Oftentimes, shows can feel like a kind of commitment, especially if they are multiple seasons long. You get pulled into watching it after the first episode and it begins to take up your watch time for other things. It is a tall order for television, in general, to keep the audience’s attention for so long, but it has been proven many times that a long storyline needs to reach its ending, or else all the good things about it will be overtaken by how it ends.
A good example of this is Game of Thrones, one of the most popular shows in recent years. The show did everything right in subverting expectations and providing insights into the complexities of its world and characters. The show received universal acclaim, until the season eight finale. The final season of the show had a lot of issues, but nothing was more disappointing than the ending. Many of the expected payoffs that were built up either didn’t go anywhere or were abruptly solved in an unsatisfying fashion. It left many fans furious that the long journey they followed now feels hollow. It’s impossible to talk about the show with anyone without mentioning the poor sendoff.
There is an increasing number of shows that get this sort of treatment. It is tough to find a long-running show that does not decrease in quality near the end. Showrunners often like to stretch out shows long after they are out of good ideas, which in turn ruins the good reputation that the show started out with.
Watching a show getting better and better over time is much more fulfilling than watching the opposite. If more productions put thought into where everything ends, we would have more reason to watch shows from beginning to end.
