decline in quality in the final season(s) of a TV show

just finsihed the wire. loved seasons 1, 3, & 4, and 2 was good, but 5 was a definite drop from 3 and 4 - kind of tarnished the characters and setting, for me. made me think of sopranos too - gave up on that last season after the first few episodes, and the season before it with buscemi was already getting poorer.

is this pretty much par for the course for tv shows? if they're any good, they get several seasons, which allows them to build up a fan-base, and then the studio is always gonna push the writers to go 1-2 more seasons over what they actually think is worth doing.

examples of tv shows which did several seasons and maintained quality until the finish?

 

Yeah no doubt.
Very few TV shows with a running story and characters throughout are able to sustain the top level for more than 2-3 seasons tops.

And people who usually go on about how season 5 or season 7 being 'as amazing as ever' are usually liars, idiots or biased fans anyway...

 

Game of Thrones, while great, it has sacrificed its slower quality narrative to fast-paced events that on many occasions makes no sense. Events happen too fast in the last season and I am afraid it will be even speedier in the last season of only eight episodes.

 

Season 33 of "General Hospital" is one of the very best things ever put on the small screen.

 

Speak for yourself. The last season was the best yet.


LOST was a piece of shit con job show the final two seasons.

 

J.J. Abram stated that its ending was the one they had cooked since the start of the show. The problem is that the show was so popular (and lasted longer that it needed to) that most fans had already preconceived theories about what was all about. So for most of us, it was a huge letdown and the final resolution seemed like a cheap easy way out leaving a lot of loose ends.

 

"Lost" was never meant to be properly tied up. If you stuck around for 6 seasons, solely for the final episode, then you kind of got what you deserved.

For a show that had to pump out 118 episodes in 6 years, it stayed remarkably compelling for the most part to me, despite plenty of hiccups, bumps in the road, cast desertions and what the fuck storylines that seemed to be added or dropped out of nowhere. How it ended had no bearing on me whatsoever.

It was just one long fucked up "Twilight Zone" episode, that I certainly feel I got my entertainments value out of. I don't think there's been a single thing on Network television since, that's come within a thousand miles of what "Lost" was able to do for those 6 seasons.

 

I think that the problem was that the original writers ran out of ideas and had other writers come on board for individual episodes and they were not told what the final outcome was going to be. So in a sense they screw it unknowingly. But Abrams & friends had to be blamed for these inconsistencies. I think that a shift in parallel universes explanation would have been more satisfactory than the official 'by the way none of this really happened since these people are, you know, dead?'.

 

LOST was shit for the same reason Prometheus was shit: Damon Lindelof.

 

Nope. "Lost" took chances network shows don't take. Never before "Lost" and never since "Lost" ended it's run.

In a sense it might have driven a ton of viewers away from Network television and towards basic, premium and streaming cable television in the search for a similar higher quality serialized dramatic format.

If you're not 95 years old and on your deathbed, you can only put up with that "CSI", "NCIS", "Law & Order" and various generic medical show nonsense for so long.

The biggest flaw in "Prometheus" was too many brain dead characters on this supposed "scientific" mission. It looked pretty, it just suffered from too many idiots.

As far as Lindelof goes, I loved the entire run of "The Leftovers".

 

Yep. He's a piece of shit.

 

Yup. Most of the Prometheus crew behaved and talked like freaking truck drivers.

 

Treme was a great show that ran it's course over 3 seasons, but they gave it one more 'half' season to give the fans some closure, but it just seemed thrown together with no real purpose other than to just give the fans a few more episodes.

The League was one of the funniest shows on TV but the last season had some pretty unfunny episodes.

The Simpsons are the Evander Holyfield of TV. Awesome in it's prime but post prime is just sad and hard to watch.

TFK

 

Deadwood was great if only for three seasons...

Justified was very good for six and I don't think the last season was a big drop in quality.

The shield I don't remember that well but I thought it was very good till the end.

 

"The Shield" and "Son Of Anarchy" were two shows I didn't really like initially but I think got better as they went along, though SOA did seem to take a pretty big hit once Ron Perlman was mostly written out of the show.

Agree on "Justified"

 

The last season SOA was pretty bad compared to the rest, but yeah jumped the shark prolly around the time clay disappeared.

 

simpsons is the most extreme, most awful example of this. it's like if roy jones kept fighting until the year 2030.

 

Whoa! Someone has too much free time in his hands!