][li]The original writers stayed, but ran out of funny things for the characters to do[/li][li]The writers think “If quirk A makes character X funny to the viewers, then taking quirk A to extremes is hilarious” and so slowly start expanding the quirks of characters to the point where they become too unrealistic to be funny.[/li][li]All of the above[/li][li]Some other reasons?[/li][/ol]
I think reason #3 may be the main reason, with a sprinkling of reasons 1 and 2.
When the series (pl.?) start, the characters haven’t found their footing yet and they kind of bumble around. You can see this in the earliest episodes of *Frasier *and Modern Family. And then everyone seems to find their niche and, if the writers are good and the ensemble is good, there is a golden period where things really click.
Some of the “middle” episodes of *Frasier *are brilliant-- same with Will & Grace.
And then… someone somewhere wants to shake things up. So two of the characters fall in love, or have a baby, or both… or they get married to someone else (the whole Leo thing on W&G was just a stupid detour) or some other outside influence is introduced and it all starts to fall apart. Sometimes this includes jumping the shark.
I think that most shows decline in quality in later seasons, not just sitcoms. The American TV model is designed to stretch out shows for as long as possible so advertising dollars can be raked in as long as possible. By the time a one-hour show has reached 100 episodes, they’ve done approximately 66 hours worth of storytelling. If a movie franchise made it to 33 installments, do you think all of them would be good?
Most stories run out of steam eventually. It would be better quality-wise if shows were allowed to bow out before they reached that point, but it rarely happens.
Cast expansion, especially in animated shows where you don’t need to put another real person on the payroll. “If people love this one-note character pipe in a line twice a season, they’d LOVE to see entire episodes revolve around him!”
I guess that’s partially a result of “running out of funny things” for the main cast and the auxiliary cast so they start milking the D-list cast for ideas.
In real life people change and evolve with time. Real life can be boring. So a particular setup that works brilliantly because of temporary tensions and alignments ( romantic tension being by far the most common ) becomes unstable and untenable over time. Sometimes the tensions are wrapped up and that lack means a loss of the same spark that made the show work. But far more often writers, realizing where their bread and butter is, draaaggggg out tensions in increasingly unrealistic ways or try to create new tensions to replace the old by increasingly ridiculous contrivances. And in the simplest sitcoms ( especially older ones ) they just have nobody ever really change in any meaningful way, which after awhile becomes stale.
A series with many seasons started good, almost by definition. (If it started out as crap, it’s not likely to have survived long.) So if it changes, where does have to go but down? And once it goes down, it’s likely to be canceled before it has a chance to go back up.
There are some story arcs you can only tell once. So you have to choose between resolving the story arc and doing something new, or you have to drag the story arc out so long it gets a little silly. Either choice has the potential go wrong or alienate current viewers. (For examples: Grey’s Anatomy ran out of combinations of characters who could commit infidelity with each other and had to start recycling affairs. Moonlighting dragged out the romantic tension for so long that they really lost the window for resolving it in a satisfactory way. Sex and the City went from a funny story about single ladies to a downer drama about married life.)
With regards to HIMYM, I thought season 7 was terrible, but season 8 really brought it back on track. Probably because they thought for a long time that it was going to be the last season so they took steps to start moving the storyline back to its origins. We just finished watching it on Netflix and thought it was hilarious.
Anyway, with regards to the question, actors are often tired of their roles, or have other commitments (or could have other commitments if it weren’t for the show), and it shows in how they just check out and phone it in.
I think it is because of the economics and decision making of TV series production.
If a show is successful now, then it has another season or two in it that are a better bet than the average new show, even if those seasons turn out to be inferior.
The same rule applies throughout the lifetime of a show. That creates an economic incentive not to end on a high note but run every show into the ground eventually.
Flanderization is another reason. Joey from Friends is an example of this. He started out about as smart as anyone else in the group, making wisecracks just like Chandler, but then as the years went on he got dumber.
Tv tropes has the idea of where a show finds its voice: growing a beard, and where it starts to decline: jumping the shark. Fans of a show tend to identify thses two points.
Yep, and then they got a 9th season and appear to be stretching Barney & Robin’s wedding weekend out over an entire season. I’ll admit the result is a lot better than it sounds. Starting in season 6Stargate SG1 had the unique problem of the producers being told the season would be the last, given time wrap up story arcs and write a proper finale, then having it renewed for another season. The last 2 seasons are practically a spinoff.
It is all of the above I think. What I find interesting though is it seems many long running shows get tired and sag for a few seasons but then in their final season get a second wind and end up providing a good final season. Frasier is a good example of this, I think. The Office as well.
I think it’s mostly just running out of ideas for the characters. With an ensemble show, the writers can stretch it out a little by focusing on different characters, but eventually you have to resolve, for example, whether Ross and Rachel will ever get together, or when Ted meets the Mother.
The show runner can have the idea of the show in his head for several months or even years before he finds someone to make it. The whole time he’s honing that first arc to perfection, everything fits together. So season 1 is awesome. But oh crap, now it’s popular and he has to make another arc? Well maybe he had all these tertiary ideas floating around in his head and he can cobble together a passable season 2. But now what?
'Spose you could just say that’s running out of ideas, but I think that’s why there can be a noticeable drop from that first season. I think that’s what happened to Homeland.
I think a number of these factors come back to a foundational issue: one of the cornerstones of humor is surprise. In the early seasons, characters are still establishing themselves, and they have lots of room to do and say things that surprise the viewers. Eventually, however, the characters become too well-defined–whatever odd things they do have become “normal” to the audience for that character. If the character reacts to something in his normally abnormal way, it’s no longer surprising, so a lot of the humor is lost. If he does something really unexpected, it’s likely to be taken as being out of character, which tends to bother fans. The writers are hemmed in on both sides, and that sweet spot where the character does something that is a logical extension of his persona, but that the viewers never thought of, becomes harder and harder to hit without reusing old material.
Writers fight this by pushing the characters to be more extreme versions of themselves, introducing new characters, and putting the characters in more unbelievable situations, among other ways. None of these work well in the short term, but some of them can improve the situation if given time to mature. Build up to a new situation, introduce a new character gradually, let an existing character experience some character “growth”, and you plant material for future seasons.
