How long, how long?

Posted by Jesse October 3rd, 2008 at 10:43am In General

You may have seen this in John’s news round-up earlier today: Rumor has it that Fox is seriously considering pulling the plug on its former sorta-hit Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles in light of its second-season ratings dive. An average of eight or nine million people watched last season’s episodes, but so far this season has been more like five or six.

The sad thing about this is that Sarah Conner is a pretty good show. The funny-sad thing about this is Fox’s supposed feeling that Conner is dragging down the ratings of its lead-out, Prison Break (which has notched similar numbers, and is also down from its previous season, though not as sharply as the Terminator show). It has apparently not occurred to Fox that Season 4 of Prison Break may be suffering more from having everyone break out of prison back at the end of Season 1 and, I assume, several times since then. Fox continues to operate under some strange formula where if a show gets good ratings for at least twenty episodes, executives will extrapolate that it has the potential to get good ratings for at least two hundred more, and renew it accordingly.

Thus, The X-Files continued for two years after its natural seven-season run, That ’70s Show went on without Topher Grace, the original 90210 lasted a full decade, and so on. Meanwhile, the network has axed an all-star line-up of some of the most innovative and flat-out wonderful network shows of the past twenty years — Futurama, Arrested Development, Firefly, Undeclared — before any of them could hit the magic 100-episode mark.

That means Sarah Conner will be in good company if it gets the boot. But really, Sarah Conner, as much as I’ve enjoyed it, isn’t even close to that class of show. I started watching it in the spring because the strike had interrupted my favorite shows, and I kept watching it because, well, I’m not really sure. Because it’s about killer robots, I guess. And because it makes a more interesting continuation than Terminator 3, and it’s fairly well-acted and exciting and all of that. Summer Glau is particularly good as Cameron, a far more intriguing lady-Terminator character than the bombshell version they gave us in T3. Basically, a good portion of the show’s success is based around Terminator 3 being kinda lame. We must be careful with this logic, lest it generate a Mummy television series.

So yes, I’ll be disappointed if Sarah Conner doesn’t get to finish out its second season and at least make a play for tying up its storyline. But at the same time, I never had the hope nor the expectation that Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles would become a long-running hit. Its narrative timeline is already well-trod territory, about to get a heavier (and probably stupider) trodding when Warner Brothers releases Terminator: Salvation, a film by McG, next summer.

In short, I don’t think that this Terminator show needs more than forty or fifty episodes to cover its ground properly. Maybe its creators disagree; maybe they’ve got a ten-year plan for the show. Even shows that look specifically designed for a limited engagement tend to develop suspiciously far-reaching narratives if the ratings are any good (can’t wait to see Prison Break’s flash-forward to 2050, when the entire cast has to bust out of future-prison, which I am picturing as being made of ice for some reason). But this whole thing has gotten me thinking about the optimal tenure for a high-quality network television show.

Generally, at least for genre-leaning shows, I’ve thought that seven seasons is the ideal: meaty enough to do a lot with the characters, but not so long that it tries a fan’s patience. This number actually originates from a franchise I’ve never paid much attention to: Star Trek: The Next Generation did seven seasons before retiring itself, and its companion series Deep Space Nine and Voyager took their cues from that run. The X-Files went for nine seasons — but only seven of those had Mulder and Scully full time, so effectively, it was a seven-season run given artificial extension. Buffy the Vampire Slayer also did seven, and in the grand scheme of things worked out near-perfectly.

Comedies are trickier, especially as hit-starved networks, over the past few decades, have been prone to extending a comedy’s life as long as possible. Technically, Seinfeld had nine seasons, but its first was extremely short, so its 180 episodes are more like an eight-season run. It faltered a little towards the end, but in retrospect 180 episodes feel just right. The lesser Friends spread itself thin at ten seasons. Newsradio felt complete at five seasons and just shy of 100 episodes, yet there was the sense that its run wasn’t quite as muscular as it could’ve been.

Since the nineties, good long-term comedies have been in shorter supply. Arrested Development was cut short before it got to 60 episodes, leaving the important comedies that have follow in its footsteps — namely The Office and 30 Rock without an immediate role model, especially given the fact that neither is a ratings bonanza. Technically, The Office is in its fifth season, though its first was, like Seinfeld’s, almost too short to count. Given that and the strike-shortened fourth seasons, and eight would seem about right. 30 Rock moves at such a breakneck pace that five or six might suffice, though the show would have to get mighty weak before you see me calling for its end.

That calling-for-its end business is tough to gauge, too, because there will always be shrill fans who insist a show should just die already. Take X-Files and Buffy, for example: the seven-season runs I mention above, to me, are mostly great with a few typical ups and downs. I particularly love the sixth years of both shows: X-Files took a turn approaching romantic comedy, with some of the best Mulder-Scully episodes, while Buffy went depressing with one of television’s better depictions of life as an aimless twentysomething. But you can find plenty of people who argue that the shows should’ve ended after their respective fifth seasons.

You can find more still who believe that The Simpsons, which recently began its twentieth season, should’ve called it quits after season, well, take your pick: fifteen, twelve, nine, seven, even four or five. The truth is, The Simpsons is still a good show that only suffers from the fact that it logged considerable time as the best show on television. I’d even argue that seasons three through nine of The Simpsons constitute the single greatest seven-season run in the history of the medium (some would say two through eight; I’d say fair enough). In the eleven (!) seasons since, it’s taken on a second life as a mere mortal show, with episode-to-episode peaks and valleys. The Simpsons is such a vast achievement that it transcends traditional season boundaries, and cannot be killed (plus, it’s on Fox; based on their formula, it’ll probably have to log about eight years of mediocre ratings and at least one major cast defection).

The Simpsons also serves as a cautionary tale; as someone who, in 1996, could not have fathomed a world with “enough” Simpsons episodes, the fact that I could see it ending any season now creates a kind of bittersweet confusion. I may posit about whether a show should call it quits after five or seven years, but there’s always the needy viewer in me who doesn’t understand how one would want any good show to end, ever (this is probably the part that sticks with Saturday Night Live through thick and thin).

The most challenging current program in this respect is Pushing Daisies, because of its blissful originality and invention. I’ve been wondering more or less since the first episode: how are they going to keep doing this show? The first season getting cut from twenty-two episodes to nine episodes, again due to the strike, didn’t help answer that question. The second-season premiere dropped some hints about future storylines that will carry through this season, and the show’s mystery-of-the-week element will certainly help; finding out how they’ll continue to pull it off will be way more fun than watching the Sarah Conner crew exercise their entertaining but limited skill set.. I have no doubt Pushing Daisies will remain funny, sweet, and a must-watch show. But I wonder about the creators’ long-term plans. Do they picture it going on for five years, which I’ve often thought of as the baseline for a consistent TV success? Then I see that the season premiere failed to crack the seven-million-viewers mark and I’m back to the worries I had upon watching that fantastic pilot: Forget whether the hypothetical Season Six will polarize people, or wear thin; will a show this offbeat survive long enough to tell the bare minimum of stories the writers want onscreen?

I don’t really have the answers to any of these questions, apart from “about seven, usually.” So I’m curious as to what others think: how long do you think a good show should run? Does genre make a difference? Is anything over five seasons pure greed? When would you pull the plug?