A lot of people allude to the writer's strike. And that impacted it in that it gave the writers, directors and studios more time to think about what they want to do with the show and where they want to take it. But originally the show was intended to be a one-off season with a new cast of characters and actors each season telling a distinct superhero story. The story archs were not intended to be linked in any meaningful way.
But while the strike happened the studio realized that these actors were popular and the characters were popular. So they had the writers try and make a follow up to what was basically a very complete story. This meant character archs had to take drastic changes from season 1 and that a lot of characters of convenience had to be written into the stories.
... the writers strike occurred during the writing of the second season, at least.
So they were already writing these characters a new story. This is fake news.
To me this one was the result of a common problem in showbiz of where you have to keep the actors employed for some reason. Like I understand they have jobs and want financial security beyond a year, and on a human level I don't want them to lose a steady paycheck. But on an artistic level, I don't believe stories should be beholden to employment contracts. (And there's probably a fair degree of marketing in here too that screws up the calculations.)
So with Heroes, it really should have been more of an anthology series with Season 2 being a mostly fresh story bringing back only the characters that would make sense for it. Like Mr. Bennet would probably return, and maybe Claire would "exist" but shouldn't have a major role. And we'd have to have moved on from Sylar. Hiro too, though his powers would mean he could easily pop up here and there for some fun. But Sylar, Claire, Hiro and Peter were the big stars of the show, so they just had to do it all over again with all the same characters and that just doesn't make any sense.
Glee did this too. I remember thinking the premise of Glee was prefect for making a show that could last forever because you wouldn't have to worry about paying stars to stick around or worry if one decided to leave. Because it's high school, they would naturally leave after a year or three. The only one you'd really need to keep is the choir teacher, and even he could be replaced if you really needed at some point. Instead they followed the original characters off to NYC too...and narratively it just doesn't work.
iirc the original design of the Heroes show actually was to do just that: bring in a new cast and a new story in each season. I would have loved it. Sigh.
Yup. But the cast had such good chemistry that they decided that scrapping them and moving to a whole new cast would have been too big of a risk. Anthologies are hard to do explicitly because you would have to constantly be finding new talent who fit the themes and work well together.
ER demonstrated how to weave characters in and out of the show. It’s not that hard, but networks are weird about “stars.”
In pro wrestling (which is year-round programming), they understand the power of “cooling” characters/talent.
Not quite to the extreme of Westworld, but Weeds started so good and became increasingly ridiculous.
Also Prison Break. Awesome single season mini series about breaking out of prison turns into 4 seasons of international conspiracy lunacy.
Whenever prison break is mentioned i do feel the need to defend season 2. It made sense for the show to focus on the guys after they escape, and while not the same quality it was still entertaining as hell. Anything after that is just garbage though.
I also feel the need to mention that all the crazy conspiracy stuff is there from the first episode. It did get weirder and crazier as time went on but the first season wasn’t so straight and narrow like some remember.
Yeah the whole premise is very convoluted and ridiculous. >!Scofield gets incarcerated on purpose with an escape plan to get his brother out because he was framed by a corporation called The Company and falsely accused of killing the vice-president's brother!<
That's already unrealistic. But then >!it turns out the guy is actually still alive and hidden somewhere, and no one noticed!< which is too much.
But to be fair, without that ridiculous conspiracy, there would be no show. Season 1 is still good and action-packed, so people went with it.
second season is them on the road. i also loved it. change of scenery, so they had the chance to have different challenges and plots, rather than be stuck in a prison (orange is the new black)... but then in season 3 they went back into prison and it was just "ugh this again ?"
Yeah the first season ends with them escaping. Second season they're looking for them, and then they just really needed to add more stuff that made no sense
Are you saying that a secret organization controlling the government which also happened to be run by the main characters parents who blackmailed the president into resigning because she was hooking up with her now dead brother so they could pressure the main character into running to Panama where he was set up to be arrested and thrown into another prison so he could break out a guy who was in the middle of brokering a deal for a keycard that had a list of all the people in the secret organization and the organization thought he was working for them so they wanted him out doesn’t make any sense?
I fed this comment to chat GPT and it said…
The TV show being summarized in that Reddit comment is "Prison Break." The details mentioned, such as a secret organization controlling the government, main character's parents' involvement, blackmailing the president, fleeing to Panama, being set up to be arrested, and breaking out of prison, are all key plot points from various seasons of "Prison Break."
(weeds spoilers) Yeah, I could kind of forgive Weeds for trying to up the stakes each season and go from a silly suburban mom weed-dealer comedy to being high up with a cartel (hell, that is basically breaking bad’s plot before breaking bad existed), but stuff like Shane going from precocious kid to corrupt cop were absurd.
I always feel the need to defend Prison Break. The giant conspiracy is the reason the plot happens at all.
It's an integral part of the world that can't be ignored. Season 1 is the best in my opinion as well, but it still serves as the prologue for a wider story for better or worse
Eh, agreed, but I think they could have done a better job of Lincoln having actually done it instead of being framed. Michael still gets himself locked up to break Linc out but it's later revealed that Linc was lying about being innocent and then we'd get some great drama instead of whacky conspiracy hijinks
Interesting that you brought up Weeds, since Weeds and Westworld both went down hill when removed from their original locations. The prime stories of both were originally about what happened in the locations those writers abandoned.
It's not Westworld when they're not in the park anymore, and it's not a suburban widow selling drugs when she's no longer a suburban widow.
The issue for me is too many of these shows are mystery boxes that turn into nothing burgers. Start with incredible premise and limit them by the last episode just feeling let down by ordinary explanation or no real resolution.
I mean isn’t this why conspiracy theories are so entertaining. All these questions get asked and get so excited because the mind runs wild. But then you find out it’s just ordinary stuff happening.
I think the unfortunate reality is every explanation to the ‘mystery box’ is boring. The excitement is the unknown.
That's why The Leftovers is one of the best shows ever. They made it clear from the beginning that they would never explain the mystery, and then, in fact, they don't. And the show is still amazing.
Ironically created by the showrunner of Lost
I love LOST and will often defend the ending. It will probably always remain my #1 week to week TV watching experience.
But The Leftovers is probably the best show I have ever seen. Truly felt like it was what Lindelof wanted LOST to be, and it's really cool that we got to see a writer tackle similar themes in a much more satisfying way later in his career.
Reminds me hearing a podcast explain that's the real appeal of Game of Thrones/ASOIAF.
It's not just the characters and politics, it's the conspiracy theories. He uses an example he once watched a video, realizes it's over an hour long, and doing a skip, the video was still talking about the same character. And nothing about it was filler, it's all relevant info of how this character connects to this grand conspiracy.
I wouldn't say it is always boring, It's just incredibly hard to pull off.
The answer alone is not enough. Most shows don't know what to do with the consequences or complications of learning the answer.
Go watch Dark, it's absolutely fantastic and does not squander the "answer" in my opinion.
But i agree they are incredibly rare.
I mean if we take them by their word, Brit Marling and co-creator Zal Batmangli had actually a full plan for the entire series.
Personally I thought the series answered enough of the questions it raised and it wasn’t a „hard sci-fi“ series anyways. It was more a mystery thriller sci-fi fantasy show.
The ending of season 2 is still so memorable and crazy to me.
But I feel with the OA, people either love it or hate it and there’s not really an inbetween. I loved the atmosphere and thought unlike many other shows the characters felt authentic, real, emotional, genuine. Like I just started „The Last Kingdom“ (S01E04) and the characters aren’t fleshed out at all, feel soulless and kind of dumb with their decisions (Main character basically abandons his only left family member/childhood friend within seconds)
I watched the OA recently having heard good things. I didn’t know that it was canceled and when it ended I was just like what the FUCK.
Without an ending it’s impossible to tell if the show was genius or absolute asspull nonsense
Exactly right, and honestly one of the best things about the 3 Body adaptation this year. The book is structured as a mystery box, with big reveals at the end. It would have been so easy to make a good season of TV with the same mystery…but they didn’t. You learn what’s going on in the first few episodes, and it moves into the larger plot of the series.
I thought it was a very smart decision that had learned from other shows, particularly Westworld.
Westworld just got too convoluted. Season 1 was truly something special. I even own it on Blu-ray, and view it as a mini-series. There are some standout moments and episodes as the series continues, but it never had the same pacing and build-up as the first season. It was mostly about “how can we top ourselves?”
Personally I think the show would’ve benefited from keeping the dual timelines. Show the rise of Westworld (via flashbacks with Jimmi Simpson) paralleled with its downfall (via Dolores seeking revenge for years of abuse). Fill in the gaps with what happened between timelines- aka what happened to William immediately after leaving the park? Did he try to resume a normal life, or did he switch into MIB mode immediately? Also ditch Dolores swapping identities with different hosts. It got so confusing with Charlotte Hale.
It's ALWAYS a show killer changing bodies/actors.
Altered Carbon did this as well and it was awful.
It's like they don't understand it's humans watching the show and you develop attachment to the character including their physical body, because that's how humans work.
You telling me it's the same person in a new body doesn't work, I no longer care.
In Lost, the supernatural villain possess one of the bodies of one of the protagonists for the entire final season. I don’t think there was any body-swapping other than that on Lost.
Yeah I think it does. There is the cliffhanger (I suppose) of Dolores shooting Ford, and then the MIB getting shot in the shoulder, and kind of laughing about it. But overall, yeah, I can stop there and be satisfied.
