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Comment by sequoia | Hacker News Reader

Plenty of shows can be good with just one or two seasons, and more is worse. Freaks & Geeks: 1 season, amazing. Ditto UK The Office. Fleabag: 2 short seasons, amazing. The OA: AMAZING first season with a complete coherent ending, then they had to make a bizarre, scattershot second season. Ditto Killing Eve (how many damn times can she get killed lol). Downton Abbey: PLANNED for 3 seasons (pre, during, & post wwI) but it was so popular they just rambled on for ages until it looked like the scripts were being pulled directly from tumblr ("beloved character came back from america! for a wedding episode! plus: PUPPIES!!" literally).

So I don't totally get the "cancelled too soon" argument. The OA should have not run to even 2 seasons.

There's a trend of not producing art or even something original, but producing "content." For example someone asked me if The Mandalorian is good. "It's star wars Content" I replied. "If you like star wars, and want Content, you'll like it." Is the plot novel? Is it original or compelling? No, but boy it's fun to see yoda puppet and more Content from the SW universe you've come to know and love!

A lot of these series may have run their creative course & while megafans want more "Content" it's the same thing as something being cancelled too soon, and most people aren't megafans.

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I would suggest you look at it as not too soon, and cancelled without completing the story.

Glow is one of the latest instances. They paid the actors for season 4, but never produced season 4. It left with a very unsatisfying ending.

Will I ever recommend anyone with Glow on Netflix? no, because I can't tell them "Hey, watch this show on Netflix, but it doesn't have an ending and likely never will"

It's similar to how I'll never recommend The Kingkiller Chronicles or a Song of Ice and Fire. Because doing so would mean that someone reading those would probably never have an ending.

This is where I feel Netflix is hurting themselves. They're producing all this content and then never finishing it. Their catalog is going to start looking like a bunch of incomplete shows.

I think it's fine if you have a show with a short run. One season that finishes properly? Great! Two seasons? Great! but ending before it finishes is just as bad as continuing on forever with no end goal.

> Will I ever recommend anyone with Glow on Netflix?

I think I've only watched season 1 of Glow, really liked it, and for whatever reason never watched the rest. I remember the season finale served as an ending of sorts. I'm sure season 2 opens more arcs to resolve, but season 1 ended satisfactorily enough for me. Anyone not watching because Netflix cancelled the show will miss something cool.

Glow is a fun show, but once the wrestling show found an audience and the characters found a certain degree of fulfillment in their wrestling roles, the stakes seemed lower to me. I'm happy with the season 3 ending as a show finale.

But I would still recommend it, or Song of Ice and Fire, because there are a lot of good parts for both. Same for Stranger Things. Is * really dead? It's not that important compared to how well it nails 80s kids horror fantasia.

In general, are you more likely to suggest a complete show or one that ends abruptly with several dangling plot threads?

Stranger Things season 1 would have been a fantastic show if it just ended there (without the final cliffhanger scene). I'd recommend it to everybody. If Stranger Things just ended now, I might still recommend it to everybody, but I'd be decidedly less likely to do so, and it would always come with the caveat "They didn't actually finish it." So not only am I less likely to recommend it, but the caveat means the other person is less likely to watch it based on the recommendation if I do. (I might also say, "Don't bother watching past season X," which is still bad for Netflix.)

I recommended Star Wars before the other 8 came out, and have continued this pattern since.

The Matrix, but without the other two, and the robots were using people for parallel processing not batteries.

Yes, and this is compounded by the season-ending cliffhanger.

What would make Glow finished?

They all grow up to 65 and become feminist writers, after having gone to the LEO as the first all-female space crew?

Not everything needs an ending.

You think The Kingkiller Chronicles will never be finished? I'd be quite disappointed by that.

The second book was published in 2011. It has now been 9 years between books and there's no sign of book 3 anywhere.

His editor posted on social media that they haven't seen even a draft of the third book.

If you have hope that book 3 exists, I would caution you to reign in your expectations a bit.

I have been waiting since 1993 for the fifth part of The War Against the Chtorr.

