Not that all shows do anything as spectacular as shark-jumping: sometimes they just sort of piddle off in directions that aren't what you wanted.
That's half of it. The shows aren't always worse, when they inevitably move themselves in search of renewal, but they aren't the *same*, sometimes in crucial ways to my own appreciation. I followed X-Files mostly for Mulder and Scully, but when I tried to follow the incoherent alien-invasion plot-arcs, the whole thing just fell apart around S4. The random degradation of Krycek as a character was tragic, even though I wasn't a major Nick Lea fan.
Maybe there's a factor that in the first season or two, an SFnal show will be establishing its background world, so some episode plotlines will be designed to explore the world, as well as showcase characters. After a while, a bad show doesn't have anything new to explore and either goes soap-opera or makes a big, artificial-seeming change in the background. (Oddly, these may be less disruptive to the popcorn-level viewer, if the quirky characters mostly stay in place.) A good show has the capacity to continue expanding its background logically, as when SG-1 developed AUs and new alien attackers, and the characters adapted believably. Still, the show certainly changed over time, unacceptably for some fans.
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On shows that change
Date: 2011-01-20 05:32 pm (UTC)That's half of it. The shows aren't always worse, when they inevitably move themselves in search of renewal, but they aren't the *same*, sometimes in crucial ways to my own appreciation. I followed X-Files mostly for Mulder and Scully, but when I tried to follow the incoherent alien-invasion plot-arcs, the whole thing just fell apart around S4. The random degradation of Krycek as a character was tragic, even though I wasn't a major Nick Lea fan.
Maybe there's a factor that in the first season or two, an SFnal show will be establishing its background world, so some episode plotlines will be designed to explore the world, as well as showcase characters. After a while, a bad show doesn't have anything new to explore and either goes soap-opera or makes a big, artificial-seeming change in the background. (Oddly, these may be less disruptive to the popcorn-level viewer, if the quirky characters mostly stay in place.) A good show has the capacity to continue expanding its background logically, as when SG-1 developed AUs and new alien attackers, and the characters adapted believably. Still, the show certainly changed over time, unacceptably for some fans.