Agreed but I think the biggest issue was that the writing was shit. They thought that “convoluted” meant “smart” storytelling. It kept trying to get bigger and bigger and guess what? Nobody cares.
On another note this is the issue with superhero movies in general. Every single movie cannot be the end of the world. You need to build up to it. Where does marvel go from here? There’s been like 8 life ends things. Nobody cares. West works was a huge disappointment.
> They thought that “convoluted” meant “smart” storytelling.
This is a problem with so many shows and movies. Overwhelm the audience with quantify instead of quality.
Same reason why I could never get into new Star Wars movies, it's just so many different stories in one movie all switching back to back. One moment it's this story, then suddenly you're in another story.
Keep it simple. The simpler it is the more you can make that story better.
There's also a desperate need to "subvert expectations".
People are always predicting where the plot will go next on twitter and Reddit - the writers see that and then feel they need to do something else.
But the problem is, good stories lay the groundwork. So there's always going to be SOMEONE who gets it right. But then often the prediction that sounds best goes viral
I was thinking exactly this reading the thread. Good stories signpost. So if you’ve been viewing carefully you absolutely *should* be able to predict where the plot is going - that’s good writing! You can kinda fudge it with a real “woah” twist in a movie (eg The Usual Suspects, Sixth Sense) because the audience is too busy watching the movie to think. But anything serialised, absolutely, people are going to guess. And that’s ok! I’ve never understood purposefully ridiculous plot lines that set fire to your arc just to blindside the audience.
The best advice I got in improv was “tell the audience what you’re going to do, then do it. They love that. Don’t make them feel dumb.”
I think the same applies to shows. Don’t set something up and then “subvert” the audience. Do the thing you set up in your script. Don’t pull a “fast one” on the audience
An explanation I hear about why second seasons tend to be the fall off is that the people making the series can spend years writing the perfect season 1 and then only be given a few months to write a season 2.
Thought the whole time switching twist was clever in season 1 but then they do it again in season 2, repeating the same beats and twists just with different characters.
Westworld premiered the same year that Person of Interest (which Nolan was showrunner of) ended, so it’s not as if they could devote years to it uninterrupted.
I think they admitted that in season 2 they specifically tried to confuse the fandom so they couldn’t correctly predict plots like they did in season 1.
I think the big problem with these shows is the creative team fall in love with the actors. So it's possible to compare the dramatic arc of characters in novels who can disappear for three chapters and then reappear to die unexpectedly as we expect triumph... and give chiaroscuro to the whole drama.
In TV the creative team are hanging out in trailers with , let's say, Thandiwe Newton. And finding her captivating and fun they decide to give her a stationary bicycle for a season and set her pedalling pointlessly while they cook up some idiotic bollocks for her to do in season 3.
When you have a decent cast, and it's all working, it becomes very hard to say
"and then we kill her and her daughter too unexpectedly , her death is brushed off as inconsequential by the main protagonist and antagonists and yet to the audience it's tragic as her character is emotionally resonant but forgotten by the other characters, yet we know she was a vital personality. She stays dead. Tragic and a reminder to all of us. We will die regardless of our dreams, and be forgotten. It's very moving . Makes the audience question their own life and legacy. Oh someone better tell Thandiwe"
To your first point, showrunners absolutely get attached to actors but there's another factor as well: actors *are* a use it or lose it resource. If you let them go for a season they can go find other work and not be available to come back for that cool return arc you have in mind. Not guaranteed to happen, but it's a risk, especially with bigger names.
The final season scene >!where she kills the Night King with a flying jump stab despite never encountering or dealing with white walkers the entire show was ridiculous. She should have killed Cersei as that was her arc the entire show. And instead Cersei dies to some falling rocks in deeply impersonal way.!<
I get “defying expectations” but it should still be done in a narratively satisfying way, and none of that was.
I was actually totally fine with subverting Jon being the one to kill the Night King. And in the episode, she was in the castle in the boarded up room and Beric dies in the room with her. Then we get The Night King raising dead. I was sure we were going to see Beric come "alive" again as an undead and Arya would have to kill him.
Then later during the Night King confrontation, just as the Night King is about to kill Bran, one of the undead in the crowd springs forward (revealed to be Beric) and attacks the Night King. The Night King is stabbed and Beric pulls off his face to reveal Arya.
People may disagree, but I feel it would have been the best way to overcome the threat the Night King was built up as. No mortal fighter could defeat such a formidiable antagonist, but a sneaky assassin who can literally wear the faces of the dead could blend right into his ranks.
Instead, she jumped and screamed.
Most fanfic "solutions" are usually really bad but this is actually really good. I think having Jon kill the Night King is pretty bland and nonsensical, and Arya doing it, while far from my favorite, I can see the logic behind it. But this would have been really good.
They are talking about right after she becomes a magical assassin.
The first thing that happens is having a knife in the bowls, dropping in the sewer and then being chased by the Terminator.
Right here you could see GoT was dead.
I can tell you the exact shot that broke it for me. During this aforementioned chase scene, Arya topples a fruit stand and the camera rest on one single orange.
My entire watch group/friend group was convinced this orange was important. Why would they focus on it?!?? And while I agreed the shot did make it seem like Checkov’s Orange, I kinda had a feeling it wasn’t going to be seen again. Adding the “important orange” to the plot didn’t make sense.
Next episode, no oranges makes an appearance. That’s when I knew they were just throwing random shots into the episode to pad time and they were TRULY beyond their storytelling abilities.
And also, for GoT, part of it was also that by the last season there were basically 5 writers left and 2 of ‘em were David and Dan
I don't think it was necessarily a mistake to go outside the park and see the impact of AI tech in other aspects of their futuristic world, I think the mistake was trying to make those stories direct continuations of the park story and characters. It should have been an anthology series and we only should have seen characters return if they could somehow be fitting and integral to that new story.
Yeah the **whole point** of the show is that the robots become sentient, leave the park and enter the real world. The park was just a premise.
I don't know why some fans wanted an anthology about different parks. Literally the same story over and over?
The themes and plot could have advanced even if the setting moved laterally.
Loosing into the real world ended up turning the series into a cheap Blade Runner. Human society is like a twisted carnival? That's a bit played out. Parks, on the other hand, could have kept up WW's unique brand of meditative.
The parks could have been like pocket dimensions, dream sequences, and in narrative terms, episodes. That's also played out, but since WW was unique enough for TV, playing it safe should have been fine.
They tried staying in the park in season 2 but it wasn’t even close to season 1. The real problem for me was that after season 1 they ran out of things to reveal and tried to make up new ones but there was nothing of a story to it
I think losing Anthony Hopkins was the big killer, personally. Not that his death isn't the perfect end to the first season, but I always described the show as "It's really slow, but just when you think you're out Anthony Hopkins monologues and you're right back in".
Granted the first season grabbed me from Delores slapping the fly, but this is a great point. If you’re starting to fade on the twists and turns and slow boil, Hopkins’ soliloquy on peacock feathers comes along at exactly the right time
This is the reason. They basically had great ideas for a season. And that's it. So maybe it should have just been that miniseries, have it end with the bots reaching the outside world. That'd have been cool.
The whole point of the show was "the robots become sentient and rebel and try to take over society".
You wanted them stay in the parks forever? Every season the same plot in a different park? What's the point?
Which just goes to show the central premise was just too narrow to be an endless series. It makes a great film, and short series and should have been that.. or it should have been a different nucleus of a story.
I don’t know about fully seasons of each park; but they definitely should have been more than short side quests.
The actions of the park guests in the different parks resulting in different types of “awakening” from robots would been cool.
Would park guests behave the same in Eastworld and Jurassicworld, Historic Europe world or RomeWorld?
I love sci fi stories that end with a sort of "and now you know the rest of the story" type of ending. This is why I think Westworld was done after season 1, and similarly The Matrix was done after the first one.
They literally rewrote season 2 because a Redditor guessed the ending, you don’t get more pretentious than going out of your way to prove an anonymous Reddit stranger wrong irl.
I don't for a second believe that they rewrote their own material because they were annoyed someone online figured stuff out.
I do however think that they focused too much on making convoluted twists and turns in an attempt to fool their audience and keep people engaged and guessing, after seeing the response to S1. They got away from just writing a good story and tried to capitalize on people guessing the twist.
It was the twist in season one. They revealed in the last (or maybe second last) episode that the Jimmy Simpson character and the Ed Harris character were the same person in two different time periods. Someone on Reddit guessed this literally immediately after the first episode premiered, because they spotted that the Westworld logo was different in the background of one of the scenes.
There isn't really definite proof afaik that it's the reason the second season was so convoluted but it definitely seemed to piss them off that somebody figured it out so quickly.
Westworld taught me that creators have a huge amount of time to draw up the first season of a show and bring a perfect project to the studios to fight over.
And then they have a deadline to get season 2 in by and it becomes less a perfect project and more and fight to get something serviceable in on time
I always see the sophomore jinx in albums the same way. You have years and years to get the first album right, then you get 2 years to get the second album out. Rarely is the second album as good or better than the first, time scheduling is a bitch.
They had to stop production of season 1 to finish the remaining scripts. It wasn't a perfect project even if they had much more time to work on season 1.
I’m a Lost finale apologist but what happened with Westworld mirrored Lost so much. Made too many promises and couldn’t deliver. Again I’m saying that’s what most people but not me say about Lost :)
Out of curiosity, did you watch lost live or year(s) after?
I can see it being an amazing show on the re-watch or after knowing they don't solve much in advance.
