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PaperclipPerfector  23d ago (text post)   2490 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 17, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I watched Dark this Lent and it made me wonder what series don't have a final season that doesn't struggle with the pacing.

Spoilers ahead

Everyone knows about AGoT season 8, no need to even mention it.

Breaking Bad is one of the highest-rated shows ever, but I really hated the pacing of the final season. The show has just spent two seasons dealing with Gustavo Fring, Walter White has evolved greatly as a character, but as a crime lord, he's back at square one again. But it's the final season already, so the plot shifts down two gears and accelerates greatly. By the season's midpoint and with the help of several montages, Walter White has found new associates, rebuilt his drug empire, eliminated everyone who stood in his way, earned a literal bed-sized pile of money and retired, just so we have enough episodes left for his inevitable downfall. I still have whiplash from it.

It's the same with Dark. The first season introduces time travel and scatters the cast between 2019 and 1986 and 1953. The second season introduces even more characters, adds 1920 and 2052 to the mix, along with a whole new parallel timeline in the cliffhanger without even starting to open the lineup of mystery boxes that would've made J.J. Abrams proud. Then, in the breadth of a single season, it adds one more jump into the past, shows the parallel timeline along with its parallel cast, its distaff counterpart to the main antagonist and her own goal, adds some quantum mechanics to save the protagonist, twice, and them hurriedly starts to open every remaining mystery box in a row without even explaining the logic behind them because it's running out of screen time and it still has to tell us, out of the blue, that both worlds are just the result of an experiment gone wrong and the protagonist has to go back in time in the real world to prevent them from being created altogether. The end. Don't think very hard why all these children from season 1 actually had to die.

So, is there a series that has the final season that doesn't feel either rushed or drawn out, that finishes exactly how and when it should?

I don't know how this didn't occur to me before, considering I just finished it recently. My girlfriend recommended a German black comedy series called How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast), whose fourth and final season came out last year. It concerns a recently dumped teenaged boy who, in a quest to win back his ex, starts a darkweb site to sell ecstasy in a bid to impress her. Consistently funny and engaging throughout with a cast of likeable characters, and no major drop-offs in quality from one season to the next. I will admit that the pacing in the last season felt a little rushed, but not fatally so, and the ending felt earned and satisfying. The only major downside I can see is that it's so much a product of its time that it may come off as somewhat dated ten years from now. As black comedies about unlikely drug barons go, for my money it's a better series than Breaking Bad, and I mean that without a shred of irony.

The problem with TV is that unless you have an extremely hard headed creative at the head of the show saying "this is going to run precisely this number of seasons and at the end of that we're done" and they have full backing from the money men and full buy in from the cast, you don't know in advance when the last season is. The show might lose funding, or commitment from stars or writers who want to move on to other projects, or be riven by internal conflicts that make it unworkable. And then you have to wrap it up.

And at the same time different audiences have different appetites for more seasons, at different quality levels.

I went to see a high school play recently, a production of How to Succeed in Business without really trying and on a talent level it was SPECTACULAR. I kid you not when I say that (other than casting, particularly kids in old man parts) if I had paid $100 for a ticket to see a touring company do the show, I wouldn't have expected more. But it was entirely too long. It ran over three hours. They crammed in extra dance sequences and songs, and dragged them out. And I was tired of it by the two hour mark, but at three hours most of the crowd was still screaming and whooping with joy at the spectacle. Because they were there to watch their kids or their friends or their old program, not to see a tightly paced performance. They would have cheered for another hour!

TV is the same. A casual fan, and at some level we're all casual fans compared to someone, wants a show to wrap it up; a hardcore fan wants it to keep going, they love the characters and want more of them. I want to watch another season of Mad Men only if it's .9x as good as the others, but there exists an audience that would watch ten more mediocre seasons taking us to the Reagan years if it were only .5x as good because they'd prefer half of Mad Men to all of something else.

So typically a show gets dragged out until the latter audience is too small to keep it going. So to members of the former audience it looks like it dragged on too long. That's probably as it should be from a utilitarian perspective, the existence of more bad seasons hurts me less than it helps someone who enjoys them.

AI is going to make this a nightmare. We're going to have to completely rejigger our conception of what is Canon, and what is a head-Canon, to make sense of it all.

you don't know in advance when the last season is. The show might lose funding

I'm still a big Babylon 5 fan, but I can't imagine how much better it would have been if the suits had just said "you need 5 seasons, you get 5 seasons" consistently from the start, rather than saying "we'll probably cancel you after this year" in season 4 (forcing two seasons worth of climax and denouement to be crammed into one) and then "nah, we're still on" for season 5 (which I think turned out okay in the second half, but which had an utterly disappointing first half).

