LogFAQs > #956575128

wpot posted...

Which is the primary reason that, IMO, almost all TV series with continuing plots don't work very well. Lost would be the poster child. I you aren't going somewhere then you're just trying to get me to watch next week: that doesn't do anything for me in the long run. It's a weakness built in to the medium without strong source material or detailed plan.

The problem there is less about the format of TV, and more about the writers.

The problem with Lost is that they essentially promised SHOCKING REVELATIONS yet had literally no idea what the answers to those questions were. And when people started pestering them, they just asked even more questions to distract you. Until it became utterly impossible to ever pay off in any satisfying way. This is the same problem the Battlestar Galactica remake had - they've admitted they had absolutely no idea where they were going or who the Cylons actually were until they arbitrarily decided, even if those choices made no sense at the time.

But creators/showrunners/script editors CAN pay off on longer-term storytelling IF they plan out the story in advance. Babylon 5 was the famous example of this - J. Michael Straczynski had a five-year story arc entirely planned out, and actually came up with ways to justify actors leaving/dying in advance so that he could write them out of the show if he needed to, no matter how important their character was to the overall arc. There were definitely hiccups (mostly from network execs screwing them over a bit vis-a-vis cancellation/renewal, and the lead actor suffering from legit schizophrenia mid-season 1 and needing to retire to seek medical care), but for the most part they kept to the original story outline, and to this day it has a fanatical fanbase loyal to it because of it.

Supernatural is sort of example of both methodologies - it started out as a show where the writers had a pretty good idea of where the plot was going for the first five seasons, but after that it kept getting renewed year after year after year and they wound up having to constantly keep coming up with new storylines on the fly, each of which became weaker and weaker as they went because they'd sort of lose track of where they were going (and power creep made things more and more ridiculous).

Long-running TV shows can write on the fly if they're not promising a dramatic ending or answer to underlying story arc questions, but if a writer wants to build a show that way, they pretty much NEED to plan stuff out in advance. Which rarely happens, because most creators are fairly lazy, or get screwed over by their network (ie, there were multi-year plans for shows like Sliders an Andromeda that got derailed because the original writers got forced off the show and replaced by people who didn't follow the original outline).
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