NO SPOILERS FOR ANY SHOW


Why is it every show seems to save their worst season for the last one ?

From Dexter to True Blood to lost to Boardwalk Empire to how i met your mother to the Sopranos

It literally takes a multiple emmy winning writer like Vince Gilligan to do a show justice

No one else is up to the task !

it's obviously hard to write a final season where you are trying to tie up as many loose ends as possible and still have an engaging, exciting last season storyline

It looks like not many writers are upto snuff, maybe some of us should trot off to hollywood to give it a go

It's because most shows are ridden into the ground. Endings are hard, but how many long running shows had great penultimate seasons? Not that many because they were already running out of juice before they hit the final stretch.

This sort of reminds me of another recent thread started by, hey, you.

Long Running Shows you Didn't quite get to the End of

Shows should get their crappy season out of the way in year three, then make sure they end on a good season. I'm surprised no show runners have thought of that.

I'm sure there is a litany of reasons including:

*the show was cancelled during the bad season
*the studio "forced" seasons beyond the creator's intention
*f!$# this, we're out of here anyway!

Plenty have tried having the crappy season in Season 1 ...

It's almost always because they are dragged out way beyond their natural conclusion.

Writing for TV is very hard, especially coming up fresh ideas for 12 to 24 episodes per season year after year. I don't think any TV Producer has any clue when their show will end in their mind. They just go with it until the network stops giving them money.

Yes cos i'm bloody peed off

Because by the time they've reached their last season, they've run out of ideas or clever season-long arcs.. they still try and occasionally come up with an idea that has potential or put together a good episode, but for the most part, by the time a show's on its last legs you wind up with a middling to bad final season.

There are exceptions... just look at the workhorses that are NCIS and Law & Order...

Criminal Minds has gotten pretty stale. tho.. they're restricted in that they do psychos, serials, etc and they've shown so many sadistic killers, you pretty much know what's coming... that show could do with some actual suspense and less gore.

One reason is if a show's successful, a lot of the writing talent and even the creators move on to greener pastures or different projects. Most shows don't end with the same team that made them successful.

Lost is far worse than some of the recent great shows' last season. The explanation was just retarded.

Most shows start going downhill which triggers a decline in ratings and a "final season". Those final seasons are written by the same groups that wrote the declining seasons and generally think they know what they're doing and don't.

So basically, it's a culmination of just over-extended a premise and not knowing where to go with it.

I think that all four of the modern Star Trek series had very capable final seasons. Not necessarily their best season, but certainly not their worst.

The final season of TNG had at least six episodes that were terrible and six more that were pretty bad. That's half the season right there.

Even though it was called a 16 episode season, the final season of Breaking Bad was really two separate seasons with the episode order cut by five episodes each.

It also meant that Gilligan and team had a two year advance notice of the series being cancelled.

That resulted in an ending that was MUCH more planned out than anyone could expect from other TV shows, and it accelerated the pace of the storytelling so there were no filler episodes.

Basically, the answer to your question is that all those other, longer-running shows that have weak final seasons are the victims of their own success.

Well AGAIN NO SPOILERS

I was soo peed off by last season of Boardwalk Empire

I'm about to start the last season of Sons of Anarchy, in my Top 5 fav shows of all time

If this season sucks, someone in Hollywood is getting a letterbomb !

TNG was running out of ideas a bit by the time it got to its final season. It's not terrible by any means, there's still some good stuff in it, but for a final season, it frankly should be better, especially after the excellent previous year.

As to the question, it's probably primarily because shows which are that long in the tooth are out of ideas artistically and are hanging around to drag more ratings out and milk something which has run out of gas for more money. Or because so many shows nowadays are plotted out as they go, and the creators don't have an endpoint in mind. But then, I keep watching Supernatural, so what do I know .

Incidentally, I am now signed up for Netflix, Prime, and Hulu and still can't stream Babylon 5 .

I think a lot of shows are created on a really good premise, or single idea, but were never given much thought on how they would end.

Re: Boardwalk Empire
Post-prohibition, the show was not going to follow the true life story of Nucky Johnson, but I don't know what Terence Winter may have had in mind going forward. Obviously, the quality of the final season was COMPLETELY dependent on the fact that the series received a renewal for just eight episodes and cancellation. Winter and crew were basically forced to rush their story to completion, and they had a lot of history and characters to service. No surprise the results were underwhelming to some.

Re: Sons Of Anarchy
Maybe you should just quit before you start. No spoilers. Just saying.

Angel had a solid fifth and final season. It's my favorite and it's still entertaining a decade on. It was able to perfectly balance one-off stories with its overarching story arc.

Star Trek: Enterprise: while not exactly a bastion of good television story-telling overall, has a final season that is the most watchable of its four season run.

While I liked Buffy more as a series (and it should've ended at the season five finale), the Angel finale was perfect.

If he's gotten this far and it's still in his "Top 5 fav. shows of all-time!", then I think he's safe going through the train-wreck that was the last season. The show lost any credibility after Season 2 anyway.

While Star Trek: TNG's final season, overall, is uneven, it still has a great series finale. It's a perfect cap to the entire show.

I would argue that, by design, most shows are created to be open-ended, since networks have typically wanted shows to run as long as possible, and have fought against the concept of a show with a definite end-game. It's only recently that networks have warmed both to the idea of heavy-serialized shows instead of standalone episodes, and with them the idea of a show ending after a pre-set amount of time. Even with Breaking Bad, I think the split final season was a compromise between AMC and Vince Gilligan over AMC wanting it for two more years, and Gilligan wanting to end it after so many episodes.


Something that's recently cropped up is the idea of an abbreviated final season. Both Nikita and White Collar had short final seasons that the show runners knew of ahead of time, and were able to craft a heavy serialized final season that managed to resolve most of the storylines. While neither were the respective show's best seasons, they were solid and by no means the worst.

This is one of the big reasons. Other than showrunner and a couple of critical producers, hit shows will often churn through writing staffs. Television staff writers are often viewed as disposable and replaceable in Hollywood, they are always the last to get paid when a show becomes a hit. So they will write for a hot show for two years, and then jump to another new series with a better offer and more control. Many times you have junior hacks writing a hit show in its final season. Without a very strong showrunner in that case, the show takes a quality hit. That was definitely evident on Lost.

When a show is in its final season, everyone in the production is scrambling to line up a job after it ends. You get lazy writing, lazy directing, pretty much lazy everything except the actors. I have seen so many shows mail it in when the staff knew it was their final season.