Conservative estimates of when The Simpsons stopped being good put it at season five, while more generous estimates (I'm in this camp) put it around season ten. No matter how you slice it, The Simpsons has been bad for at least twice as long as it was good. It's weird to think of The Simpsons as having a net-negative impact on popular culture, with its molehill of classic episodes which left an indelible mark on the popular imagination being dwarfed by its mountain of unwatchably bad ones. But maybe I'm thinking of this wrong and entertainment is a strong-link problem, where it doesn't matter how much rough you create as long as there are a handful of diamonds scattered throughout.

The Simpsons doesn't feel like the kind of show where they kept it going because the hardcore fans want it even if the quality is declining over time. It feels like the kind of show where the population of casual fans is big enough that a critical mass will keep watching, while the original hardcore fans look on in horror as it transforms into a shell of its former self.

So what defines Hardcore vs Casual here? It seems odd to say that the casual fans are the ones who enjoy all of the output, where the hardcore fans are the ones who only like the best output.

Certainly in baseball, the fans who only watch the playoffs, or only watch games featuring A+ opponents, or only watch in years where the team is good, or will watch a game if it's on but won't watch every game those are the casual fans. Where the fans who watch every inning of every game, the guy who use to insist on driving the dump truck at work for afternoon games so he could listen on the radio, the fans who watch two sub .500 teams in August throw out their fifth starters with first pitch at 10:05pm. Those are the hardcore sickos.

It seems odd to say that the casual fans are the ones who enjoy all of the output, where the hardcore fans are the ones who only like the best output.

By "hardcore fan", I'm referring to people who make a point of watching every episode when it comes out, buy the merch, know the lore etc. By "casual fan", I'm referring to people who will watch an episode when they're bored at home flicking through channels, but won't go out of their way to watch every episode. The impression I get is that the people who watch newly-released episodes of The Simpsons are mostly in the latter camp. I imagine if you surveyed people "in the last year, have you watched at least one episode of The Simpsons?", the number of people who would answer in the affirmative would be massive compared to the number of people who would answer positively to the question "have you watched every episode of the most recent season of The Simpsons?"

To illustrate, imagine you have a show with a hardcore fanbase of 1 million people, and a casual fanbase of 50 million people. The hardcore fans make a point of watching every single episode within a day or two of release, while the casual fans only watch the show when they're aimlessly flicking through channels, and only one in ten happens to land on it any given week. The show ends up with ratings of 6 million people per week, which comprises the same 1 million hardcore fans every week, plus a rotating roster of 5 million casual fans. The show eventually undergoes so much change and declining quality that it alienates the hardcore fans, but if the population of casual fans who'll tune to watch an episode occasionally is big enough, it can sustain the show even if it no longer really has a hardcore fanbase.

It's a bit like that joke about how Maroon 5 signed a deal with the Devil whereby they would have numerous #1 singles, but no one would ever call them their favourite band. Have you ever met someone who said their favourite band was Maroon 5? By the same token, lots of people still watch The Simpsons, but I'd say you'd be hard pressed to find someone who says it's (still) their favourite show.

It's a bit like that joke about how Maroon 5 signed a deal with the Devil whereby they would have numerous #1 singles, but no one would ever call them their favourite band. Have you ever met someone who said their favourite band was Maroon 5? By the same token, lots of people still watch The Simpsons, but I'd say you'd be hard pressed to find someone who says it's (still) their favourite show.

While it is a great joke and reflects something real going on underneath the surface, I think you are obviously incorrect about this. This is "How did Nixon win when nobody I know voted for him" level analysis, you and I are in a cultural bubble of people among whom a consensus exists that modern Simpsons sucks.

Quick calibration: how many people do you know who LOVE NCIS?

NCIS was THE top rated scripted tv show for six years, and remained in the top 5 or so for over a decade. It has zero long term cultural impact, but there were lots of people who loved it, who watched every episode, who quoted it at each other, who considered it great writing.

The FBI series, which I find unwatchably offensively bad when I run into it if my mother or my grandmother were watching it, draws like 8 million viewers an episode.