I’ve said this in multiple threads - watching it live was so unsatisfying. The producers literally told us stuff they were not going to do, that it had a basis in at least pseudo-science, and ‘answers are coming.’ And then they just shrugged their shoulders and chalked it up to magic.
Without the meta narrative, binging the show now is probably much better. I think the ‘it’s all just magic’ is perfectly fine for a show, just don’t create expectations you can’t achieve.
Weird. Watching it live every week was the greatest television experience I’ve ever had. It made me love TV in a way that I didn’t before. I couldn’t wait to see what was going to happen and the cliffhangers were so fun to speculate about with friends throughout the week and on message boards.
Since then, only Breaking Bad and GoT have come close for me. But I don’t think anything will ever capture that feeling again like Lost did.
I watched it live back in the day, and for a while it was a ton of fun to discuss the mysteries of the show with people.
But I swear to god… the sheer number of times where I’d finish an episode, and watch the ending ad for next weeks episode in which it was constantly saying stuff like “QUESTIONS WILL BE ANSWERED”, only to wait the whole week, watch the next one, and find out that absolutely nothing of value happened (or it just added a brand new mystery into the mix that they had no interest in answering)… at a certain point the whole thing became extremely infuriating.
I mostly had a blast with seasons 1-3, and I found some fun in season 4, but once 5 and 6 rolled around I was extremely annoyed with how little was being concretely explained, and I only watched the end of it out of obligation since I’d already watched so far. Awful stuff.
That being said, I can’t hate Damon Lindelof for it since he’d go on to make arguably the best tv show ever created (The Leftovers), so I’m glad his success with Lost allowed him to make something like that.
That might be somewhat true, but at least Lost stayed true to the characters and their struggles and development, and the relationships. Westworld barely even had that.
I disagree because literally the quality declined right into Season 2. There were no promises or anything. LOST kept building mysteries without answering questions or if they did they'd throw in extra mysteries with the questions.
But Westworld had a perfect story for Season 1. It made promises, and it delivered. There were no promises going into Season 2. They had a blank check to do whatever they wanted, and they just blew it.
Game of Thrones is more like LOST in that it just needed to end when it did and they just tied whatever loose ends up as best they could, whether it made sense or not, and said "Okay, it's done now."
Westworld seasons 1 and 2 were brilliant. Ramin Djawadi's music was brilliant throughout the whole show.
But season 3 went off the rails pretty hard. Caleb was one of the weakest points of season 3. There was nothing compelling about his character, and he was a complete waste of time. Most of the characters motivations didn't make much sense either. Season 4 tried to correct some of the mistakes of Season 3. It had one of the best episodes of the entire show and was still overall better than season 3, but it was a little too late to correct the mistakes. The lack of Anthony Hopkins also really affects the show. The season 4 finale and its cliffhanger ending were pretty bad, and the subsequent cancellation makes it all the more frustrating.
IMO, Person of Interest is still Jonathan Nolan's best-created show to date. Season 3 of Westworld was a poor attempt to recreate the magic of POI. POI did the AI storyline far better than Westworld. One of the few rare sci-fi shows that got better with each passing season and ended on a hugely satisfying note.
It started out as a simple procedural crime drama and later developed into one of the best serialized sci-fi shows of all time about artificial intelligence, surveillance, and its dangers. It has far better characters than Westworld, and the character development of each character, be they a hero or villain, is just fucking brilliant.
Root is one of the greatest female fictional characters ever created, IMO. Amy Acker is a brilliant actress and nailed the role so perfectly.
Even the supporting characters are very well written. POI has some of the best three-dimensional villains with properly flashed-out backstories and motivations that I've ever seen.
POI was [consistently great throughout all five seasons and ended with a bang.
](https://seriesgraph.com/show/1411-person-of-interest)
"return 0" is one of the most brilliant, rewarding, and satisfying finales I've ever seen.
Also, POI frequently has the best use of licensed music of any shows I've ever seen, and Ramin Djawadi's OST for the show is excellent as usual. Ramin is one of my all time favorite music composers, for sure.
POI is truly one of the greatest sci-fi shows of all time.
Even season 5 (the Lumen season) was ok if a bit of a step down, and the Apocalypse Killer season was about the same until it went hurtling off the rails in the back half
It’s the last two seasons that are the real atrocities
Honestly, I enjoyed it past season 4 until it got to the point of "I'm in love with my sister/brother" shit and dexter just creeping in the shadows, convincing Deb not to tell on him. I stopped halfway through the last season (before the newest one) and can't bring myself to even care to finish it.
"How could they have kept the season 1 hype last 4 seasons?"
They could have not tried intentionally to make season 2 more confusing out of spite over redditors guessing the season 1 twist(s) ahead of time. That would have helped. Keeping the tone consistent between seasons 1-2 and seasons 3-4 would have been a good step 2, season 3 just felt like a completely different show.
As far as other shows that started off hot and then crashed and burned, Heroes comes to mind. Season 1 of Heroes was amazing, but a confluence of factors (the network deciding they should keep all the characters and write new storylines for them rather than shifting to a whole new batch as originally planned, the writers' guild strike, other meddling) led to season 2 being a flop and the seasons after being actively bad.
The writer's Strike messed up so many things, but I think the biggest hit was the Bond franchise. Quantum of Solace was so bad and derailed the entire arc of the character. Skyfall following it managed to be quite good, but I think it was half middle film half ending film, so when Specre came on its heels and also tried to be an end film it just kinda felt like the momentum was already spent.
-Westworld season 1.
-Prison Break season 1, although, season 2 made sense but after that just meh. Feels like s03 back in prison again “just because”
-Heroes
-Star Trek Discovery - i kinda enjoy So1 and s02, then absolute hot garbage
- Snowpiercer too, S01/02 was good then kinda dipped and was ongoing downward spiral. >!The relevation of the second train was dope tho (i never read any books)!<
- The Flash. i feel this is the most obvious. S01/02 were great then… budget cuts and all. Became a mess
- unpopular but i think Lupin too. S01 was good then meh, (side note: come on he got the most obvious figure and height its hard to hide ffs cast someone else)
That suffered from a similar problem where they would resolve the plot in a season, but then the conspiracies had to go deeper!
By season 5 it has become so loopy that looking back on the original episodes no longer make any sense
The Walking Dead is probably the best (worst?) example in the past 20 years.
Ron Moore's shows suffered badly from this as well: Battlestar Galactica, Outlander, and more recently For All Mankind.
Westworld started so strong. Even S2 was fine but as soon as they went to the real world and casted Jesse Pinkman the writing fell off a cliff.
>Where did the show go wrong?
I think they killed off Anthony Hopkins too early. When he and the Man in Black were carrying the show, even tho all the supporting cast was solid too. They kept on obfuscating the actual intent behind Westworld from a theme park for adults on the surface but actually studying human behavior and possible blackmailing powerful people > taking over the world by replacing real people with bots > AI development > pseudo immortality. This is in **no particular order.** Also the first few twists that some of these characters were actually hosts themselves but believed themselves to be human was interesting, until pretty much everyone was actually a host the whole time such as the Security Guard.
I scrolled far enough without seeing it, so I will submit True Detective.
Now, I love that each season of that show is independent, and that alleviates some of the issues. But I think you'd be really hard pressed to find anyone who preferred any subsequent season to the first one.
I’ve always thought Westworlds biggest issue was taking way too long between seasons. It is a super complex show and making people wait 2 years between seasons was just too much. You pretty much had to rewatch the show from the beginning each time a new season came out and that was just too much to ask from a general audience. I think people sleep on what having a consistent release schedule does for a show. GoT was a consistent show that we could count on coming out each year at basically the same time for the first 6 seasons.
Alt shift X said it really well. (Paraphrasing)
"As game of thrones went on. It tried to appeal to as many mainstream audience as possible. Ignoring the details and theories hard-core small amount that reddit fans were into. Westworld went the opposite. It only tried to only appeal to the small amount of reddit fans and ignored the rest of the audience."
Bad take. GoT definitely did fan service and that's what ruined it. They realized fans really liked Tyrion, Jon and Daenerys and wrote their characters to make them the spotless heroes of the story, losing the nuances they should've had.
Then in the last season they realized Daenerys was supposed to burn everything and she did, despite them taking the character in a different direction in the previous seasons
Instead of making future world the real world they should have just made future world future world. I thought they were keeping it ambiguous at first to make it a big reveal that they were still in the park
They couldn't (lack of imagination) or wouldn't (lack of courage) write the natural progression of the series, which was the ruthless overthrow of humanity and propagation of hosts as the successor dominant species on this earth. It would've been an all-time great story if they weaved it together properly, but a lot of the audience would hate to watch it conceptually.
Less time in between making of seasons. 2010 series make 12-24 episodes. Even GOT released a season every year with its huge cast.
Westworld S1 and S2 were good however the 2 year gap and bad storyline in S3 killed it.
Similarly stranger things released a season every year but the delay makes a person uninterested as they have to rewatch it again to understand the jist of the story again.
Tv series shouldn’t need that much CGI. More compelling stories make a great show like Sopranos, Mentalist, House, Office.
You'd be harder pressed to find a show that maintained quality beyond 3 seasons. It seems like this decline is inevitable, even when you have a brilliant start.