To be fair, respect for talent . When you can create a tv show the caliber of game of throne 5 years after the 1st book is release catch-up and over take the books. It makes you wonder if there is difficultly to completing epic, wheel of time dragged out, king killer and game of thrones. On the other hand Malazan seems to be fine thou it’s loosely bound, and the book writing AI brandon sanderson works 25 hours a day

To be fair, game of thrones, the first book in the song of ice and fire series came out in [1996](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Song_of_Ice_and_Fire#Overvie...)

The TV show started in 2011.

Kingkiller Chronicles is only 3 books, hardly epic. It's a trilogy. The first book came out in 2007, second in 2011, and nothing has been seen of the third, and presumably, final book.

Brandon Sanderson treats writing books as a job, thus he writes every day. Now you could argue that his books aren't as entertaining to you (subjective) or that his prose isn't as good (a bit less subjective), but he does treat his job like a job. Whereas Rothfuss and GRRM seem to try to do literally anything but continue writing their books.

Sanderson isn't a bot but he has something a lot of people lack, work ethic.

Stephen King sits down every day and writes x amount of pages. 10 or 15 maybe, been awhile since I've read on writing but he talks about it in there. He is not super concerned about the quality of it, he just wants to get it out there. If those pages end up as part of an actual book then he'll obviously be going back over them etc. I assume Sanderson operates very similarly.

GRRM on the other hand agonizes over writing out perfect rough draft pages and thus never gets anything done.

Yea, there's usually two general types of writers, and they can be on a teeter totter so to speak:

Those that outline and plan ahead of time using the outline

Those that write the story as they write

Sanderson is very much an outliner, I think GRRM is more a it'll come together as I write it kind of person. He probably has some sort of plan, but it isn't as fine tuned as Sanderson's I suspect. Sanderson does multiple drafts as well, which works with how I write. My first draft may be complete trash, but getting it on paper helps me a lot in at least getting the ideas out and then I can fine tune or start over if I'm not happy at all.

But yes, I think Sanderson is very much a "I write regardless and I'll refine it over time" type of person and doesn't agonize over the little details until it's time to actually do that.

GLOW works fine regardless of how many seasons you want. Every season has an ending. There's no need to literally see every character's end of life like Soprano's and Six Feet Under

I feel like you didn't watch Season 3.

I feel like he didn't watch the last episode of the Sopranos...

Depending on how you interpret the last episode, you absolutely did. And, in my opinion, it got a great ending regardless of personal interpretation.

I'd agree you could interpret it multiple ways, but the poster said 'literally.'

It's only canceled too soon if the main plot arc isn't resolved, which does happen with some regularity.

I am very annoyed with shows dragging on endlessly though. I very much like Babylon 5 for precisely this reason: it told the story it intended to, and when the audience asked for more content they spun it off into other shows/movies.

In general, I would say that 5 seasons is a good maximum, and that you better have a good reason for going longer (e.g. adapting a book series to TV, where each book is a season).

Babylon 5 is a bit of an oddball. They were originally told they'd have a fifth season. Then they were told they wouldn't, so they wrapped it up in season 4 (and season 4 is quite compressed as a result, which might be what you like). Then they ended up getting that fifth season. They used it to do all kinds of fun 'post show' things.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine went 7 seasons. They could have done it in 3-4; especially if they could have had modern 50-60 HBO-style shows, rather than 35-40 minute network television shows.

I'd like to see creators target 3-4 seasons and contracts be written for them to create all those seasons. The really good, fan-centric ones could then do the Babylon 5 style post-seasons or a contract could be written for additional seasons to cover the next story arc. (I'm sure this is impossible for some reason, but I can dream.)

As things stand, I generally don't watch any new show that doesn't already have a few seasons under its belt. I really dislike watching a season of a show, falling in love with it, and then finding out its already gotten the axe.

Babylon 5 is also a useful oddball because so much of its plan versus reality was documented on USENET or in interviews as they happened. As they say "no plan survives contact with the enemy" and in this case the enemies of any 5 year TV plan are numerous, and included among other things network notes, network switches, cast contract negotiation problems, cast health problems, and more. JMS made it very clear he had to have a ton of contingencies in his five year plan and the show had to carry out a number of them.