I'm not unfamiliar with hardcore fans being unhappy with the product, I'm a Philly sports fan! But TV is not primarily a rarefied niche, an artistic product that caters to the aesthete and the discriminating. It is primarily slop served up lukewarm to the masses, and masses of people like things that you and I might not. De gustibus, I suppose.

To return to Maroon 5, when I was maybe nine years old Train came out with the song Drops of Jupiter, and for whatever reason at nine years old I was OBSESSED with it. I bought the CD and played that song on repeat. Train is an unspeakably lame, mainstream, trend-following, Nissan-advertisement-rock, corporate slop level of band. But at nine, that was my taste. A Pitchfork reader might wonder who the hell likes Train enough to care about their output, and surely no one really likes them. But at nine, I derived immense enjoyment from them.

There exists a whole universe of media consumers who have little impact within the circle of critics and cognoscenti.

I don't dispute the existence of dedicated fans who will go out of their way to watch certain shows every week that I would turn up my nose at. Plenty of my female colleagues make a point of tuning in to Love Island every week, in part because they don't want to be excluded from the "did you see what happened on Love Island last night?" water-cooler conversations the next day. I'm not suggesting that only shows admired by the intelligentsia or by snooty TV critics can attract a fanbase of devoted, hardcore fans. Probably an outright majority of shows with devoted fanbases are ones that TV critics wouldn't be caught dead watching (e.g. just about every soap opera you care to mention: Coronation St, EastEnders and so on).

But I don't think it's controversial to claim that some TV shows can be sustained by attracting a sufficiently large audience of casual fans who won't tune in for every episode, but will collectively watch enough episodes to keep the ratings up. (Probably most game shows fall into this category.) The impression I get is that this is now a category The Simpsons falls into, with the audience of devoted fans who will go out of their way to watch every episode having dwindled over time. I could be wrong, but that's the impression I get.

In an attempt to put hard figures on my gut feeling, it's indisputably true that the show's ratings have plummeted over time, from a peak of 30 million early on to something like 2.5 million today. (The decline would be even more striking when controlling for population.) This pattern is certainly consistent with only the most hardcore of the hardcore fans sticking around. Alternatively, it could be the case that the show's audience is primarily made up of casual viewers who'll only tune in when they have nothing better to do or there's nothing else on the tube.

The decline would be even more striking when controlling for population.)

Though less striking given the decline in audience for any primetime tv show. Used to be that primetime shows often hit 20 million viewers an episode, now they hit 5 million if they are lucky. So it's more like maybe a halving of their audience share relative to the secular trend.

2,000,000 is a pretty good audience. If you could launch a show with The Simpson's budget and be assured of 2,000,000 viewers, you'd get a green light. If an artist knew that 2,000,000 people would enjoy their art, they would make it.

This article, basically, but for TV.

There's no reason to expect the showrunners to operate on the timeline of taste, rather than the timeline of money.

If you could launch a show with The Simpson's budget and be assured of 2,000,000 viewers, you'd get a green light.

Do you think so? I've heard it said that The Simpsons is one of the most expensive shows on TV. This article claims that, by 2011, each episode cost $5 million to make, or $110 million for an entire season. I have a hard time imagining a network greenlighting a show that costs $100 million a season only to get 2 million viewers a week.

while more generous estimates (I'm in this camp) put it around season ten

Quite generous. Season 8 at the latest in my mind (Season 9 is when Scully took over), and even half of season 8 is weak. Even being generous, anything past season 9 (the last one to have Hartman) would be a tough tough sell for me. I'm old enough to have watched all those seasons as they were released, though, which might make a difference.

The sharpest discontinuous decline in show quality in my mind was obviously between seasons 8 and 9; the internet seems to agree. IMDB ratings also seem to agree that "The Principal and the Pauper" (season 9 episode 2) was the most blatant turning point: second-worst-rated episode up to that point, and the only thing that beat it was a clip show. On the other hand, it's still higher rated than the average of basically every season from 17 to 37, so there's something to be said for the power of dull continuous decline too.

If we were to say that the Simpsons was all good in seasons 1-8 except for a few clip shows, then in average ratings it doesn't decline past "mostly good" (where the average episode is at least as good as all those early episodes) until around season 12; if we set our sights higher (yeah, some of those season 1 episodes were meh) then season 10 was the dividing line, and the last good individual episode was probably 2024.

Now I'm curious; I'm going to watch that one.

... wait, it opens by claiming to be the Simpsons Series Finale? Are those ratings just people's way of saying to let the show finally die with dignity?