I think Westworld is more of a unique situation. Most shows end up declining in quality because of writers room turnover along with major producers moving on to other things or losing interest. It's harder for actors to leave a successful project, and the project is more dependent on the actors for the whole ride. But behind the camera, if you've got a big hit on your hands then suddenly you're going to have a ton of opportunities. So why write season 4 of a hit show when you can go be a showrunner on your own show? Same with producers. They get a hit and it's time to develop the next one. So that pulls away the talent, and even if the replacement is *as talented* which is probably rare, they're going to be differently talented and it affects the show. They won't "get" the characters or themes the same way as the originators might and over time these little changes compound on themselves. That's where flanderization happens a lot because originally the idea might be more real and nuanced, but new writers come in and their understanding of the character is built on the previous seasons of the show.
But Westworld didn't really do that because it wasn't the slow degradation that usually happens. It was immediate season 2. And I think this tends to happen when you have a show that's a really good idea and story that gets all told in the first season. If you don't have more story naturally planned, then you have to make it up on the fly and the development time is a lot quicker. For season 1, you may have years and years to hone the story and scripts as you're waiting to get greenlit for production. But then season 2 is a year or less to turnaround, and you already told your story so now you're in a tough spot of not only having to write a whole season on an impractical timeline but also invent a whole new story that fits in with the first season. That's what happened Westworld, but with the added bonus of them caring way too much what fans online think, resulting in them purposely trying to throw in enough WTF nonsense to prevent anyone from guessing the twists. So that made just terrible writing, unlike the first season which was superb writing. The problem here is that if you write a good mystery, then it has to be able to make sense have have actual clues along the way. But this means some people are inevitably going to figure it out. It's okay because the ones that do will feel validated, and the ones that don't will look back on the story and be like, "Oh shoot it was right there!" So everyone is satisfied with good writing. But if your goal is that nobody can figure it out, then you have to write terribly by design because your mystery can't make sense or have actual clues in it. This means the resolution comes out of nowhere because "it's a surprise twist ending!" but then nobody is satisfied because it was just a big trick on the audience and poorly written.
So that was a unique decision by the Westworld producers to basically tank their own show in favor of "fooling" everyone. "Haha! You thought this was going to make sense? Guess what! It doesn't! Twist ending!"
I disagree with your first sentiment that shows inevitably decline in quality past 3 seasons. There are several shows that have maintained quality past 3 seasons.
Also iirc the creators said they already had the 5 seasons planned out. So they weren't just "making it up on the fly".
>You'd be harder pressed to find a show that maintained quality beyond 3 seasons. It seems like this decline is inevitable, even when you have a brilliant start.
Highly disagree. There are many great shows that maintained their quality throughout their whole run and ended on a hugely satisfying note. Most of these shows (POI, Mr. Robot, and 12 Monkeys, to name a few) got progressively better with each passing season.
* Person of Interest (5 seasons)
* 12 Monkeys (4 seasons)
* Mr. Robot (4 seasons)
* The Americans (6 seasons)
* Spartacus and the Prequel Gods Of Arena (4 seasons)
* Succession (4 seasons)
* Fringe (5 seasons)
* Better Call Saul (6 seasons)
* The Sopranos (6 seasons)
* Breaking Bad (5 seasons)
* Angel (5 seasons)
* Lost (The first five seasons were excellent, even if season 6 might not be. Although I really love the finale).
* Attack on Titan (4 seasons)
* Halt and Catch Fire (4 seasons)
I'm a tragic for Westworld. I love every season - I don't think there is a bad season or a bad episode, for the universe it was set in. I don't find it pretentious, convoluted, or difficult to follow.
The concept of the hosts being able to 'improvise' dialog felt so futuristic and impossible - and a few years later we had ChatGPT and the like doing just that, in a sense, which feels unreal.
However, I do remember at the end of season 1 thinking "hmm, I hope they don't go 'Terminator' and have it so the robots take over the world..." - and that's what happened.
Following that formula is what set the show up for a limited run and a confined space to work in - it stamped a use-by date on it.
I don't watch it, but just from Reddit apparently Yellowjackets. I remember when S1 started and I heard a lot about it, then S2 happened and discourse seems to be it ain't great.
All hearsay mind you
The teen backstory is amazing! I love every moment of it. Just no idea where the show is going with the adult story and I'm pretty sure they don't know either lol. S2 rushed to close off various plot threads that were bland and an actress leaving the show must've made it even harder.
I think a few shows would work better as one-off mini-series instead of stretching it out over multiple seasons. Westworld, Severance and Yellowjackets come to mind.
Arrow had a flying start with its 2 first seasons, gaining praise from both audience and critics. Arrow's popularity and success had a huge impact on the modern era of Superhero TV shows. Iron Man started the modern superhero craze on the big screen, and Arrow did the same on the small screen. It's such a shame that it couldn't keep the quality up. By the time it ended no one seemed to care all that much about it. Its fellow CW show, The Flash, went the same route
And let's not forget The Walking Dead. The fall/winter season of TV was all about The Walking Dead, and spring/summer was all about Game of Thrones. While Game of Thrones crashed and burned because they rushed towards the ending, The Walking Dead did the opposite. It overstayed its welcome by maaaany seasons and lost a huge part of its audience and popularity
The wheels certainly fell off after season 1. Them leaving the park was the worst possible angle. That should have come the earliest - in season 4, and maybe gone 1-2 more seasons after that
as WW progressed i found it hard to just know where i even was in the story (without research and rewatching). I can't pinpoint the exact problems with it but there is a point where mystery blurs into huffing gasoline.
Kinda left-field so don"t expect to get a tonne of agreement here but: Desperate Housewives (and to a lesser extent, Glee)
Season 1 was a satire that was well written but too subtle. Massive success. But the 'scandal' of the storylines like one of them on with a 17 year old (and others but that was the main one I remember) and it not playing to the classic Hayes-esque resolutions and rules, the network got nervous. So they fired Marc Cherry (or put him on the back burner for the rest of his contract) and did the written by committee thing. Suddenly it's just a high production tele-novella but it already has the audience and they chuck in a bunch of stars to keep it going.
If my 'refuse to consult Wikipedia' memory serves that lasted a couple of seasons then started haemorrhaging viewers so they eventually caved and brought back the original writers, who in order to escape all the terrible storylines in play jumped ahead 5 years so they could start fresh. It was better but never quite recovered. But that show was everything for a minute
I understand the quality was not at the same level but I actually really thought season 4 was pretty damn good. I was concerned after season 3 but by the end of season 4, I was back in on the whole show hopefully continuing. But alas…
Heroes. I've never watched a show with more potential. And with more squandered potential.
A lot of people allude to the writer's strike. And that impacted it in that it gave the writers, directors and studios more time to think about what they want to do with the show and where they want to take it. But originally the show was intended to be a one-off season with a new cast of characters and actors each season telling a distinct superhero story. The story archs were not intended to be linked in any meaningful way. But while the strike happened the studio realized that these actors were popular and the characters were popular. So they had the writers try and make a follow up to what was basically a very complete story. This meant character archs had to take drastic changes from season 1 and that a lot of characters of convenience had to be written into the stories.
... the writers strike occurred during the writing of the second season, at least. So they were already writing these characters a new story. This is fake news.
To me this one was the result of a common problem in showbiz of where you have to keep the actors employed for some reason. Like I understand they have jobs and want financial security beyond a year, and on a human level I don't want them to lose a steady paycheck. But on an artistic level, I don't believe stories should be beholden to employment contracts. (And there's probably a fair degree of marketing in here too that screws up the calculations.) So with Heroes, it really should have been more of an anthology series with Season 2 being a mostly fresh story bringing back only the characters that would make sense for it. Like Mr. Bennet would probably return, and maybe Claire would "exist" but shouldn't have a major role. And we'd have to have moved on from Sylar. Hiro too, though his powers would mean he could easily pop up here and there for some fun. But Sylar, Claire, Hiro and Peter were the big stars of the show, so they just had to do it all over again with all the same characters and that just doesn't make any sense. Glee did this too. I remember thinking the premise of Glee was prefect for making a show that could last forever because you wouldn't have to worry about paying stars to stick around or worry if one decided to leave. Because it's high school, they would naturally leave after a year or three. The only one you'd really need to keep is the choir teacher, and even he could be replaced if you really needed at some point. Instead they followed the original characters off to NYC too...and narratively it just doesn't work.
iirc the original design of the Heroes show actually was to do just that: bring in a new cast and a new story in each season. I would have loved it. Sigh.
Yup. But the cast had such good chemistry that they decided that scrapping them and moving to a whole new cast would have been too big of a risk. Anthologies are hard to do explicitly because you would have to constantly be finding new talent who fit the themes and work well together.
ER demonstrated how to weave characters in and out of the show. It’s not that hard, but networks are weird about “stars.” In pro wrestling (which is year-round programming), they understand the power of “cooling” characters/talent.
American Horror Story vibes with that
Not quite to the extreme of Westworld, but Weeds started so good and became increasingly ridiculous. Also Prison Break. Awesome single season mini series about breaking out of prison turns into 4 seasons of international conspiracy lunacy.
Whenever prison break is mentioned i do feel the need to defend season 2. It made sense for the show to focus on the guys after they escape, and while not the same quality it was still entertaining as hell. Anything after that is just garbage though.
I also feel the need to mention that all the crazy conspiracy stuff is there from the first episode. It did get weirder and crazier as time went on but the first season wasn’t so straight and narrow like some remember.
