Not all sitcoms do. Dick van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore stayed pretty fresh right up to the end.
New characters can help, but they usually hurt.
Resolving tension usually hurts - like Rhoda getting married. Max and 99 getting married.
And mostly I agree it is running out of ideas natural for the characters and situations. You see this by the writers resorting to the standard sitcom plot devices, often stuff like “Will John leave and move to Peoria?”
More for serialized shows, but I can’t imagine the pain of trying to write stories when you’re not even sure if you’ll get renewed for the next season or not. You either plan it out way ahead and pray everything goes okay or write some sort of pseudo-finale in case your show gets killed. Then if not you have to swerve back, “Haha! Just kidding guys.”
I agree with this and the rest of your post, but there’s also different audience expectations. If you change it up people who liked it the way it was will complain. If you don’t change it different people will cry creative stagnation. Screwed either way.
Me, I generally prefer successful shows to stay the way they are and run that train until the wheels fall off. My friend is the opposite. He liked Arrested Development at first but quit after s2. He said it got too boring because the characters have the same jokes over and over, like Tobias being awkwardly in the closet and a terrible actor or the cousin incest jokes. But I could watch that forever.
It is #3, but in more ways than that. Character development of any kind is bad for comedies. A show gets to be long running in the first place by having the right formula, situation and characters. Changes are rarely an improvement.
I think your first reason is not as big of a deal as you might think, unless there were wholesale changes on the writing staff, and no writers came forward between one season and the next. I don’t know how common that is, but if it did happen, i think it could possibly give the show a fresh new set of ideas, so instead of hurting the quality, i think it’s also possible that the quality could improve. I think the second reason is the biggest reason… Writers are only human, and eventually everyone seems to run up against the idea wall.
So here are my reasons:
An example of this is Julia Louise Dreyfus of Seinfeld. She has an annoying habit of jutting her bottom jaw outward when she speaks. Usually at the end of a sentence of a point she’s making, the lower teeth make their appearance, and it drives me crazy. Once i start noticing stuff like that, the show loses its appeal. If you need a soecific example, in the YADA YADA show, she volunteers that she yada yada’ed over sex. When Jerry says "but you yada yada’ed over the best part, she says “no, I mentioned the bisque.” And out comes the lower jaw and teeth.
Characters age. Children shows inevitably suffer this, and almost ever successful show that has children in it tries to inject some lame child actor into the series in a lame attempt to keep the “family” element of the show alive. They NEVER work. Pick your favorite, from Cousin Oliver in the Brady Bunch, to that little kid (Olivia?) they brought on Cosby, to (andy?) on Family ties, to that grubby kid (seven?) on married with children.
The audience changes, and therefore tastes change. The only shows that seem to make it over multiple generations, and there aren’t that many, are cartoons like the Simpsons. The characters don’t age at all, and they don’t really change either. It keeps the viewer in the same world for 30 minutes once a week, and that’s not such a a bad thing. But humans change, and viewers change too, so when Roseanne decided to change the characters into lottery winners instead of the lower middle class working folks, a large part of their audience couldn’t identify with them and they left.
Many changes cannot be avoided, so the downward death spiral for almost every show is inevitable. But the single biggest reason to me is that writers just run out of fresh ideas.
[quote=“Polerius, post:1, topic:672125”]
[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][/QUOTE]
Often true, but not really true in HIMYM, and in Barney’s case, the character has actually become less cartoonish and quirky as the show went on.
Anyways, I imagine a lot of it is just a selection effect. If the later seasons of a Sitcom were good, they wouldn’t be the later seasons, since the show would keep getting renewed and they’d be the middle seasons.
But Frasier was consistently good for its entire run. Yes, it lost a little something when Niles and Daphne finally started boning, but it was still one of the best shows around.
As for sitcoms in general, a lot of shows lose their steam because they’re too focused (partially or wholly) on young kids, and then the kids grow up and stop being cute.
I think Frazier mainy benefitted from the jeopardy effect. By being after brain dead shows like friends people felt smart. I believe they were cancelled soon after moving out of the must see tv Thursday slot. I would also disagree that they were brilliant. Frazier was a stereotypical academic, miles was a pansy, every show was about Frazier getting his comeuppance or miles getting humiliated.
FWIW Frasier moved off Thursdays in its second season. I would submit it was a show that wasn’t afraid to have its characters be smart. Most shows run from that.
Money, mostly. Most any concept for a show is going to have limited potential for story ideas, but when you get a hit the studio/network make the creative people produce more. Either the show gets stale, starts repeating itself, or just plain goes off the rails. Instead of Ted taking a season to find his wife or Earl clearing the list in a couple of years, the goalposts are moved again and again. Then the ratings dip, cast members start champing at the bit to do something else before they can only play sitcom moms and dads, and you get a crappy, rushed final season that’s part goodbye and part last-ditch money-grab by everyone involved.
The thing about family shows is that many of them start with the premise that this is a family of well-meaning, good-hearted people doing the best they can. The adults do the best they can at their jobs. The parents do they best they can raising their kids. The kids do the best they can to grow up and be good with only humorous mishaps, not real trouble.
But the characters (all of them, not just the kids) get older, and this has to pay off. When the children move up to the next level of education, they should be the best students, the most popular, and the most outstanding in activities/sports, right? Since they were raised by such awesome parents. Or if they’re entering the working world, they should be the best in their field immediately. And the adults, who’ve been shown to be so earnest, should either get promoted, or start their own business and be hugely successful at that right out of the gate.
And that’s a bit hard to believe. In fact, it’s kind of sickening sometimes. Which is why I prefer shows like Always Sunny, where you know going in that the characters are never going to make anything of themselves.
Many more sitcoms fail and die than survive. The few that survive do so because they managed to hit just the right blend of writing, acting, timing, chemistry between characters, etc.
The few shows that do become successful, well not every person in a show is involved with it from start to finish. Writers leave, actors leave, executives leave, etc. So the dynamics of the show can change and disturb the balance.
Writers come and go, or they run out of ideas. I’m reminded of an old cartoon where the executive is talking to a newly promoted employee, saying “Congratulations, you’ve made it to upper management and the good life! Now come up with 50 brilliant ideas a week or you’re fired.” It’s hard to come up with new plots, ideas, and dialogue constantly, while keeping true to the theme of the show and the characters.
A lot of characters change over a series. For example Amy from the Big Bang Theory had kind of “grown” and changed a lot since her introduction, she used to be a lot more analytical and “sheldon-like”. From Family Guy, Stewie and Brian’s relationship has evolved to the point where there are episodes revolving around it, and I remember their writers doing an anniversary episode and saying they never really thought about the dynamic between these 2 characters, but once they put them together, they just clicked. But just as often, the changes don’t work and people are unhappy. Adding a new character or expanding an existing character is more likely to be the death knell than a breath of fresh air.
Also, the studio themselves may interfere with the show for various reasons. There are many well known examples of this, some of which worked out well and many that didn’t.
In summary, there are a lot of things that go into making a show successful, and once you make it, it’s really tough to keep that balance going.