🔗 Share this article Series Including The Duffer Brothers' Hit and The Survival Drama Have Become Bloated. I Strongly Prefer the Single-Season Program Many viewers know this disappointment. The second series of your favorite TV show drops on your platform, and your mind is full of hopeful expectation. Season one ended so perfectly: upcoming stories were hinted at provocatively, and a protagonist met a mysterious end – or so it seemed. After the season wrapped, you were perusing Reddit threads with fellow enthusiasts to find some Easter egg clues pointing toward upcoming twists. But the new season opener falls flat. It feels like the entire writers’ room has been fired and replaced by artificial intelligence. By the next installment, your favorite cast member has done something that viewers recognize as jarringly uncharacteristic. Halfway through the season, it’s clear that the showrunners have had collective amnesia regarding plot points heavily emphasized earlier. As the underwhelming ending arrives, you long for an earlier termination. The Downside of Prolonged Runs Regretting a show's continuation is hindsight; viewers usually oppose premature cancellations. Take Kaos, a clever mythological satire starring Jeff Goldblum, which was binned by Netflix due to low viewing figures. Yet audiences can console themselves that their enjoyment of the series won’t have been muddied by a sophomore slump. Looking back at the horror-mystery show Yellowjackets, I prefer it had remained a self-contained narrative. The debut offered a richly imaginative setup, with ten flawless installments. In 1996, a plane carrying an all-girl high school football team crashes in the middle of nowhere. Top-notch cast members (with Juliette Lewis, Lauren Ambrose and Sophie Thatcher) depicted the survivors in dual eras. There were multiple award nominations, producers originally mapped out a five-season arc to tell the story in necessary detail. But last week, it was announced that it would end with season four. I felt grateful as a viewer. Young actors prepare for Stranger Things' next chapter. Plot twists have diluted the essence. Rather than leading with the girls’ return home, and their coping with awful experiences, we were taken in directions that bloated the original premise. A fatiguing tendency emerged of introducing peripheral figures (like the underdeveloped daughter Callie) who did nothing for the broader story. It’s frustrating, and as a viewer, it is depressing to see your favorite show morph slowly into a hate-watch. An Increasing Pattern Yet this issue extends beyond Yellowjackets. Shows such as Emily in Paris, House of the Dragon, Squid Game and Stranger Things have lost the shock of the new, and fallen headfirst into expected or comfortable cliches. Occasionally, series should end on a high note. Indeed, pleasures exist in single-season stories. Considering Sharp Objects, I May Destroy You, and Adolescence, TV creators know when to stop when the story has naturally reached an endpoint. Yet the spell breaks for programs including Big Little Lies, originally a limited series, return repeatedly with declining quality. Hopefully, Adolescence’s producers have thought twice about that rumoured season two. The Perfect Example I wish Yellowjackets could have been a one-and-done series, occupying our minds endlessly, unresolved threads included. My top series ever followed this pattern. This beloved 90s drama, the ideal adolescent show, ran for just one year but was cinematic in its scope: its characters were difficult and contradictory, the filming captured a fall aesthetic, and the dialogue was untethered from the normal “teen speak written by a 35-year-old” trope. Its final episode was bitterly unresolved, but that is perfectly in keeping with the reality of never having real, definitive answers to the open-ended questions from your teenage years. Following 18 excellent installments (plus one weak one), I felt devastated and created my own continuation to answer some of those questions. It might only live on an old hard drive, it shows how series resonate profoundly. The Special Relationship If TV creators can remember the sacrosanct relationship between viewers and shows, more series can conclude appropriately. Priya Elan focuses on cultural topics.