It's also an oddball because even JMS hasn't been able to replicate it with nearly the same degree of success. B5 follow-up Crusade was pitched with a 3-5 year plan and barely survived a half season. (Supposedly B5: Legend of the Rangers was pitched as a 5 year plan including cleaning up Crusade plot-lines at least "sideways" and that barely got a pilot movie.) Sense8 was pitched to Netflix (appropriate to consider for this overall thread) as a 5 year plan and got 2 seasons and wrap-up movie (though seemingly had a lot fewer contingency problems than B5's early seasons in the 2 seasons and a movie that it did get).

> It's only canceled too soon if the main plot arc isn't resolved, which does happen with some regularity.

When shows become popular, the arc suddenly becomes longer until it loses popularity and they cancel it. There are a ton of shows that have this pattern of having a really interesting premise followed by a pretty fast paced plot moving first season. Then they get renewed for 3 more season and the show slows to a crawl and gets cancelled after season 2.

As a counterpoint - to me, the second season of the OA was one of the most audacious, crazy things I've ever seen on television, and its cancellation bummed me out to no end.

Same here. I thought it was starting to finally realize some of its potential in the second season and by the cliffhanger ending it was extremely promising for season 3. I think not only was season one intriguing, and season two utterly fascinating, but that it was really building momentum toward a fantastic season three. It's the absolute perfect example of a show that was damaged by its cancellation.

OA was fantastic.

Often it’s the most creative and least formulaic shows that get cancelled :(

I always describe The OA as not necessarily "good" per se, but extremely interesting and unique. I would really like to have seen where they were going with it.

Seconding this! That finale is almost more perfect never pursued; what it implies about the show's future direction is so bonkers, maybe it's better as a beautiful mystery. It's a hell of a coup de grace for a show that always had a lot to offer its audience even while it kept them guessing.

It felt like they were going for a sort of fusion of Sliders and Quantum Leap. It felt very, very different. I liked that. Bonus for the rare transmasculine representation in TV.

Except that they had clearly written themselves into a corner. Bringing the real actors into the show is the equivalent of writing about writing a story.

Well, the story was pitched as unfolding over 5 seasons. It seems more likely that you just don't like where they wanted to take the show.

Which can be perfectly fine. I would have trusted them to make it work somehow.

I did that once with Lost. Never again.

Could not have said it better. Would like to add that Netflix's high turnover for shows is breathing precious oxygen into the creative world. New stories and new plots with stranger or darker characters, more twists. A good break from the trash remakes of classics.

Not a huge fan of SW but Mando gave me the feeling of wonder about the universe that the OT gave 11 yr old me when it ran on a Sunday special. So there is at least one point I beg to differ on.

Right, and a willingness to experiment on new things inherently implies some of those things will be cancelled.

If cancellation is an unacceptable outcome, they need to have a higher bar up front before launching, and fewer things will launch.

There are too many startups! Some of them don't even work! /s

This is why I basically stopped watching Western shows (outside of the ones people absolutely rave about, and even then only a select few). Something is good, it makes money, they milk it for all its worth until it becomes awful and gets cancelled. That always left me with a bad memory of it as something I enjoyed turned to shit.

I switched over to watching shows from Asia where the format is basically only one season by default, it rarely goes to two, and there is a logical beginning, middle and end that follows a proper story arc. If the show was good when it ended then watching it remains a great memory. I've enjoyed so much stuff over the years and it's never let me down like the Western model does.

I don't think Freaks and Geeks is a great example, because it's one of the classic cases where people really wish there had been more than one season. It's clear that it was not out of steam after one season.

There's a difference between stories told with a self-contained timeline on their own terms (a la Fleabag), and having the rug pulled out from under something that isn't resolved.

Extrapolating off the writers and directors later stuff Freaks and Geeks would have dipped sharply season 2.

It succeeded so well because it was one season. The novelty held it up.

I really liked Undeclared. It I could have seen doing a second season.