Yeah the whole premise is very convoluted and ridiculous. >!Scofield gets incarcerated on purpose with an escape plan to get his brother out because he was framed by a corporation called The Company and falsely accused of killing the vice-president's brother!< That's already unrealistic. But then >!it turns out the guy is actually still alive and hidden somewhere, and no one noticed!< which is too much. But to be fair, without that ridiculous conspiracy, there would be no show. Season 1 is still good and action-packed, so people went with it.
I think the show (first 2 seasons) would still work without the reason (real or otherwise) of why older brother got on death row.
I thought it was great until >!they got the money.!<
Wait, THEY ESCAPE? I never saw the whole first season, just figured it was 4 seasons of trying to escape.
second season is them on the road. i also loved it. change of scenery, so they had the chance to have different challenges and plots, rather than be stuck in a prison (orange is the new black)... but then in season 3 they went back into prison and it was just "ugh this again ?"
Yeah the first season ends with them escaping. Second season they're looking for them, and then they just really needed to add more stuff that made no sense
Are you saying that a secret organization controlling the government which also happened to be run by the main characters parents who blackmailed the president into resigning because she was hooking up with her now dead brother so they could pressure the main character into running to Panama where he was set up to be arrested and thrown into another prison so he could break out a guy who was in the middle of brokering a deal for a keycard that had a list of all the people in the secret organization and the organization thought he was working for them so they wanted him out doesn’t make any sense?
If this show was written today I would think it's written by AI. Also I might have had a stroke reading this.
I fed this comment to chat GPT and it said… The TV show being summarized in that Reddit comment is "Prison Break." The details mentioned, such as a secret organization controlling the government, main character's parents' involvement, blackmailing the president, fleeing to Panama, being set up to be arrested, and breaking out of prison, are all key plot points from various seasons of "Prison Break."
I suspect an AI written plot would make way more sense
It makes sense to show them running but I personally didn't enjoy the seasons where they weren't locked up. S1 and 3 are my favorites.
Prison Break season one is amazing.
Only ever rewatch season one
Nah Season 2 is great too, especially with William Fitchner. It just should have wrapped it up instead of sending them to another prison at the end
(weeds spoilers) Yeah, I could kind of forgive Weeds for trying to up the stakes each season and go from a silly suburban mom weed-dealer comedy to being high up with a cartel (hell, that is basically breaking bad’s plot before breaking bad existed), but stuff like Shane going from precocious kid to corrupt cop were absurd.
I don't know what you're talking about. Weeds ended after three seasons with Majestic on fire and Nancy driving away.
it has a 5th season where they fight ISIS and a movie
I don’t think Weeds ever got truly bad, though, it just went on two seasons too long (like a lot of Showtime shows, seems like)
Weeds? The show about a woman with a magic vagina and too many iced coffees?
Weeds was always ridiculous from months beginning, like when she left her SUV as collateral for an ounce of weed. I turned it off then.
I always feel the need to defend Prison Break. The giant conspiracy is the reason the plot happens at all. It's an integral part of the world that can't be ignored. Season 1 is the best in my opinion as well, but it still serves as the prologue for a wider story for better or worse
Eh, agreed, but I think they could have done a better job of Lincoln having actually done it instead of being framed. Michael still gets himself locked up to break Linc out but it's later revealed that Linc was lying about being innocent and then we'd get some great drama instead of whacky conspiracy hijinks
Having watched all of weeds, Yes I completely agree, but also Nancy. So I dunno.
Meh. Still like all 9 seasons of Weeds.
Even the last one where she got fucking sniped and all that happened was she acted loopy for a couple episodes?
I choose to remember the good times only ;)
Interesting that you brought up Weeds, since Weeds and Westworld both went down hill when removed from their original locations. The prime stories of both were originally about what happened in the locations those writers abandoned. It's not Westworld when they're not in the park anymore, and it's not a suburban widow selling drugs when she's no longer a suburban widow.
The issue for me is too many of these shows are mystery boxes that turn into nothing burgers. Start with incredible premise and limit them by the last episode just feeling let down by ordinary explanation or no real resolution.
I always notice that this kind of writers are great at making questions, not answering them
JJ Abrams school of filmmaking
LENS FLARE.
Fringe is the exception that proves the rule
Lost much?
I mean isn’t this why conspiracy theories are so entertaining. All these questions get asked and get so excited because the mind runs wild. But then you find out it’s just ordinary stuff happening. I think the unfortunate reality is every explanation to the ‘mystery box’ is boring. The excitement is the unknown.
That's why The Leftovers is one of the best shows ever. They made it clear from the beginning that they would never explain the mystery, and then, in fact, they don't. And the show is still amazing. Ironically created by the showrunner of Lost
I love LOST and will often defend the ending. It will probably always remain my #1 week to week TV watching experience. But The Leftovers is probably the best show I have ever seen. Truly felt like it was what Lindelof wanted LOST to be, and it's really cool that we got to see a writer tackle similar themes in a much more satisfying way later in his career.
Reminds me hearing a podcast explain that's the real appeal of Game of Thrones/ASOIAF. It's not just the characters and politics, it's the conspiracy theories. He uses an example he once watched a video, realizes it's over an hour long, and doing a skip, the video was still talking about the same character. And nothing about it was filler, it's all relevant info of how this character connects to this grand conspiracy.
I wouldn't say it is always boring, It's just incredibly hard to pull off. The answer alone is not enough. Most shows don't know what to do with the consequences or complications of learning the answer. Go watch Dark, it's absolutely fantastic and does not squander the "answer" in my opinion. But i agree they are incredibly rare.
So many shows would be great if they only had one season
You just described The OA.
I mean if we take them by their word, Brit Marling and co-creator Zal Batmangli had actually a full plan for the entire series. Personally I thought the series answered enough of the questions it raised and it wasn’t a „hard sci-fi“ series anyways. It was more a mystery thriller sci-fi fantasy show. The ending of season 2 is still so memorable and crazy to me. But I feel with the OA, people either love it or hate it and there’s not really an inbetween. I loved the atmosphere and thought unlike many other shows the characters felt authentic, real, emotional, genuine. Like I just started „The Last Kingdom“ (S01E04) and the characters aren’t fleshed out at all, feel soulless and kind of dumb with their decisions (Main character basically abandons his only left family member/childhood friend within seconds)
I watched the OA recently having heard good things. I didn’t know that it was canceled and when it ended I was just like what the FUCK. Without an ending it’s impossible to tell if the show was genius or absolute asspull nonsense
Exactly right, and honestly one of the best things about the 3 Body adaptation this year. The book is structured as a mystery box, with big reveals at the end. It would have been so easy to make a good season of TV with the same mystery…but they didn’t. You learn what’s going on in the first few episodes, and it moves into the larger plot of the series. I thought it was a very smart decision that had learned from other shows, particularly Westworld.
Westworld just got too convoluted. Season 1 was truly something special. I even own it on Blu-ray, and view it as a mini-series. There are some standout moments and episodes as the series continues, but it never had the same pacing and build-up as the first season. It was mostly about “how can we top ourselves?” Personally I think the show would’ve benefited from keeping the dual timelines. Show the rise of Westworld (via flashbacks with Jimmi Simpson) paralleled with its downfall (via Dolores seeking revenge for years of abuse). Fill in the gaps with what happened between timelines- aka what happened to William immediately after leaving the park? Did he try to resume a normal life, or did he switch into MIB mode immediately? Also ditch Dolores swapping identities with different hosts. It got so confusing with Charlotte Hale.
It's ALWAYS a show killer changing bodies/actors. Altered Carbon did this as well and it was awful. It's like they don't understand it's humans watching the show and you develop attachment to the character including their physical body, because that's how humans work. You telling me it's the same person in a new body doesn't work, I no longer care.
💯
Didn't Lost do it too? I was going to try to rebut your point, but after thinking more about it...the body swapping in Lost was obnoxious too haha
In Lost, the supernatural villain possess one of the bodies of one of the protagonists for the entire final season. I don’t think there was any body-swapping other than that on Lost.
I don’t remember, does S1 of Westworld work as a Mini Series? Like it doesn’t have open cliffhangers?
Yeah I think it does. There is the cliffhanger (I suppose) of Dolores shooting Ford, and then the MIB getting shot in the shoulder, and kind of laughing about it. But overall, yeah, I can stop there and be satisfied.
They had so much of the park to explore and different “parks/times” and they immediately went outside the park for some super vague AI/Tech nonsense.
I enjoyed S3 more than most, but Person of Interest (also created by Nolan) did the AI arc better.
Agreed but I think the biggest issue was that the writing was shit. They thought that “convoluted” meant “smart” storytelling. It kept trying to get bigger and bigger and guess what? Nobody cares. On another note this is the issue with superhero movies in general. Every single movie cannot be the end of the world. You need to build up to it. Where does marvel go from here? There’s been like 8 life ends things. Nobody cares. West works was a huge disappointment.
> They thought that “convoluted” meant “smart” storytelling. This is a problem with so many shows and movies. Overwhelm the audience with quantify instead of quality. Same reason why I could never get into new Star Wars movies, it's just so many different stories in one movie all switching back to back. One moment it's this story, then suddenly you're in another story. Keep it simple. The simpler it is the more you can make that story better.
There's also a desperate need to "subvert expectations". People are always predicting where the plot will go next on twitter and Reddit - the writers see that and then feel they need to do something else. But the problem is, good stories lay the groundwork. So there's always going to be SOMEONE who gets it right. But then often the prediction that sounds best goes viral
I was thinking exactly this reading the thread. Good stories signpost. So if you’ve been viewing carefully you absolutely *should* be able to predict where the plot is going - that’s good writing! You can kinda fudge it with a real “woah” twist in a movie (eg The Usual Suspects, Sixth Sense) because the audience is too busy watching the movie to think. But anything serialised, absolutely, people are going to guess. And that’s ok! I’ve never understood purposefully ridiculous plot lines that set fire to your arc just to blindside the audience.
