The question being, whether, the pain and angst we feel when our favourite TV Shows begin to head downhill is really worth it. Okay, so today’s post is going to be rather overdramatic, for I am, of course, imagining that TV has a huge impact on each and everyone of our lives, and that, one actually cares about how the stories are evolving and characters are changing. But, really, it depends on your emotional attachment to things, such as TV Shows. With some of us, when our favourite character is brutally and stupidly killed and we cry for three hours straight (I am, of course, not speaking from experience here…), one begins to wonder whether watching this same favourite TV show is ever going to be the same again. However, some of us will simply lean back in our chair and enjoy the fact that we no longer have to suffer the awkward moments where we’re watching TV with our parents and two grown men are playing naked-hide-and-seek (What will we do without these moments, ay?).
With a lot of people, TV is simply, something to do. It’s nice to be able to sit back on a Monday evening and have a laugh whilst watching The Inbetweeners (Sadly, this is no longer) or to catch up on the latest episode of Spooks with a cup of hot chocolate and the BBC iPlayer. I, however (as you may have guessed), am one of those people who really enjoys, and gets a lot out of TV – which is funny, seeing as I don’t really watch that much of it. Quality over quantity, I say. Mind you, I do watch the X Factor (Shouldn’t have admitted that, should I?) on a regular basis so I guess I can’t really talk.
With a lot of TV shows, there is often, too much quantity and not enough quality. They tend to start off brilliant, which is usually why another series is commissioned, and then start to head downhill. The first series is always the freshest, the funniest and ultimately: the favourite. So what can one do to ensure that a TV Show stays just as quirky, just as action-packed and just as brilliant, without going overboard and thus, becoming unbelievable (Unless, of course, it is Sci-Fi in which case – pretty much anything can happen)? Of course, I am not saying this is the same for all TV Shows; I can name quite a few where the first series was not my favourite, but as an overall view – the first series or first couple of series are usually the best.
Take Skins for example, pretty much 90% of Skins viewers will tell you that the first two series were by far the best. The storylines were better (After all, in the first two series, no-one was clubbed to death with a baseball bat), and the characters were a lot more likeable and easy to emphasise with, producing actors, such as Dev Patel who went on to star in Slumdog Millionaire. For me, personally, the third and fourth series ruined Skins – so one might ask, should they have left it there after the first two series? Did we need to continue or would it have been best left as a memory? Having a new episode of Skins to watch every Monday Thursday? was a novelty but by the end of the series, I was turning to 4oD a few days later, with no particular interest in whether JJ could actually get a girlfriend or not. Give me Maxxie and Tony back any day. In some TV programs, total cast changes can and would work. For example, thinking about it, I believe a new series of The Inbetweeners with a completely new cast could work, so long as the same writers are kept on. However, it’s always a risk, and with the aforementioned ‘Skins’, I don’t think this risk paid off.
Now, this blog post was evidently going to lead onto one of my favourite TV Shows: Torchwood. What started off as a five or six men main cast has now been brought down to a grand sum of… two. My front is simply that the programme has changed, and not for the better – or at least, I will find out this summer whether all those losses were for the benefit of the programme or not, although I highly doubt it. The first two series were made up of 13 incredible episodes each, every one of them brilliantly scripted and full of mystery, romance and action. At the end of the second series, two of the five-man team were killed off, with, as far as I know, neither actor requesting their character’s ending. So, we’re left with three main characters left. Now, I am in no way complaining about this, for Exit Wounds was a superb series finale, full of tension and lines that made even the less-compassionate folk shed a tear. But, then I ask the same question – Should it have been left here? Should we have left these two wonderful series of 13 episodes each where they were? Back
Unfortunately (Well, and fortunately) I cannot complain about the quality of the third series of Torchwood: Children of Earth for it really was a fantastic drama that kept me on the edge of my seat throughout. But I still don’t see what happened at the end of Day Four as necessary. Possibly one of the most likeable characters in TV at that time being axed off the show, and once again, not at the actor’s request, seemed superfluous and frankly, quite stupid. Of course, I see the other side to the story, for it was brilliantly done and certainly affected almost everyone watching in some way or another, but was it really necessary? As a fan, I will definitely be watching Series Four when it comes out in the summer, but the show has lost what it once was and I’m not sure I can see it being as funny, as sexy or as dazzling as it was renowned for.
But whose fault is it when shows come down to this? Is it the writers who ultimately decide what happens – who lives and who dies? I am a fan of Russell T Davies, writer of episodes of Doctor Who and Torchwood, and creator of Queer as Folk, however there is one thing that he said which grates with me, I do not have the exact quote (if anyone does that would be brilliant) but it was something along the lines of “I do not write with the audience in mind, overall – who cares what they think? I am here to write a story not please the masses. I write for myself and myself only” I find this to be a very self-centred egotistic approach to writing a story. Although I agree, that ultimately, it is Russell’s story and thus, he can do with it what he likes, sometimes you need to take the fans views into consideration, for we are the ones who watch, love and appreciate the stories he is telling us. One screenwriter who does, or did, do this is that of Marc Cherry, creator of Desperate Housewives. In the original drafts of Series 6, the character of Mike Delfino was to marry Katherine Mayfair, but after realising how much of a fan base Mike and Susan Mayer had, Cherry changed his mind and re-wrote it. Perhaps it would have been better and more of a challenge to stick with this first less popular coupling, and attempt to win fans round to supporting them, but sometimes I think you have to listen to your viewers, and that is exactly what Cherry did.
Ultimately, this is just my own highly opinionated view on what TV is turning into. And this all came, from myself humming a tune that used to be in Hollyoaks back in the golden years (Craig and Jean-Paul ftw). But please do leave me a comment expressing your view, whether it be similar to mine, or completely different.
