RenOS
Reality is that which will always eventually assert itself
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User ID: 2051
RenOS
Reality is that which will always eventually assert itself
5d ago
Yeah, struggling on the finish line is common, and mystery shows are the worst offenders. Some shows & movies are great and clearly originally planned as a one-off initially, and then unexpected success results in a bad case of sequelitis. First three seasons of Supernatural, for example.
Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood is imo rightfully one of the highest-rated animes. Very good, self-contained story from start to finish, with minimal fillers throughout. Whatever you might think of the genre in general, this is how it's done.
Avatar: The Last Airbender has a weak-ish start and a few fillers inbetween, but the ending lands. People have already mentioned Gravity Falls, but that is definitely another one.
Blackadder is mainly episodic comedy, but it does not fumble the ending, neither inside the seasons, nor the last season.
There are also a decent number of animes with only 10-20 episodes, but I think that's not what you had in mind when asking the question.
It seems we're talking a bit past one another. I'm not really talking about episodic fillers, though of course those can also be a problem. To me the entire premise of the third and fourth season felt tacked on in the typical style of how tv shows always have to expand the scope from personal adventures to grand, world-saving heroism when they run out of interesting small-scope ideas.
To elaborate a bit (spoiler, obviously): The original premise of the first season was about how the four thought they were sent mistakenly to heaven, but actually it's hell and they're instead supposed to be mentally torturing each other. Then we also find out in the second season that despite getting rebooted over and over, they always find out the truth and in addition, they actually become better people. They then appeal their case to a judge. And ... that's actually already a good story. Imo they should have simply gotten into limbo or maybe even heaven, that's it, with the implication that appeals along these lines are already not terribly uncommon. But finding out that nobody has been to heaven in ages due to an extremely simplistic, stupid point systems was not only completely unnecessary to the original idea, from the start it was imo a bad and rather arrogant premise. This is compounded by how it's solved by exactly those four humans who originally were extremely vapid and self-involved. Them eventually improving to a point that they don't belong into hell anymore is a nice idea; Turning them into moral geniuses that re-design the entire system is, again, stupid and arrogant. The ending of "heaven gets boring, so suicide" is also, again, unnecessary to THAT premise.
Otherwise, I unsurprisingly strongly agree with your earlier post. I'm a solidly in the technofuturist transhumanist "good-things-are-good" camp, and I have nothing but scorn for the showrunner's values. But even independent of that, I think that just keeping the story tightly focused on the original premise would have been much better. If anything, I'd have preferred a few seasons of episodic hijinks along that line to the ever-increasing scope we got instead.
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