Extrapolating off Judd Apatow and Paul Feig? Could be worse. Freaks and Geeks also had an incredible cast. I'd have trusted them to make a solid season 2, although I must say it's kind of perfect as it is for me.

The prequel and new generation Star Wars movies are SW content and are mediocre to downright criminally awful. I’d given up on SW completely. Yet The Mandalorian delighted me and I’m craving for more. So no, clearly being content isn’t enough by a long shot.

The prequels were perhaps less entertaining than the original three (although I really feel this depends on one's age at first viewing), but when considered carefully they rhymed beautifully, and said something deep about contemporary society as well. It helps to consider the fact that the "good guys" in the prequels are the "bad guys" in IV-VI. Then compare Luke to Anakin. Lucas tried something audacious, and it worked magnificently, and maybe a dozen people understood it. Then he could sell the whole mess to Disney with a clear conscience.

http://www.starwarsringtheory.com/

I don't hate II and III, they're ok. The first prequel was terrible though. I recently watched the movies in Machete order with my kids and it was pretty good. I probably won't do it again but I don't regret it. The most recent Disney ones have been utterly dire. I skipped the last one completely and nothing Ive heard about it inspires me to give it a chance.

Granted The OA is not for everyone, but I thought it was one of the best and imaginative things I'd seen on TV in recent years. I loved that it made me go "wtf is going on?" It truly was an escape from reality. It was bizarre, but it had its audience.

Season one I loved–it was novel and very original, unraveled the plot over time, had character development & an amazing ending that tied it all up in a bow. It was a clear and beautiful beginning-middle-end arc.

My complaint is that adding another season doesn't enhance a begging-middle-end story arc that's already done, especially when it clearly was tacked on and not part of the original story.

What I'd prefer? Give the creator a blank slate and let them make another amazing story, rather than saying "this Ducati is great–keep adding wheels!"

I had a different take. It didn't feel tacked on to me, but rather that season 1 was like a benign initiation phase, a dip-a-toe-in-the-crazy kinda deal. By season 2, they felt confident that the audience was now ready for the real deal and they upped the ante. Unfortunately not everyone followed. From what I understood, it was a 5 part story planned over 5 seasons.

wtf was the octopus about. This was a bunch of spooky concepts all mashed together without any clear theme. What was the main theme or central concept of season 2? Season 1 was clearly about the movements & what they did, whether they're supernatural or what. Season 2 was like "Silicon valley! Rhizomes! Time travel! Talking sea creatures!" just sort of a throw everything at the wall approach. Anyway it didn't work for me especially with how fantastic and cohesive the season 1 story was.

Check out the notes here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_OA#Production which make clear that the season 1 story was a cohesive, beginning to end story that the creators refined over a series of years (and it shows). Then "hey lets add a season 2."

I assume this concept is in the TV industry as well but there's a saying in the music industry about a band having their entire life to write their first album and then a year to write their second.

Anything from Zal Batmanglij is out of this world. You should check his early films. I've watched "Another Earth" back in the day for instance and while maybe right now, there is more popular stuff that followed, it was very different back when it appeared.

I guess it was before things like "Melancholia" and "Interstellar".

This guys is a genius.

FYI Another Earth is directed by Tim Cahill not Zal. From what I can tell Brit Marling is the main common thread between that movie, The OA, The Sound of Her Voice.

These three I've seen personally are all good and have a lot of overlapping themes and premises, like mysterious charismatic figures in a slightly off kilter, ambiguously fantastical world convincing people to believe and follow them and their reality.

It's almost comforting to know that The OA is a third or fourth shot at that kind of premise by Brit and her collaborators. Maybe that's why it felt so beautiful and out of nowhere and perfectly formed.

I think Showtime should have followed this. Usually the first season is spectacular, and it's almost as if the writers are surprised it is renewed, but they wasted their best material on season 1.

Weeds Season 1 was amazing, the rest not so much. Dexter, season 1 should have just been a single season, sooo good, after a while you wonder how many serial killers reside in Florida. Billions, season 1 amazing, it hasn't been too bad after, but after a while it just starts to seem forced.

