Re: Limited series as a solution to annoying cliffhangers and other th
I'll give my standard answer to this topic: a show's premise often tells you how long the show should run. A show that is too short is worse than one that runs too long - at least when it's too long, you can bail on it and return to check out the ending.
BSG - Four seasons was good; any more would have been pushing it. I was very glad to see it end when it did, because it was getting that "they're stretching things" feel towards the end.
Lost - I'll be very sad when it's gone, but I can tell now that more than six seasons would really be pushing it.
Heroes - Like
Star Trek, it has an open-ended premise that could theoretically run forever, if not as the original series, then as spin-offs. In its case, the only limiting factor is whether the writers can come up with stories worth telling.
Chuck - It needs another season but if that's the last one, fine by me. The premise is very restrictive and can't go on forever.
I wouldn't mind seeing some limited run series (less than a year) in the mix - we used to call those "mini-series" and they've vanished off the face of the earth. But that doesn't mean other stories don't require one, two, five or ten seasons to tell.
The issue of shows being cancelled before their time is separate from the issue of how long they should run. If a mini-series doesn't perform, there's nothing stopping the network from yanking it before its end. Nobody starts a show with the intention of seeing it cancelled, and making a show shorter won't stop it from being cancelled, so I don't see the logical connection between a premise's implied length and the odds the series will be cancelled.
When you let a series drag on and peter out, the guys in charge become much less bankable. There's not much chance of Berman and Braga making a popular Trek series anytime soon, for example. But if Voyager had been shorter and Enterprise's early seasons had sucked less, that might, indeed, by different.
If you're running into the problem of creative burn-out, then change the personnel.
VOY's premise could have been sustained seven seasons and been as good as
DS9 throughout.
ENT could also have been a strong seven-season show.
Of the two,
ENT is the one that should have been seven seasons (a couple setting up the Earth-Romulan War; three of the war itself; two more telling how the Federation was founded in its aftermath).
VOY easily could have been less, maybe more like four. But that's all dependent on the producers and writers having a story that's worth two minutes of telling, much less seven years.
Hype it up before it begins, start fast and strong and end fast and strong and you'll still likely have a pretty decent sized audience that is enchanted with the series creators, and those popular names can be used to hype up the next series.
If you're riding the wave of success, then why not use that success to hype up the next season rather than jump to a new series? It might just be a matter of semantics anyway. A show could be constructed so that each season is more of a departure from the last than we normally see. You can't do that with a narrow (goal-oriented) premise like
Chuck, but a situational premise without a single goal like
Heroes or
Star Trek is perfect for that approach.
Then you run into the problem that many people watch shows for their favorite characters, which means that even if you change the premise, you will probably not be able to get away with a total change in the cast. And if you do kill off major characters, the savvier folks in the audience will be able to predict those deaths by intuiting who the fan-favorites are, or just paying attention on the message boards, and knowing that X, Y and Z are safe. That kinda kills some of the suspense but I doubt it can be helped.
Plenty of shows are disasters early on, and don't get into their groove until later seasons.
If they are disasters early on, they never get a chance to find their groove.
Studios want to find the goose (TV show) that lays a tonne of golden eggs (seasons), after all, if it works its much more profitable than a single egg. Not the smartest thinking in my opinion, but it i what it is.
TV runs on the hit-based model: one hit pays for a whole raft of failures. That's the only thing that can finance the high failure rate of shows (2/3rds fail the first year, and that stat may be higher now). But what other business model could pay the way? If you needed more shows to be hits, you'd take fewer risks. TV takes few enough risks as it is.
Maybe the networks have trepidations because it could mean each season starting from scratch.
That's exactly why they won't do it. And if Miniseries X actually is a huge hit, it will become an ongoing series because that's the hit that the network needs to finance the ongoing parade of failures. The
Lost example is a rarity, and even then, six years is a healthy run - and given the way the ratings are going, probably wouldn't have lasted much longer anyway.
I've never understood this way of thinking.
If a show is bad, 22 crap episodes or 13 crap episodes won't make the difference.
I agree. People see the 13-episode runs of cable shows and think somehow that can be translated to network TV runs, but they don't realize that HBO or AMC gets revenues from cable subscriptions, which means they can be less mass market and riskier in their approach, get an audience that would spell doom on a network, and still get by just fine. Each viewer of HBO or AMC is worth more than network viewers, so the viewers get better product. That's where the quality difference comes from - the viewers are worth the quality, and they demand the quality.
HBO or AMC could do 22 episode runs of shows and they still would be good because the approach is bolder and more creative and the talent behind the shows is good. Some dumb police procedural on CBS isn't going to magically become worth watching just because they do fewer episodes per year.
With the advent of DVD sales and online streaming, there are enough available revenue streams for most studios to successfully make back the money on most shows even if they aren't ratings winners.
Those have some impact, but less than people commonly assume. Just because you might watch shows that way doesn't mean they are significant yet. The business model will be heavily based on eyeballs watching ads and counted via Nielsons for some time yet.
The part of the financial picture that gets underreported is the ability of cable to get financing from subscriptions and forge a different business model from broadcast. That's where I see the big difference in quality, the ability to hold an audience via arced storytelling and niche interests. There's a reason Skiffy could afford to show
BSG and greenlight
Caprica on a mere 2M viewers or so over the show's run. Even on the CW, that number might have merited cancellation and on any other network, it would have been doomed.
If the network cancels the show before the contract is up, the studio can then shop it around or release it in some low-cost, high-return way like DVD, that allows for recouping of costs.
Direct to DVD, for anything other than cheap crap monster movies and that ilk, is very iffy. Remember, not being on network or cable means you lose a huge chunk of your advertising. Now how do people find out your show exists? A lot of the "cost saving" of not having to find a place on TV is going to be gobbled up by vastly increased marketing costs.
The situation is even more obvious than the Berman-and-Braga travesty. When the writers and producers on your show have been out of ideas since the last Ice Age, maybe it's time to get fresh blood?