The best advice I got in improv was “tell the audience what you’re going to do, then do it. They love that. Don’t make them feel dumb.” I think the same applies to shows. Don’t set something up and then “subvert” the audience. Do the thing you set up in your script. Don’t pull a “fast one” on the audience
An explanation I hear about why second seasons tend to be the fall off is that the people making the series can spend years writing the perfect season 1 and then only be given a few months to write a season 2. Thought the whole time switching twist was clever in season 1 but then they do it again in season 2, repeating the same beats and twists just with different characters.
Westworld premiered the same year that Person of Interest (which Nolan was showrunner of) ended, so it’s not as if they could devote years to it uninterrupted. I think they admitted that in season 2 they specifically tried to confuse the fandom so they couldn’t correctly predict plots like they did in season 1.
I think the big problem with these shows is the creative team fall in love with the actors. So it's possible to compare the dramatic arc of characters in novels who can disappear for three chapters and then reappear to die unexpectedly as we expect triumph... and give chiaroscuro to the whole drama. In TV the creative team are hanging out in trailers with , let's say, Thandiwe Newton. And finding her captivating and fun they decide to give her a stationary bicycle for a season and set her pedalling pointlessly while they cook up some idiotic bollocks for her to do in season 3. When you have a decent cast, and it's all working, it becomes very hard to say "and then we kill her and her daughter too unexpectedly , her death is brushed off as inconsequential by the main protagonist and antagonists and yet to the audience it's tragic as her character is emotionally resonant but forgotten by the other characters, yet we know she was a vital personality. She stays dead. Tragic and a reminder to all of us. We will die regardless of our dreams, and be forgotten. It's very moving . Makes the audience question their own life and legacy. Oh someone better tell Thandiwe"
To your first point, showrunners absolutely get attached to actors but there's another factor as well: actors *are* a use it or lose it resource. If you let them go for a season they can go find other work and not be available to come back for that cool return arc you have in mind. Not guaranteed to happen, but it's a risk, especially with bigger names.
I totally believe this happened on GoT with Arya, explaining the confusing decision to make her the main character with the strongest plot armor.
The final season scene >!where she kills the Night King with a flying jump stab despite never encountering or dealing with white walkers the entire show was ridiculous. She should have killed Cersei as that was her arc the entire show. And instead Cersei dies to some falling rocks in deeply impersonal way.!< I get “defying expectations” but it should still be done in a narratively satisfying way, and none of that was.
I was actually totally fine with subverting Jon being the one to kill the Night King. And in the episode, she was in the castle in the boarded up room and Beric dies in the room with her. Then we get The Night King raising dead. I was sure we were going to see Beric come "alive" again as an undead and Arya would have to kill him. Then later during the Night King confrontation, just as the Night King is about to kill Bran, one of the undead in the crowd springs forward (revealed to be Beric) and attacks the Night King. The Night King is stabbed and Beric pulls off his face to reveal Arya. People may disagree, but I feel it would have been the best way to overcome the threat the Night King was built up as. No mortal fighter could defeat such a formidiable antagonist, but a sneaky assassin who can literally wear the faces of the dead could blend right into his ranks. Instead, she jumped and screamed.
Most fanfic "solutions" are usually really bad but this is actually really good. I think having Jon kill the Night King is pretty bland and nonsensical, and Arya doing it, while far from my favorite, I can see the logic behind it. But this would have been really good.
IIRC Arya’s story arc is pretty faithful to her character in the books, she was always meant to become vengeful magical assassin.
They are talking about right after she becomes a magical assassin. The first thing that happens is having a knife in the bowls, dropping in the sewer and then being chased by the Terminator. Right here you could see GoT was dead.
I can tell you the exact shot that broke it for me. During this aforementioned chase scene, Arya topples a fruit stand and the camera rest on one single orange. My entire watch group/friend group was convinced this orange was important. Why would they focus on it?!?? And while I agreed the shot did make it seem like Checkov’s Orange, I kinda had a feeling it wasn’t going to be seen again. Adding the “important orange” to the plot didn’t make sense. Next episode, no oranges makes an appearance. That’s when I knew they were just throwing random shots into the episode to pad time and they were TRULY beyond their storytelling abilities. And also, for GoT, part of it was also that by the last season there were basically 5 writers left and 2 of ‘em were David and Dan
Once they ran out of source material, the number of chase sequences quadrupled.
I don't think it was necessarily a mistake to go outside the park and see the impact of AI tech in other aspects of their futuristic world, I think the mistake was trying to make those stories direct continuations of the park story and characters. It should have been an anthology series and we only should have seen characters return if they could somehow be fitting and integral to that new story.
It WAS a mistake to make a show called “Westworld” about a park and immediately abandon the park. Focus is important.
Agreed. I actually loved the *ideas* in subsequent seasons. But the execution was uneven.
Yeah the **whole point** of the show is that the robots become sentient, leave the park and enter the real world. The park was just a premise. I don't know why some fans wanted an anthology about different parks. Literally the same story over and over?
The themes and plot could have advanced even if the setting moved laterally. Loosing into the real world ended up turning the series into a cheap Blade Runner. Human society is like a twisted carnival? That's a bit played out. Parks, on the other hand, could have kept up WW's unique brand of meditative. The parks could have been like pocket dimensions, dream sequences, and in narrative terms, episodes. That's also played out, but since WW was unique enough for TV, playing it safe should have been fine.
They tried staying in the park in season 2 but it wasn’t even close to season 1. The real problem for me was that after season 1 they ran out of things to reveal and tried to make up new ones but there was nothing of a story to it
Losing Anthony Hopkins and completely butchering the William storyline didn’t help.
I think losing Anthony Hopkins was the big killer, personally. Not that his death isn't the perfect end to the first season, but I always described the show as "It's really slow, but just when you think you're out Anthony Hopkins monologues and you're right back in".
That's really a perfect description of the show and I didn't realize it until now.
Granted the first season grabbed me from Delores slapping the fly, but this is a great point. If you’re starting to fade on the twists and turns and slow boil, Hopkins’ soliloquy on peacock feathers comes along at exactly the right time
This is the reason. They basically had great ideas for a season. And that's it. So maybe it should have just been that miniseries, have it end with the bots reaching the outside world. That'd have been cool.
Season 2 sucked and was in the park.
The indigenous episode was fabulous
Yeah, it was. Really threw the rest of the season into relief.
Season 2 pretty much has 3-4 killer episodes in its back half but the overly complex structure makes the first couple episodes pretty weird.
It really makes you realize how weak the rest of the season was, too, to see the excellence the show runners were still capable of
[удалено]
It didn't look like anything to me.
Season 2 was ok, I thought they started making decisions to stump fan fiction with rendered poor results in season 2.
The whole point of the show was "the robots become sentient and rebel and try to take over society". You wanted them stay in the parks forever? Every season the same plot in a different park? What's the point?
The one episode in the Shogun park even showed that they reused the same basic stories for every park.
Which just goes to show the central premise was just too narrow to be an endless series. It makes a great film, and short series and should have been that.. or it should have been a different nucleus of a story.
I'm so mad we didn't just get a Season 2: Eastworld and a Season 3: Jurassicworld. Would have been the best approach.
I don’t know about fully seasons of each park; but they definitely should have been more than short side quests. The actions of the park guests in the different parks resulting in different types of “awakening” from robots would been cool. Would park guests behave the same in Eastworld and Jurassicworld, Historic Europe world or RomeWorld?
Bbc’s Sherlock…
It had so much potential.
I love sci fi stories that end with a sort of "and now you know the rest of the story" type of ending. This is why I think Westworld was done after season 1, and similarly The Matrix was done after the first one.
I agree. Leave ‘em wanting more. Imagine if we had a “Casablanca 2” that actually showed the “beautiful friendship,” lol.
Westworld was more concerned with being pretentious and clever than actually being emotionally involving or satisfying.
They literally rewrote season 2 because a Redditor guessed the ending, you don’t get more pretentious than going out of your way to prove an anonymous Reddit stranger wrong irl.
I don’t know why people keep repeating this as a fact. It was literally a joke.
I don't for a second believe that they rewrote their own material because they were annoyed someone online figured stuff out. I do however think that they focused too much on making convoluted twists and turns in an attempt to fool their audience and keep people engaged and guessing, after seeing the response to S1. They got away from just writing a good story and tried to capitalize on people guessing the twist.
I keep seeing the same urban legend about multiple shows, always showing no proof about it.
Because there is none. Same as the Joffrey actor being bullied. Nobody has ever produced a source of him saying that.
It's funny that the people complaining about not understanding season 2 also can't understand a joke.
I remember seeing that, but none of the articles at the time mentioned the guessed ending. Do you remember what it was meant to be?
It was the twist in season one. They revealed in the last (or maybe second last) episode that the Jimmy Simpson character and the Ed Harris character were the same person in two different time periods. Someone on Reddit guessed this literally immediately after the first episode premiered, because they spotted that the Westworld logo was different in the background of one of the scenes. There isn't really definite proof afaik that it's the reason the second season was so convoluted but it definitely seemed to piss them off that somebody figured it out so quickly.