Yeah, off the top of my head I couldn't remember which episodes were from which season. There are a few episodes from season 10 I remember enjoying as a teenager ("The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace", "Mayored to the Mob", "Viva Ned Flanders", "Screaming Yellow Honkers", "Maximum Homerdrive"), but I don't think I've watched any of them since, and suspect I wouldn't find them quite as amusing if I watched them again now. It looks like the most recent season containing an episode I watched as an adult and enjoyed was season 8, featuring "You Only Move Twice", "A Milhouse Divided" and "The Springfield Files" among others.

So, is there a series that has the final season that doesn't feel either rushed or drawn out, that finishes exactly how and when it should?

DS9. Not everyone likes how it ended, but the pacing was quite good IMO and the final season pays off setups from prior episodes going all the way back to the pilot.

I'm not a big TV person, but Silicon Valley is probably the most consistently high quality TV show I've ever seen. Over on IMDb, the top-rated episodes are the season 1 finale and the season 2 finale, which is accurate, but having watched it several times there never comes a point where I feel like there's a major drop-off in quality, a sense of serious discontinuity with what has gone before. Some episodes are stronger than others, obviously, but none ever struck me as major duds. (Even one of my favourite shows ever had at least one episode which was unwatchably bad, where it felt like even the actors didn't know what they were doing there.) And you might say this is a bad example because it's a sitcom, but it's an unusually narrative-driven sitcom in which each season has an overarching plot arc, and there's real dramatic tension in watching the characters extricate themselves from the latest corner they've found themseles in.

Roswell Conspiracies: Aliens, Myths and Legends has an absolutely fantastic ending that explains all the mysteries and ties up all the narrative threads; it's like the antithesis of The X Files. But it only went on for one 40-episode season, so I'm not sure it counts.

Tons of single and double-cour anime (Erased, Trigun, Cowboy Bebop, Azumanga Daioh, etc.), but again, not sure they count.

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.

So, is there a series that has the final season that doesn't feel either rushed or drawn out, that finishes exactly how and when it should?

Have you already watched Twin Peaks? Between the original series, Fire Walk With Me, and The Return, it ended up finishing exactly how it should.

For many years I considered Twin Peaks my favourite TV show of all time, and everything from the pilot to the episode in which the killer is unveiled is pretty much perfect. But the back half of season 2 is painfully padded and drawn-out, just barely managing to pull a satisfying cliffhanger ending out of the hat. I watched The Return a few years ago and liked it, but watching it for a second time recently found it extremely erratic in pacing, with lore-heavy episodes that go nowhere and take forever to get there, to the point that I gave up on it halfway through.

But the back half of season 2 is painfully padded and drawn-out, just barely managing to pull a satisfying cliffhanger ending out of the hat.

True, I generally block a bunch of the back half from my memory. For every bit of interesting acting or lore or character interaction or whatever, there are 3 bits of bad soap opera padding.

watching it for a second time recently found it extremely erratic in pacing, with lore-heavy episodes that go nowhere and take forever to get there, to the point that I gave up on it halfway through.

I haven't rewatched it, but I do remember that it was necessary to sit back and enjoy the journey because overall the series wasn't going anywhere quickly... right up until everything started to happen and then it was almost impossible to hang on. The way it managed to come together (as much as is possible for Lynch) made me think the pacing was deliberate, but that might not make it easier to sit through some of the lore stuff.

I think Twin Peaks is the greatest show ever filmed, but if you don't like "drawn out" The Return is not the show for you...

So, is there a series that has the final season that doesn't feel either rushed or drawn out

(sobs in Firefly)

that finishes exactly how and when it should?

Okay, never mind.

It's a kids' show, but: Gravity Falls.

Andor's second season started slow (like its first) but more than made up for that by the end.

Bojack Horseman.

Wow, you'd think it would be easy to come up with more examples, wouldn't you? But even if I consider very episodic shows, where there's no arc-plot to be rushed or drawn out, it feels like most of the great long-running shows were only ended a year or more after they'd started running low on ideas, and most of the great short-running shows were killed too soon, and there are even some shows that somehow managed to do both, being first killed in their prime and then resurrected in inferior form. There are still a lot in each of those categories that are great overall despite pacing flaws, but they're not what you asked for.

