Why TV Dramas Fall Apart

I just finished The Wire...the epic rise and tragic collapse of the show's artistry matches that of the crime bosses it features.

We can summarize the 5 seasons as follows:
1. Cops and Robbers - Set the scene - this show is going to get good
2. Dock Workers - At home with a contract - this show is good
3. City Hall and Stringer Bell - Narrative perfection; oppressive tone - this show is damn good
4. Educational Excursion - Job-dropping collapse - this show is too good for you and must lecture you
5. Newspaper Farce - this show has nowhere else to go but from the tragic to the absurd

Personally, I prefer season 2 - season 3 is almost unending dread. Anyway, this pattern is played out in various other shows. Most peak early...if anything it's a shock that The Wire lasted 3 good seasons. Meanwhile, comedies usually have long runs where they get better. Why?

Comedy develops with familiarity. This is why your idiot friends seem funny to you and no one else. This is why Anchorman keeps getting funnier the more you watch it. The first time Al Bundy comes home and complains about a fat woman waddling into a shoe store, it's new. The tenth time, you know it's going to be funning as soon as he walks in. A good comedy never really has to go anywhere. The narrative is minimal and has no carry-over (except Arrested Development - more on that later) so you can jump in wherever knowing the characters and more and more ready to laugh.

Drama doesn't work this way. Let's enumerate a few key reasons dramas fall apart, starting with the problems and then moving on to the problems created by the solutions to the original problems.

The Original Problems:
1. Familiarity breeds boredom. Think about it - the more you're around your friends, the funnier they seem to you, but the more tired you get of their b.s. Give me one season of Tony Soprano bitching about his mother and I'm there with the guy...seven seasons though, well after she's dead? Get over it...to quote the Godfather, "YOU CAN ACT LIKE A MAN!"
2. The first season is an enclosed circle. No one can expect a show to run more than a season given how competitive the world of tv air time is. So the first season is designed as a complete narrative...compelling, tight, and packaged. Further seasons are more open-ended - will the show sustain its popularity? Will the network re-up? Cancel? How many more seasons do we have to work with?
3. Success breeds editorial freedom. The first season of a show has to get noticed and renewed. It has to generate an audience. Therefore, the show has to be easier to access; it has to be interesting to a general audience. It also has to be good enough to leap out amongst a pile of scripts. The first season is often the sum total of a writer's brilliance. Once the show succeeds, the writer's off the hook. It's the same reason the Genius Grant program has been a flop - success breeds complacency. Writer's get lazy and grow unconcerned with their audience. They indulge their own petty jealousies and interests. Thus, the Sopranos bores us with dream episodes and The Wire leads us into lectures on education policy and the ex-journalist writer's pent up rage at his former employer. The network indulges these flights of fancy because they want to keep the writer doing the show and because ultimately, the viewership is locked-in and less demanding.
4) Critical Acclaim mounts expectations for intellectual content. The Sopranos becomes the focus of psychology papers, creating a feedback loop of Sopranos episodes reflecting psychological research. The Wire falls in love with its headlines as a gritty look at urban decay instead of a good cops and robbers show. The acclaim becomes the purpose of the show and drives the narrative off-track, at least in terms of actual artistic content and viewer interest.

As a result, several new problems arise:
1) The writer runs out of ideas. This happens to all of us, especially writers on a deadline. Sometimes, the best of what a writer has comes together in one work. Once, the door is opened to more, there may be a few moments of the old magic, but the rest is a grind for a paycheck.
2) Too many characters and storylines to track. At a certain point, when a show keeps adding new things to keep it fresh, if it doesn't give up on the old, you just end up with too much. Each episode becomes a scattershot, advancing several plotlines incrementally. With so much ground to cover, the opportunity for artistic focus gets stretched thing and snaps.
3) Too many cooks in the kitchen. One common solution is to start having guest writers and guest directors to make up for a disinterested creator. This works great in comedy, where you're just playing with the same formula in new ways. But in drama, the narrative is totally lost. The guest sections get interspliced with the portions that HAVE to be there to advance the season long plot, and again, the episode by episode tone and theme becomes a hodgepodge of styles, mostly bland punctuated by a few bright moments.
4) Lecture not story...this was The Wire's biggest failing, but it's a common problem - having addressed the interesting emotional and interpersonal content, the show seeks to remain intellectually respected by defaulting to social relevance. Thus, more and more, the viewer gets lectured instead of getting entertained. What made The Wire great were real people - the cops didn't always win, all of the characters had flaws and strengths, no one was always right and no one always won. All of that was wiped away in favor of a ludicrous docudrama series on education policy in which all of the teachers were dedicated and noble, held down by the system.

It's kind of strange to reflect that this was ultimately what did Arrested Development in. The show got progressively funnier as it went along, but as a drama with a narrative, it got progressively harder to follow. In retrospect, watching on DVD, it's fantastic. As an episodic drama, it's a bit much to try to keep it all together.

So is there a solution? Sure - know when to quit.