This season of One Tree Hill (OTH) totally sucked ass. As someone in a tv forum said, the episodes were filled with irrelevant chatter and overly-cliché love stories. The season finale was even worse; all the main characters portrayed and voice-over how wonderfully perfect their lives are (as in one of them actually said “ah, my life is so perfect”), and the story’s main couple ended the show by saying “Take a ride with me” and drove off into the sunset. OMG! If I’m a writer on the show, I would fire myself. Where is the drama? Where is the cliff-hanger and suspense that keeps people coming back for more? It would make sense if it was the series finale, but it’s not! It’s scheduled to return for another season, and without the story’s main couple (not renewing contract)! LOL!! There isn’t even a bad guy left on the show!! The ultimate villain in the series cried and begged for redemption when he realized he was going to die. How pathetic! Where was the “I’m going to die anyway, so I have nothing to lose” rage? All the episodes were total crap! They even spent one whole episode reminiscing about a killed-off side actor who only appeared in less than 10 episodes. The love story was so cliché that even the script-writers know it is cliché (there was a dialogue that goes something like “boy meets girl, falls in love, boy says I love you, girl can’t say it back, boy leaves”, to which the reply was “yes I heard that one before”). No prizes for who can guess what the girl said in the last episode… (and yes, they ended with a kiss, how interesting)
If you know the story is bad and cliché, wouldn’t you change things? In the end the writers focused more on making the characters, who started out the show as high school students, seem like they grew up into perfect model citizens of society, each with their equally perfect spouses/girlfriends. Comedy totally wasn’t in the picture, drama was scarce, the characters were fake and the love stories were so predictable.
OK enough venting about that…
My point is that in this day and age, in Hollywood, pilots (trial episodes) come and go all the time. If your writing is not up to par, your show will die prematurely (discontinued after 9-11 episodes). So all the shows that do make it have some sort of unique element or theme to them that keeps people tuned in. The problem is, once these shows settle in to their respective genres and gain a faithful weekly audience, the writing deteriorates. They start being more commercialized and start focusing on different aspects of the show that they think audiences want to see.
Case in point is Grey’s Anatomy. After the first 2 seasons, the main characters were rarely seen together and the light hearted chats and chuckles in the cafeteria in the midst of all the medical commotion disappeared. They all had their own messy love lives and medical specialties that they hardly stopped to talk to each other. The writers were focusing more on who sleeps with whom, and what medical tragedy should happen next that they forgot that those comedic and light moments (even for a few minutes) are crucial to the viewers. They distanced and separated members of the original group that brought viewers in, in the first place.
I have read somewhere that the 3rd – 4th season is normally where most drama heavy shows sink. The producers and writers know that line and there have been great ideas that have propelled certain shows over that line.
OTH brought up a great idea that I originally thought would work. As the characters graduated from high school, the next season was set 4 years later, turning the show from a teen series to an adult series, in the process changing the genre and the flow of the show. It worked, but only half way. They were portrayed to have their own business, or employment, with the frequent flashbacks (as many viewers want to know what happened in those 4 years) and marriages and children. But all that went down the drain when, instead of changing things up, they went back to how it was when they were teens. None of the characters cared about money or responsibilities, some of them didn’t even have jobs (for long periods of time)! Yet they were still having meaningless sex and meaningless drama, at the same time living in bungalows with a swimming pool and a child to feed. When they decided to make it into an adult series, they should have included things that mattered to adults.
Another way to cross that line is to have a really long story arc that spans several seasons. Lost is one of those series that keeps its viewers guessing all the time. At any given time, there would be like 5 scenes in previous episodes that have not been explained, not to mention the big question that has plagued viewers since the beginning: “what the heck is going on?”. At the same time, they provide enough information to keep you on your toes guessing, and force you to exchange information and theories on the forums.
Anyone remember
Reunion? That was a good show with a good plot and a good mystery. The reason it didn’t make it was because it was aired at the same time as CSI and Lost (if I’m not mistaken). I would have loved to see how they extended the series beyond 20 years (20 episodes).
If you know any other methods to keep viewers tuned in after 4 seasons, I would love to discuss it. Comedy is a different story altogether. They usually have longer viewership than drama-heavy series because people can just tune in on any given day of any given week to get in a few laughs without worrying about a storyline (they just have to have watched the first season to know the characters). Drama gets old fast. You miss a few weeks and it’s difficult to catch up, and not everyone is going to like where the story is going.
