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
Sometimes you realize that the main story arc keeps finding new reasons to continue, after lots of surprise twists and turns that each give another episode. Like they finally find their killer, after a whole bunch of running around, escapes, shoot-outs, stunts, explosions, etc. but it turns out he’s been working for someone else all along, and now we have to find the Boss. It will never end, and all the plot manipulation doesn’t serve a better story, it just keeps us watching so we can consume advertising.
My son is always complaining that a lot of these series probably started out as a movie, but Netflix, et al, want constant “engagement,” so if you want Netflix to stream your content, you better stretch it into 10 episodes, with a cliffhanger. Quality isn’t important, just engagement, so a good movie concept gets beaten to death as a series.
That’s why a lot of British shows are so good. They’ll say right up front that this entire series is only going to be one season of 3-6 episodes, and that’s it. They take as much time as they need to tell the story, then quit. They don’t just keep screenplay masturbating.
Absolutely an issue for American shows. So many are built around a three season arc just trying to get on the air. Then if they make it big, they panic and have no idea what the fuck to do with season 4.
So many shows fail in season 4.
Probably the worst example is Game of Thrones. They started the show with at least the last third of it unfinished, and once that TV money started rolling in, GRRM basically lost his motivation to write.
Walking back character development/growth.
When the characters are talking about something and say “oh this is like that time when…” and a flashback scene which is just copy and pasted from old footage is used. Then they do this 5 more times in the episode. So annoying and cheap.
A clipshow episode. These were used as cheap fillers when the shows still had 20+ episode seasons, if the production needed to save money this was the easiest way to do it.
For all its other issues, Rick and Morty did this right. They had a clip show episode, but of things that had never aired. Others too, but Rick and Morty is the example that came to mind.
When they have a contained shark that the main character decides to jump to keep establishing his cool.
Seriously though, when threat of the week escalates to such a degree that it becomes a potential universe calamity, it’s hard to be worried about Murderer McGee stabbing 13 people to death.
Shoehorning in a new main character
Shoehorning in a new main character to try to increase appeal
Shoehorning in a new main character to try to increase appeal to sell more merchandise
Shoehorning in a new main character to try to increase appeal to sell more merchandise because the higher ups made a decision to drastically change the original main character in an obvious cash grab
I’m looking at you, ya pop tart colored unicorn
The actors and writers get bored and do a musical episode.
B-but Scrubs’ musical episode was great!
The magicians best seasons were the ones with musical episodes
Identical twins…trapped in the basement…winning the lottery…tonight, on a very special…cousin oliver
When it’s based on a book/series and outruns the source material
When the main character(s) have a baby. When that happens it’s time to go.
It’s the pilot of a sitcom in which a goofy husband and hard nosed wife blah blah zzzzzzzzzz……
Joss Whedon is the executive producer.
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Changes in over or undertones. IE change in overtone being it suddenly turns into an action comedy when it was a gritty murder mystery. A change in undertone would be like if two characters that never had any romantic tension, or were canonically confirmed to not have romantic feelings for each other, suddenly were cofessing their feelings for each other.
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