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When the writers start to lean too hard on character shticks.
When a show focuses on women in season 1 and in season 2 they add a white male character as a love interest. Examples: Supergirl, Once Upon A Time, Yellowjackets.
Similarly, when a shows focuses on women in season 1 and they add a whole bunch of male characters in season 2 that they give a ton of screen-time to. Extreme example: The Wilds
Having the Baby.
The budding love story is a go to for writers. Everyone loves it, and makes you feel emotions when they finally get together. Problem is, it has a natural path.
2 to 3 seasons to get together. 1 season of new bliss, 1 season of ups and downs, ending with a marriage proposal. 1 season of engagement ending in wedding. 1 season of new marriage stuff. Now what?
Married couples are boring. So what do we do now? Now it's time for the baby.
And babies are horrible on TV. People watch TV to escape reality, not hear a screaming child. So the dream couple has a baby and it's so tiring and so much work, but suddenly the show starts focusing on other characters, and then suddenly you know it's over.
The office was famous for this one. Everyone loves Jim and Pam, until the wedding, then who cares. They tried to force those feelings again with Andy and Erin, but you just can't.
Parks and rec luckily took a different route with Andy and April, but you can tell they were teetering on the edge, and in the final season everyone had kids anyway.
HIMYM had a worse approach because it wasn't that Ted was on the path, but rather Lily and Marshall already were and so kids came in earlier, and again change the entire show.
The list goes on, it is an official trope now
A similar red flag, introducing a new, younger "cute" kid character because the previous cute kids aged out of the category.
For some reason the Cosby show was the first thing to mind there. Move out of the way Rudy!
I think Modern Family was the exception to this, at least with Mitchell & Cam. Gloria getting pregnant just had vibes of Married with Children when Peggy got pregnant and it felt like the start of the end.
It worked with Modern Family because the show's entire premise was about Families and when that's the show's premise then the reverse is true, Families without children are boring lol
Married with Children’s pregnancy story arc was driven by the Katey Sagal’s real life pregnancy. She unfortunately had a miscarriage after it had been written into the show, so the writers decided to bail on it by making it all a dream. It comes across as sloppy writing, but it was probably the most compassionate way to handle it.
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I'm not sure if that's a red flag as much as it's just a symptom of a show having gone for a while. Like if it shows on the air for a number of years then naturally couples are going to have to start moving forward with their lives so a baby's rather par for the course. However at the same time the longer show goes on the more likely it is to start to decline. I'm thinking this is more correlation than causation.
When a character that has fully and officially died or been wrote off, returns in some deus ex machina style lazy way
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Celebrity appearances.
Not to say the show goes downhill because of it. But I feel as if it's often used as a crutch to attract more viewers.
*screams in Ed sheeran on GOT"
"We want to appeal to a wider audience that's not the typical X fan".
It's usually code for "stakeholders/execs want infinite growth, and we are too burnt out/creatively bankrupt to fight back. So, enjoy the change to another cookie cutter slop content".
Some shows even start out there already. Massive red flag.
When netflix picks it up and adds new seasons (using untalented writers instead of the ones that made the show good)
Netflix will revive shows after the original networks didn't order more seasons. In other words, the show was already long-dead...
Can't wait for the Netflix seasons of Futurama after it gets cancelled again.
Futurama ended after 5 seasons
Alternative timelines
time travel in general, for me... unless the show is specifically about time travel.
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When one or more of the original main character actors leave the show. They'll either introduce new characters to replace the originals or refocus the show on some of the existing, less-important ones. Sometimes a show can make it work, and occasionally you end up with something better, but it usually indicates the show has one, maybe two seasons of life left.
Starting to answer backstory questions no one really wanted to know. For example, I knew Seinfeld was running out the clock as soon as they gave Kramer a first name.
when oliver shows up
seriously, one that really bothers me was Psych. my all-time fav buddy comedy. when the primary premise of the show is no longer on display, its time to wrap it up.
as the series wore on they relied less and less on 'shawns gift', and the magic was gone. they moved away from made the show great.. a guy succeeding with a unique talent despite himself. a comedic-ally driven contemporary sherlock holmes trope.
the subsequent movies doubled down on not using his talents and so they are even worse than the final years of the show.
Ah yes. The Oliver/Poochie character.
ETA: Or Scrappie Fucking Doo
Season 3 of a show that wasn’t originally planned to be 3+ seasons is usually around where it starts to drop off. There are exceptions, but I’ve seen several shows where S1 is fantastic, S2 is good, S3 is okay at best, and S4+ is utter trash.
Clip Show! Nothing says "We're out of ideas" like a rehash of the currently available greatest hits.
Community had clips from "previous episodes" that never existed in their bottle episode.
Most of the time I hate clip shows, but that time was okay.
Community was great at simultaneously lampshading, satirizing, and paying homage all at the same time. Abed was the perfect vehicle for that sort of meta-self-referential nihilism. Plus the entire cast was lightning in a bottle.
Except for Pierce.
He was semen in several bottles.
Clip shows are usually about “we didn’t adequately budget and need to make an episode using only one set and one day of shooting.”
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Maybe Moe gets a cellphone?
Original writer/creator/actor leaves the show. There can be a lot of reasons why they leave, and sometimes it's a really good reason, but the show almost always suffers.
When they do the black and white episode that is from like the 1940s
I wish they did like in the 1940s... Instead, current directors cannot shoot proper B&W and just rely on hackneyed gimmicks (I mean stuff like using the overly contrasted shade of a Venetian blind, smoke going through a ray of light, ...). There is always too much white and too much black, which kills the range in between, unlike old movies and TV shows which are made of shades of grey where everything can be seen clearly; settings are not adapted either; anyway they have no idea of what they are shooting, they simply shoot in colour and then remove colours in post-processing like they do usually when they apply their stupid colour filter (blue-brown = Scandinavian police drama, lovat green = Germany, yellow = Mediterranean, blue = techno-thriller, etc.). Any low-rated chain-produced family entertainment TV series from the 50s and 60s, filmed by a random director from back then, exhibits a better B&W picture than those modern arty attempts.
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Flashbacks.
More than 4 seasons.
6 seasons and a movie though
When the actors have so much Botox they can’t move their faces. Oh sorry, that happens the second the movie/show starts.
The narrator asks you to tell your friends to watch the show
they didnt
Romance between two characters that seems to come out of nowhere because the main characters have already gotten together.
A character explaining that justice is following your gut rather than the law while being some sort part of justice system.
I stopped many show because of that.
That is also why I loved what B99 did so much.
Stupid law stopping us from searching his house! Ugh a warrant? So stupid and useless, right people watching?; we should get rid of those stupid amendments!
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When there’s a big shakeup in writers.
Unnecessary cameos by guest stars that completely pull you out of the narrative. Bonus points if it's Ed Sheeran.
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this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2024
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