My personal sign is when you start seeing awkward collaborations start cropping up. One time when I was thrifting, I picked up a graphic novel that had the Justice League, team with the Power Rangers of all things. I glimpsed into what the plot was about out of morbid curiosity and it was just a plain generic time and dimension thing.
Nothing ever connected between the teams at all. DC Comics, while fledgling at times with how they go about their series and movies, still have far more relevance than Power Rangers do. I think the Power Rangers are just grasping at straws to keep being relevant when people have largely moved on from them.
When it becomes clear the writers don’t have a long term plan. I’ve been rewatching Once Upon A Time. Still my all time favourite show but I’m confident that the writers only had a clear plan up to the end of season 3, after that things start to get fuzzy. Storylines get abandoned and unresolved, things happen that seem to be setting up something that doesn’t come, storylines happen that almost contradict past events (for example Snow and Charming having a dark secret about what they did to Maleficent, when you watch prior seasons with that in mind, it’s really weird nobody brought it up sooner). Yeah, you can just tell they didn’t plan past a certain point and they started adding lore that didn’t add up
Walking back character development/growth.
Loose ends start accumulating and there comes a point where you realize there’s no way they could possibly be resolved coherently in the time the series has left. I was feeling this in a big way during seasons 6 and 7 of Game of Thrones.
That pretty much sums up Lost for me. I probably watched longer than I needed to land on that conclusion, but I wanted to quit on a good point to leave the series behind.
I don’t remember exactly when I quit watching, but they managed to contact a ship and they were about to be rescued. My headcanon is that they made it home to live miserably ever after. I’ve since learned that the show got even worse.
I remember watching early Lost promo videos where a very smug JJ Abrams swore blind there was a fully logical explanation for everything happening. And then a polar bear showed up. And I realised that whatever definition of “fully logical explanation” he was using probably didn’t align with my own definitions of those words lol. That show was pure hype with talented actors.
What pissed me off the most about Lost is that, very early on, I pegged onto the fact that they were naming a lot of characters after prominent social philosophers; all of whom wrote about things like inequality, the social contract, human nature, etc…
- John Locke (John Locke, Liberty and the social contract)
- Desmond Hume (David Hume, treatise of human nature)
- Danielle Rousseau (Jean-Jacque Rousseau, discourse on inequality and the social contract)
- Boone Carlyle (Thomas Carlyle, the importance of belief)
- Juliette Burke (Edmund Burke, Philosophy of Conservatism)
- Mikhail Bakunin (Mikhail Bakunin, Russian Anarchist)
And a few others. As they introduce these characters, they set them up in opposition to each other and I’m thinking "okay…this means something. They’re trying to say something about society in a Lord of the Flies type of way.
I remember myself and a friend of mine discussing the show endlessly after each episode wondering what it all meant in that context. And then…nope…they were all just dead all this time. It meant…precisely…jack…shit.
And it couldn’t have been an accident that they so many promininent social philosophers showed up. They CHOSE to name those characters that…for no other reason than a fuck-you-red-herring.
I can’t even begin to describe how much that angered me. I’ve despised JJ Abrams ever since.
When the potential long-term impact of the events keeps increasing, but the actual long-term impact keeps decreasing.
The “clip show” is a good sign the writers are running out of ideas. The writers write 10 minutes of dialogue and the rest of the show are scenes from previous episodes.
I think clip episodes are actually when the production runs out of money so they force the writers to make something very cheap. Usually at the end of a season.
There’s usually a large chasm between the good episodes and the low quality of a clip episodes, rather than a gradual decline.
Clipshows were a necessary evil on broadcast shows, especially scifi ones that cost a lot of money. Sometimes the show would have to do a clipshow or a noticeably cheap bottle episode to save up for an expensive episode. Also, in the pre-streaming era, people couldn’t just watch all the episodes in order on demand so an occasional episode summarizing what was going on was actually useful.
Meta: when the principal actors become the producers.
When the sexual tension between main characters eventually results in a sexual relationship or they get married.
If it’s Cop apologia, when the cop has to go ‘rogue’ to get ‘justice’.
I find it worse when the sexual tension just keeps on going and goes nowhere. I really liked for example that they didn’t do that in Kim Possible. They let Kim and Ron become a couple and made new stories about how they work out as a couple. It’s been a while since I’ve watched it, but I remember appreciating that they could just be together instead of some will-they-won’t-they bullshit.
When the clip shows start appearing.
SG1 did clip shows really well.
One before, and one after, they jumped the shark.
Its possible to do it right.
On older broadcast shows, sometimes that was just a necessary evil to save the budget up for an expensive episode.
Depending on the kind of show it is contextual, but here’s some.
If it is a tight self contained story that ends…and then more things happen. Stranger Things for example pretty much perfectly ended in season 1. There was a tiny dangling mystery regarding Eleven’s fate. Such things do not need to be a sequel hook, they can simply exist to tantalize and never be expanded on. This is like if Inception 2 was made and it answered the questions about Cobb’s spinning totem; it would utterly miss the point that the story was over and the ending was intentionally ambiguous.
If the actors or voice actors are simply getting too old for the part. Personally I have a good ear for animation’s voice acting. It drives me absolutely crazy when I hear noticeably aged actors reprising role or continuing them as if nothing has changed. Obviously some performers can last longer than others but for example modern Simpsons is unwatchable to me entirely on the basis of the voices. Even if somehow the writing turned around I simply can’t get past the voices. Similarly I could barely sit through The Incredibles 2, which supposedly picks up right as the first movie ends but all the voices are aged 14 years and I can hear it.
I’m kind of ambiguous about the first point. I think you can expand on a tightly-written, concluded story… but not repeatedly. Furthermore, it requires you to - to some degree - shift the focus of the following stories. Continuing the meta-story is all and just fine, but the immediate story can’t be about the same theme/issue/encounter indefinitely.
jumped its shark
…. Is this a thing? Origin?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_the_shark
The phrase was coined in 1985 by radio personality Jon Hein in response to a 1977 episode from the fifth season of the American sitcom “Happy Days”, in which the character of “Fonzie”(Henry Winkler) jumps over a live shark while on water-skis.
Basically any time a show goes on too long and tries to introduce a stupid, attention-getting gimmick to try to stay relevant.