  • The Shield, which is a better version of Breaking Bad (which imo got way too enamored with its lead for such a moralistic show). This is not to say that it was fun. I found it an incredibly stressful watch but the show had basically made tension its trademark circa Season 6 and never stopped so it was true to form.
  • Succession also knew to wrap itself up instead of overstaying (it was on the brink) in a way that feels true to the plot.
  • The Good Place expanded as far as it could go, had maybe one additional twist on the premise and then ended well.

Succession ended well, but it still had a lot of repeat of the same plots. The protagonists learn something, and then next season forget it, and learn it again, only to forget it again.

I agree on the Shield. I think it came out just a bit too early to really benefit from being 'prestige TV'. Breaking Bad's popularity exploded in later seasons thanks to the growth of the internet and social media, but more than that it had the room to focus on Walt. The Shield was too long, bogged down with a lot of aimless plotlines; it felt like the production was still caught between making a serious character study, and a procedural cop show at times.

It was also on FX, which didn't help.

Imo The Good Place dragged out far too much, but I also greatly disliked the direction it went into later for other reasons that are arguably subjective, so YMMV.

Imo The Good Place dragged out far too much,

Nah. In particular, they went in to Season 2 with a perfect excuse to write an arbitrarily long, very episodic stretch of filler material, and they basically ignored that, time skipped as necessary, and kept the show pacing tight anyway.

but I also greatly disliked the direction it went into later for other reasons that are arguably subjective

And yet this time I won't argue, for a sufficiently narrow definition of "later". I thought the ending (by which I mean roughly the last episode and a half) was decent, but I was still disappointed. The rest of the show was great, not just decent. It also felt like there were multiple different ways they could have made the ending great instead, yet they didn't. They weren't smart enough to handle a better-in-nerdy-ways ending (in the second big block of spoilered text here), and they either weren't brave enough or truly broad-minded enough to handle a better-in-obvious-ways ending (in the final block there).

Nah. In particular, they went in to Season 2 with a perfect excuse to write an arbitrarily long, very episodic stretch of filler material, and they basically ignored that, time skipped as necessary, and kept the show pacing tight anyway.

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.

I think I understand you now. You didn't sell me on "tacked on", though - IMHO as long as stakes are raised steadily that's just a common way of writing in general, not a failing and not specific to TV shows. There are a lot of ways to do it wrong (writers who rely on expanding scope because that's the only way they can raise interest, writers who run out of interesting grand-scope ideas too and then end up with an anticlimax or with no sense of stakes, writers who can't or don't bother to come up with convincing Watsonian reasons for the higher stakes and for their particular protagonists to be critical to them...) but I don't think the writers here made any of the typical errors; I think we just have a difference of taste here. You might be right that following your tastes would have led to a better result overall, or even to a result that I'd think was better.

You definitely did sell me on "arrogant", but any kind of "here's how heaven works" worldbuilding pretty much has to be that.

I thought they were somewhat humble about parts of the expanded premise, given their milieu.

There were a significant number of fans whose first reaction to the simplistic stupid point system was: "Ha ha! Yes! There is no ethical consumption under capitalism!" - and I think that was foreseeable, given that the second sentence is something of a far-left-wing cliche. To some extent the worldbuilding here inherently respected their confused sense of ethics, by stating that the point system wasn't too stupid to put in place to begin with, but by the time we see the results it's obviously utter nonsense and the writing doesn't hold back on that. We know that the system is bad, giving false positives by the billion, before we even dig in to the details, and the one guy we see still managing to beat the system isn't a paragon of ethics, he's an anxiety-riddled worthless hermit.

And I stand firm on the idea that, despite the arrogance, the fatal flaw here was that the writers weren't brave enough to be arrogant enough:

If you're going to have the arrogance to end your story with characters deciding the future evolution of whole planes of existence, you've got to go whole-hog and not leave the past evolution of reality so unexamined. Was Nietzsche right in a non-metaphorical sense, and God is dead? Was this whole thing some kind of Deist creator's experiment, with lessons learned only to be applied to the next universe? Are the Makers the top gods? Whoever's in charge, are they as screwed up as the committee they delegated the Good Place to? Do they no longer exist? Why not? If they still exist, why are they incommunicado? Are the afterlives we've seen not really all there is? There might be lots of good reasons why our characters can't find all the answers, but it's weird that they (everyone, but Chidi especially!) weren't more interested in all the obvious questions.

The Shiield

Seven seasons? That's more than I can handle. I'll earmark the other two for St Peter's fast, thanks.

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