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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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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