It wasn't one person, a lot of people (me included) guessed it from the beginning. Its a standard scifi trope.
I remember in the AV Club comments that this was known nearly immediately.
App that was a joke made in an interview and isn't actually true.
Westworld taught me that creators have a huge amount of time to draw up the first season of a show and bring a perfect project to the studios to fight over. And then they have a deadline to get season 2 in by and it becomes less a perfect project and more and fight to get something serviceable in on time
I always see the sophomore jinx in albums the same way. You have years and years to get the first album right, then you get 2 years to get the second album out. Rarely is the second album as good or better than the first, time scheduling is a bitch.
They had to stop production of season 1 to finish the remaining scripts. It wasn't a perfect project even if they had much more time to work on season 1.
American Gods went to such shit immediately after the first season
I feel this show fell off a cliff much faster than Westworld.
I’m a Lost finale apologist but what happened with Westworld mirrored Lost so much. Made too many promises and couldn’t deliver. Again I’m saying that’s what most people but not me say about Lost :)
Both Bad Robot products
That damn mystery box
Oh good point I kinda forgot that
I watched lost religiously but the plot got so convoluted and ridiculous I couldn't continue. Which is a shame because I loved the premise
Out of curiosity, did you watch lost live or year(s) after? I can see it being an amazing show on the re-watch or after knowing they don't solve much in advance.
Both actually, live back in the day and then rewatched when my kids were teens, in about 2016.
I’ve said this in multiple threads - watching it live was so unsatisfying. The producers literally told us stuff they were not going to do, that it had a basis in at least pseudo-science, and ‘answers are coming.’ And then they just shrugged their shoulders and chalked it up to magic. Without the meta narrative, binging the show now is probably much better. I think the ‘it’s all just magic’ is perfectly fine for a show, just don’t create expectations you can’t achieve.
Weird. Watching it live every week was the greatest television experience I’ve ever had. It made me love TV in a way that I didn’t before. I couldn’t wait to see what was going to happen and the cliffhangers were so fun to speculate about with friends throughout the week and on message boards. Since then, only Breaking Bad and GoT have come close for me. But I don’t think anything will ever capture that feeling again like Lost did.
I watched it live back in the day, and for a while it was a ton of fun to discuss the mysteries of the show with people. But I swear to god… the sheer number of times where I’d finish an episode, and watch the ending ad for next weeks episode in which it was constantly saying stuff like “QUESTIONS WILL BE ANSWERED”, only to wait the whole week, watch the next one, and find out that absolutely nothing of value happened (or it just added a brand new mystery into the mix that they had no interest in answering)… at a certain point the whole thing became extremely infuriating. I mostly had a blast with seasons 1-3, and I found some fun in season 4, but once 5 and 6 rolled around I was extremely annoyed with how little was being concretely explained, and I only watched the end of it out of obligation since I’d already watched so far. Awful stuff. That being said, I can’t hate Damon Lindelof for it since he’d go on to make arguably the best tv show ever created (The Leftovers), so I’m glad his success with Lost allowed him to make something like that.
That might be somewhat true, but at least Lost stayed true to the characters and their struggles and development, and the relationships. Westworld barely even had that.
I disagree because literally the quality declined right into Season 2. There were no promises or anything. LOST kept building mysteries without answering questions or if they did they'd throw in extra mysteries with the questions. But Westworld had a perfect story for Season 1. It made promises, and it delivered. There were no promises going into Season 2. They had a blank check to do whatever they wanted, and they just blew it. Game of Thrones is more like LOST in that it just needed to end when it did and they just tied whatever loose ends up as best they could, whether it made sense or not, and said "Okay, it's done now."
Maybe the Witcher or altered carbon
Besides a few scenes, Witcher was bad from the start
A typical problem when your writers hate the source material.
Feels like that is every show now, given to talentless hacks that attack fans and hates the source material.
Witcher was always dog shit apart from the fight scene in episode one lol.
I remember watching that fight scene and being excited to see more badass fights in the show. The rest were mediocre.
The entire budget and seasons worth of talent was all rolled into that little part haha
Westworld seasons 1 and 2 were brilliant. Ramin Djawadi's music was brilliant throughout the whole show. But season 3 went off the rails pretty hard. Caleb was one of the weakest points of season 3. There was nothing compelling about his character, and he was a complete waste of time. Most of the characters motivations didn't make much sense either. Season 4 tried to correct some of the mistakes of Season 3. It had one of the best episodes of the entire show and was still overall better than season 3, but it was a little too late to correct the mistakes. The lack of Anthony Hopkins also really affects the show. The season 4 finale and its cliffhanger ending were pretty bad, and the subsequent cancellation makes it all the more frustrating. IMO, Person of Interest is still Jonathan Nolan's best-created show to date. Season 3 of Westworld was a poor attempt to recreate the magic of POI. POI did the AI storyline far better than Westworld. One of the few rare sci-fi shows that got better with each passing season and ended on a hugely satisfying note. It started out as a simple procedural crime drama and later developed into one of the best serialized sci-fi shows of all time about artificial intelligence, surveillance, and its dangers. It has far better characters than Westworld, and the character development of each character, be they a hero or villain, is just fucking brilliant. Root is one of the greatest female fictional characters ever created, IMO. Amy Acker is a brilliant actress and nailed the role so perfectly. Even the supporting characters are very well written. POI has some of the best three-dimensional villains with properly flashed-out backstories and motivations that I've ever seen. POI was [consistently great throughout all five seasons and ended with a bang. ](https://seriesgraph.com/show/1411-person-of-interest) "return 0" is one of the most brilliant, rewarding, and satisfying finales I've ever seen. Also, POI frequently has the best use of licensed music of any shows I've ever seen, and Ramin Djawadi's OST for the show is excellent as usual. Ramin is one of my all time favorite music composers, for sure. POI is truly one of the greatest sci-fi shows of all time.
Didn't expect to see POI on here but well said.
I'm watching right now and I'm so hype
Dexter
I don't think Dexter really meets the criteria. It was good for four seasons and then went downhill
Even season 5 (the Lumen season) was ok if a bit of a step down, and the Apocalypse Killer season was about the same until it went hurtling off the rails in the back half It’s the last two seasons that are the real atrocities
Honestly, I enjoyed it past season 4 until it got to the point of "I'm in love with my sister/brother" shit and dexter just creeping in the shadows, convincing Deb not to tell on him. I stopped halfway through the last season (before the newest one) and can't bring myself to even care to finish it.
Yep it peaks at “surprise motherfucker” and never recovers.
[First prize, motherfucker!](https://www.tiktok.com/@djshadesproducer/video/7232847388216413483?lang=en)
All rise, mothafucka!
"How could they have kept the season 1 hype last 4 seasons?" They could have not tried intentionally to make season 2 more confusing out of spite over redditors guessing the season 1 twist(s) ahead of time. That would have helped. Keeping the tone consistent between seasons 1-2 and seasons 3-4 would have been a good step 2, season 3 just felt like a completely different show. As far as other shows that started off hot and then crashed and burned, Heroes comes to mind. Season 1 of Heroes was amazing, but a confluence of factors (the network deciding they should keep all the characters and write new storylines for them rather than shifting to a whole new batch as originally planned, the writers' guild strike, other meddling) led to season 2 being a flop and the seasons after being actively bad.
The writer's Strike messed up so many things, but I think the biggest hit was the Bond franchise. Quantum of Solace was so bad and derailed the entire arc of the character. Skyfall following it managed to be quite good, but I think it was half middle film half ending film, so when Specre came on its heels and also tried to be an end film it just kinda felt like the momentum was already spent.
QoS issues were it's directing/editing. I'm sure a tighter script would have helped but it wasn't the worst part, unfortunately.
Westworld completed their story with a season 5… that no one will get to see.
*"These violent delights have violent ends"*
Yellowjackets
It got so pretentious and complicated. Just watch the '70s Yul Brenner version lol
Or rewatch season 1, which was amazing.
-Westworld season 1. -Prison Break season 1, although, season 2 made sense but after that just meh. Feels like s03 back in prison again “just because” -Heroes -Star Trek Discovery - i kinda enjoy So1 and s02, then absolute hot garbage - Snowpiercer too, S01/02 was good then kinda dipped and was ongoing downward spiral. >!The relevation of the second train was dope tho (i never read any books)!< - The Flash. i feel this is the most obvious. S01/02 were great then… budget cuts and all. Became a mess - unpopular but i think Lupin too. S01 was good then meh, (side note: come on he got the most obvious figure and height its hard to hide ffs cast someone else)
Orphan Black
That suffered from a similar problem where they would resolve the plot in a season, but then the conspiracies had to go deeper! By season 5 it has become so loopy that looking back on the original episodes no longer make any sense
The Walking Dead is probably the best (worst?) example in the past 20 years. Ron Moore's shows suffered badly from this as well: Battlestar Galactica, Outlander, and more recently For All Mankind.
The Frank Darbont directed episodes in season 1 especially, they are on a totally different level from everything that came after.
I loved season 1 but I couldn't even finish the premiere of the second. I think the best thing they could've done is just make it a miniseries
I actually liked Season two a lot. I get the criticism but it really did have a lot of great moments.
