Shows That Choose Their Own Demise
Generally, American scripted television series follow a familiar cadence of life phases, showing stages of youth, maturity and senescence in the same manner as the humans who created the shows do.
Pilot Era – That crucial first season. This is the stage where a show has to prove its Darwinian fitness. Fresh, full of ideas, often rough-edged and hyperactive, the look and feel of the show is crafted. Statistically most scripted shows do not survive even one full season order.
Peak Era– The equivalent of youthful maturity, this is when a show delivers on its promises to the audience (and, therefore, the nets and advertisers). This can happen as soon as the first season ( “Twin Peaks,” “Six Feet Under”) but some shows, having dispensed with pilot-era tricks and gimmicks, settle into greatness in subsequent seasons (“X-Files,” “Friends,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Star Trek: The Next Generation”).
Mannerist Era– the quality of the shows level off and becomes bureaucratic: the object of, say, “CSI: Miami” is to continue to produce more episodes of “CSI: Miami.” American television series are usually open-ended, so this era can continue indefinitely.
(these last two categories are a bit subjective. You can say “The Sopranos” premiered in its peak, and stayed there for all six seasons, and I’ll back you up. But a show like “The Simpsons,” which has consistently delivered fine shows but with only modest serial developments, might just be in the longest mannerist era in television history.)
Problem Era: Key actors or creative personnel leave. Kid actors get too old. Premises get re-engineered when they become too far-fetched. At this point, that famous Shark appears, and must be jumped.
These phases are, as I mentioned, symptomatic of American commercial television, where every show televised is constitutionally bound to keep going until cancellation. As strange as it seems, this has benefits: Syndicated reruns of these shows can be broadcast in any order, forever.
But if the producers of a show decide to avoid death by cancellation or the indignity of shark-jumping, the results can be unique and exciting. Two examples of this willful, BBC-style self-limitation are wrapping up their seasons this very week.
The creators of “Lost” on ABC decided, sometime before the beginning of this current strike-truncated season, to put a hard end to the saga of the survivors of Oceanic 815. The gears changed, and flashbacks became flash-forwards. And not surprisingly the quality of the show began to improve. Plots became clearer and more coherent. I have read that the entire scope and tenor of the show may change in this upcoming finale, concentrating on the few characters that have managed to escape the island.
On the SciFi Channel “Battlestar Galactica” is also moving to a definite finale, probably less than a dozen episodes away. As it is with “Lost,” the mounting pressure of this hard end is ratcheting up the intensity of the storylines. The Cylons, the fundamental enemies of the human race, are fighting among themselves, and some are seeking an alliance with humans. The ultimate goal of finding Earth has turned from an ad-hoc mumbo-jumbo plot maguffin into both a serious struggle and a race against the clock.
The ticking clock is the key addition to both of these series, both of which were arguably the finest on television in recent years. Knowing how and when the series will play out eliminates Mannerist ennui and the need for shark-jumping. With a known, limited time to live, the writers are making every episode count.
This change of strategy showed up rather blatantly in the latest aired episode of “Battlestar Galactica,” “Guess What’s Coming to Dinner.” A Cylon Model Six (the tall sexy one) was allowed to speak to the Quorum, the human representative body. She was there to explain what had changed for their faction, and why the loss of instant resurrection (normally, when a Cylon is killed, they just download into a new body) had turned them against their own and into alliance with humanity. But as much as you can hear the character making her point, you can hear the creators of “Galactica” justifying their decision to end the show in their own terms, and why the decision was a good one:
“Something began to change [when we found we could not resurrect]. We could feel a sense of time, as if each moment had it’s own significance. We began to realize that if our existence held any value, it must end. To lead meaningful lives, we must die, and not return.”
–Skot C.