After hearing that Dan Harmon has been let go as Community showrunner, and seeing how hard fans have been fighting to bring back The Secret Circle (most likely in vain), I dust off my soapbox to share my views on what’s wrong with the television industry.
Here at Hypable we get a lot of comments from you guys about the TV shows we cover. And while of course there are the gung-ho loyal supporters of certain shows, a surprising amount of comments are about the same thing: how good a show used to be, but how bad and repetitive it has become over time, trying to maintain the same format to avoid losing viewers.
These comments make me feel like I’m not alone in a sea of people who are scared of change and essentially want to keep watching the exact same episode week after week – which is what I’ve started to suspect that the networks think we want. Or what they think they need to give us to keep up the all-important ratings.
This post was mainly prompted by yesterday’s news that Dan Harmon has been let go as Community‘s showrunner. Whatever else he may or may not be (and it doesn’t really matter anyway), I think we can all agree that Harmon was a visionary, and a unique being in Hollywood who didn’t let his creativity be compromised just to draw in more viewers. One of the reasons NBC let him go was, as far as I understand it, because they want to make Community more “mainstream.” Way to ruin one of the most original shows on television, guys.
Now, I understand that mainstream = higher ratings, but I think that logic is so dumb. I don’t know why, of all art forms, television is the one most compromised by commercialism and greed – and when we’re lucky enough that a true masterpiece actually makes it to screen, it is either slammed down (Firefly) or corrupted (Community) by the networks. They are too afraid of being different to stand up and rebel about the slow demise of television as art.
Why do you think whenever there is a foreign show like Forbrydelsen or Borgen (you show them how it’s done, Denmark!), people get so over-the-top excited? It’s because here are shows that dare to risk losing viewers for the sake of slow burning storylines and prolonged on-air silences, and that don’t subscribe to the glamour of Hollywood. They dare to be art forms in an era where 90210 is… well, actually on the air at all.
Look how many shows are launched and cancelled each year, it’s outrageous. I like to refer back to the column I wrote a year ago, where I listed the 10 shows that looked the most promising in the 2011 fall season. Out of those, only two were renewed for second seasons. That’s eight original, enticing concepts that were simply too different for the mainstream audience, that didn’t grab their attention within the first 10 minutes of the pilot, and were therefore doomed to fail before they had a chance to properly establish themselves and develop. (And okay, to be fair, some of my picks were just plain awful. I’m not a prophet!)
Let’s look at a show which could easily have been cancelled after its first season, but luckily wasn’t: The Vampire Diaries. Unsurprisingly (because it’s awesome), this show was recently renewed for a fourth season, but it had a terrible, clunky start. Should the network have given up on it without giving the showrunners a chance to learn from their mistakes? And speaking of bad first seasons, what about Buffy? The first season was downright painful – but luckily WB saw something in that show and gave it a second chance!
Now compare that with shows that have not been given this chance. Firefly, for one. More recently there was Flash Forward, and what about this year’s victims Alcatraz, Terra Nova, Awake and The River (to mention a few)? Who knows how iconic they would have been by their third seasons? And then of course there’s The Secret Circle – obviously very similar to The Vampire Diaries, but comparatively I’d argue that it had a stronger start. Sure, the first season was flawed and they took too long to establish their main arc, but I believe that had Circle been given a second season, we would have seen a similar improvement as we saw with Diaries.
But of course, the all-important ratings meant that any actual consideration for plot and satisfying the viewers were thrown out the window. Who cares that a narrative was left unfinished? New glossy shows with new glossy stars are ready to sweep in and make that all-important first impression! And then there are the teen-magnets that have long outstayed their welcome like Gossip Girl and 90210. And Supernatural, of course. I love this show and am very happy it was renewed, but let’s face it, in terms of satisfying fans, I think it could end tomorrow with Sam and Dean going out in a blaze of glory, and most viewers wouldn’t feel cheated in the slightest. Their story is done, and anything else at this point is just extra.
And regarding The Secret Circle, let’s get real guys. Despite dedicated fans’ best efforts to bring back the show, the campaigns are not going to succeed, for the simple reason that it won’t be commercially beneficial to any network.
Really, this isn’t intended as a rant against the networks, because they’re only doing what they know will work to get them the most money. But isn’t that sad? Maybe the writers launching web series have got it right, maybe that’s where we’ll find satisfying, complete narratives in the future. Television is more and more about the buzz (or, dare I say it, the hype), and we shouldn’t kid ourselves about its commercial nature. To a greater and greater degree we’re seeing television shows cave to the pressure to increase ratings and stay on the air by doing overly simplified storylines and having stock “twists” like pregnancies, hook-ups, character deaths and lost siblings. Because if we’ve seen it before, we can understand it. As a collective mass, we’re just too stupid for good television.
It’s a good thing that the people writing the shows still care what we think – see them interacting with fans on Twitter, promising payoffs and giving nods to popular fan theories in the scripts. The writers aren’t the problem, it’s just such a shame that they have to fight the networks to be allowed to tell the brilliant, original stories we know they’re capable of telling.
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