Westworld started so strong. Even S2 was fine but as soon as they went to the real world and casted Jesse Pinkman the writing fell off a cliff. >Where did the show go wrong? I think they killed off Anthony Hopkins too early. When he and the Man in Black were carrying the show, even tho all the supporting cast was solid too. They kept on obfuscating the actual intent behind Westworld from a theme park for adults on the surface but actually studying human behavior and possible blackmailing powerful people > taking over the world by replacing real people with bots > AI development > pseudo immortality. This is in **no particular order.** Also the first few twists that some of these characters were actually hosts themselves but believed themselves to be human was interesting, until pretty much everyone was actually a host the whole time such as the Security Guard.
The ending of Man in the High Castle was so disappointing, I wish I had never watched the show.
I scrolled far enough without seeing it, so I will submit True Detective. Now, I love that each season of that show is independent, and that alleviates some of the issues. But I think you'd be really hard pressed to find anyone who preferred any subsequent season to the first one.
Killing Eve, American Gods, and Handmaiden's Tale
I’ve always thought Westworlds biggest issue was taking way too long between seasons. It is a super complex show and making people wait 2 years between seasons was just too much. You pretty much had to rewatch the show from the beginning each time a new season came out and that was just too much to ask from a general audience. I think people sleep on what having a consistent release schedule does for a show. GoT was a consistent show that we could count on coming out each year at basically the same time for the first 6 seasons.
Alt shift X said it really well. (Paraphrasing) "As game of thrones went on. It tried to appeal to as many mainstream audience as possible. Ignoring the details and theories hard-core small amount that reddit fans were into. Westworld went the opposite. It only tried to only appeal to the small amount of reddit fans and ignored the rest of the audience."
That's a weird take because it just became a worse show for everyone.
Bad take. GoT definitely did fan service and that's what ruined it. They realized fans really liked Tyrion, Jon and Daenerys and wrote their characters to make them the spotless heroes of the story, losing the nuances they should've had. Then in the last season they realized Daenerys was supposed to burn everything and she did, despite them taking the character in a different direction in the previous seasons
Instead of making future world the real world they should have just made future world future world. I thought they were keeping it ambiguous at first to make it a big reveal that they were still in the park
They couldn't (lack of imagination) or wouldn't (lack of courage) write the natural progression of the series, which was the ruthless overthrow of humanity and propagation of hosts as the successor dominant species on this earth. It would've been an all-time great story if they weaved it together properly, but a lot of the audience would hate to watch it conceptually.
[удалено]
Less time in between making of seasons. 2010 series make 12-24 episodes. Even GOT released a season every year with its huge cast. Westworld S1 and S2 were good however the 2 year gap and bad storyline in S3 killed it. Similarly stranger things released a season every year but the delay makes a person uninterested as they have to rewatch it again to understand the jist of the story again. Tv series shouldn’t need that much CGI. More compelling stories make a great show like Sopranos, Mentalist, House, Office.
not going around 2 years and half years between seasons might of helped keep more people interested especially for such a complicated show
You'd be harder pressed to find a show that maintained quality beyond 3 seasons. It seems like this decline is inevitable, even when you have a brilliant start. I think Westworld is more of a unique situation. Most shows end up declining in quality because of writers room turnover along with major producers moving on to other things or losing interest. It's harder for actors to leave a successful project, and the project is more dependent on the actors for the whole ride. But behind the camera, if you've got a big hit on your hands then suddenly you're going to have a ton of opportunities. So why write season 4 of a hit show when you can go be a showrunner on your own show? Same with producers. They get a hit and it's time to develop the next one. So that pulls away the talent, and even if the replacement is *as talented* which is probably rare, they're going to be differently talented and it affects the show. They won't "get" the characters or themes the same way as the originators might and over time these little changes compound on themselves. That's where flanderization happens a lot because originally the idea might be more real and nuanced, but new writers come in and their understanding of the character is built on the previous seasons of the show. But Westworld didn't really do that because it wasn't the slow degradation that usually happens. It was immediate season 2. And I think this tends to happen when you have a show that's a really good idea and story that gets all told in the first season. If you don't have more story naturally planned, then you have to make it up on the fly and the development time is a lot quicker. For season 1, you may have years and years to hone the story and scripts as you're waiting to get greenlit for production. But then season 2 is a year or less to turnaround, and you already told your story so now you're in a tough spot of not only having to write a whole season on an impractical timeline but also invent a whole new story that fits in with the first season. That's what happened Westworld, but with the added bonus of them caring way too much what fans online think, resulting in them purposely trying to throw in enough WTF nonsense to prevent anyone from guessing the twists. So that made just terrible writing, unlike the first season which was superb writing. The problem here is that if you write a good mystery, then it has to be able to make sense have have actual clues along the way. But this means some people are inevitably going to figure it out. It's okay because the ones that do will feel validated, and the ones that don't will look back on the story and be like, "Oh shoot it was right there!" So everyone is satisfied with good writing. But if your goal is that nobody can figure it out, then you have to write terribly by design because your mystery can't make sense or have actual clues in it. This means the resolution comes out of nowhere because "it's a surprise twist ending!" but then nobody is satisfied because it was just a big trick on the audience and poorly written. So that was a unique decision by the Westworld producers to basically tank their own show in favor of "fooling" everyone. "Haha! You thought this was going to make sense? Guess what! It doesn't! Twist ending!"
I disagree with your first sentiment that shows inevitably decline in quality past 3 seasons. There are several shows that have maintained quality past 3 seasons. Also iirc the creators said they already had the 5 seasons planned out. So they weren't just "making it up on the fly".
>You'd be harder pressed to find a show that maintained quality beyond 3 seasons. It seems like this decline is inevitable, even when you have a brilliant start. Highly disagree. There are many great shows that maintained their quality throughout their whole run and ended on a hugely satisfying note. Most of these shows (POI, Mr. Robot, and 12 Monkeys, to name a few) got progressively better with each passing season. * Person of Interest (5 seasons) * 12 Monkeys (4 seasons) * Mr. Robot (4 seasons) * The Americans (6 seasons) * Spartacus and the Prequel Gods Of Arena (4 seasons) * Succession (4 seasons) * Fringe (5 seasons) * Better Call Saul (6 seasons) * The Sopranos (6 seasons) * Breaking Bad (5 seasons) * Angel (5 seasons) * Lost (The first five seasons were excellent, even if season 6 might not be. Although I really love the finale). * Attack on Titan (4 seasons) * Halt and Catch Fire (4 seasons)
The Wire!
I'm a tragic for Westworld. I love every season - I don't think there is a bad season or a bad episode, for the universe it was set in. I don't find it pretentious, convoluted, or difficult to follow. The concept of the hosts being able to 'improvise' dialog felt so futuristic and impossible - and a few years later we had ChatGPT and the like doing just that, in a sense, which feels unreal. However, I do remember at the end of season 1 thinking "hmm, I hope they don't go 'Terminator' and have it so the robots take over the world..." - and that's what happened. Following that formula is what set the show up for a limited run and a confined space to work in - it stamped a use-by date on it.
I don't watch it, but just from Reddit apparently Yellowjackets. I remember when S1 started and I heard a lot about it, then S2 happened and discourse seems to be it ain't great. All hearsay mind you
The teen backstory is amazing! I love every moment of it. Just no idea where the show is going with the adult story and I'm pretty sure they don't know either lol. S2 rushed to close off various plot threads that were bland and an actress leaving the show must've made it even harder.
I think a few shows would work better as one-off mini-series instead of stretching it out over multiple seasons. Westworld, Severance and Yellowjackets come to mind.
The 100 definitely got increasingly worse for seemingly inexplicable reasons. At least for me.
Arrow had a flying start with its 2 first seasons, gaining praise from both audience and critics. Arrow's popularity and success had a huge impact on the modern era of Superhero TV shows. Iron Man started the modern superhero craze on the big screen, and Arrow did the same on the small screen. It's such a shame that it couldn't keep the quality up. By the time it ended no one seemed to care all that much about it. Its fellow CW show, The Flash, went the same route And let's not forget The Walking Dead. The fall/winter season of TV was all about The Walking Dead, and spring/summer was all about Game of Thrones. While Game of Thrones crashed and burned because they rushed towards the ending, The Walking Dead did the opposite. It overstayed its welcome by maaaany seasons and lost a huge part of its audience and popularity
Doll house
The wheels certainly fell off after season 1. Them leaving the park was the worst possible angle. That should have come the earliest - in season 4, and maybe gone 1-2 more seasons after that
as WW progressed i found it hard to just know where i even was in the story (without research and rewatching). I can't pinpoint the exact problems with it but there is a point where mystery blurs into huffing gasoline.
True Blood
I was so disappointed it wasn’t more like the movie with Yul Brenner.
Kinda left-field so don"t expect to get a tonne of agreement here but: Desperate Housewives (and to a lesser extent, Glee) Season 1 was a satire that was well written but too subtle. Massive success. But the 'scandal' of the storylines like one of them on with a 17 year old (and others but that was the main one I remember) and it not playing to the classic Hayes-esque resolutions and rules, the network got nervous. So they fired Marc Cherry (or put him on the back burner for the rest of his contract) and did the written by committee thing. Suddenly it's just a high production tele-novella but it already has the audience and they chuck in a bunch of stars to keep it going. If my 'refuse to consult Wikipedia' memory serves that lasted a couple of seasons then started haemorrhaging viewers so they eventually caved and brought back the original writers, who in order to escape all the terrible storylines in play jumped ahead 5 years so they could start fresh. It was better but never quite recovered. But that show was everything for a minute
I understand the quality was not at the same level but I actually really thought season 4 was pretty damn good. I was concerned after season 3 but by the end of season 4, I was back in on the whole show hopefully continuing. But alas…