I think there is a parallel here with the old saying, "you have your whole life to write your first record and then six months to write your second.” Similar to the Showtime shows you mentioned, I would apply this to the first season of HBO's "True Detective." Spectacular first season in which I got the sense the writer put in everything he had collected in his head his whole life, and then a rushed second season due to its success.

Earth: Final Conflict

Season 1 was amazing. After that, bleh. At least in that case it sounds like executive meddling was the culprit.

On the other hand, The Expanse keeps opening whole new everythings that make what came before tiny but also essential. No second of plot is wasted. They could loosen it up a bit with a bottle episode or two to develop the characters more though. I could go any number of seasons if they could maintain the quality.

And then there's the new Lost In Space. They're going to end it in the next season at exactly the right time. Pacing-wise, it feels like a three-part miniseries. Just enough room to build a world and develop the characters without overstaying its welcome.

The Expanse is already written to 7 or 8 books. Plus, as you mention, they take the “solution” from the prior work and turn it into the “problem” for the next. The authors of the original content did a bunch of background work ahead of time as they were planning on turning it into an RPG.

AFAIK they actually played in the world as a tabletop RPG.

For better and worse, sometimes it still feels too much like very little in the world of The Expanse actually happens outside of the "campaign PCs" and it makes it feel like a smaller world than it should that much doesn't actually seem to happen until just the moment when the "campaign PCs" show up. The show tries to make up for it some of the time, but that still feels like the core of things. (I have not tried reading the books yet.)

It's a bit of a trope in the books that Holden has a need to get involved in everything. They even lampshade it with Avasarala.

Showtime seems like the worst for this. Maybe Netflix is becoming the anti-Showtime. I've joked before that I wish I could pay half price for a Showtime subscription that only had the first half of each series.

Strongly disagree on Billions.

Season 1 was good and they’ve only gotten better since.

The main thesis I'm hearing here, which I think I agree with, is that a work ought to be planned out from beginning to end, and it simply is as long as it is. But then I picture some cigar-chomper type dude who thinks it's more like an assembly line where some products are popular so you make more of them, and some aren't so you shut them down. There's a disconnect (again) between artistic & commercial, between love & money, and between (as it were) work & play.

Some cigar chomper transformed The X Files from a beloved show to one where everyone just wanted the damn thing to end.

Eh, I feel like the Mandalorian can be objectively "good" though. Just in terms of, you can tell the people are talented who were assembled to work on it. There are lapses from time to time though, for sure.

In terms of production The Mandalorian is pretty amazing. In terms of script it is predictable, fairly boring and drowning in various "the plot needs to happen" moments.

For some reason I cannot phantom, Netflix and others seem to have tons of money to throw at the production, but don't seem to want to spend more than a few pennies on script.

I tried watching Cursed on Netflix, and had to force myself past the first episode due to the horrible writing. It never got better. The pieces were there for a fairly interesting show but it clearly needed more work on the writing side. Instead they pushed it into production and made another predictable flop.

We consume more literature in a year than last generations consumed in a lifetime. Filling all of that with groundbreaking writing is an impossible prospect. Competent production is much more scalable: if you can make one good episode you can make 100.

> We consume more literature in a year than last generations consumed in a lifetime.

This is probably true if you take the average person, but there have always been people reading their entire lives, and there has been a mass market for bad literature for hundreds of years. Cervantes was decrying the state of literature and the huge amount of poor, samey chivalric books in 1605.

We don't need to fill all of it to have some good shows, especially when those shows are already on top of the production ladder and aren't limited by funding. The top shows should be equivalently "top" in all aspects.

It's because money cannot manufacture good writing. There are reliable processes by which a holder of capital can turn $10 million into good production and $100 million into great production, and you can parallelize this as much as you want. There are enough serviceable directors, editors, camera operators, etc. to scale up your production volumes to dozens of shows and billions of dollars.

There is no such repeatable mechanism for original writing. You can find great writing for nothing and pay through your nose for terrible writing. You can find a great writer who delivers a great concept but then she has nothing else in the tank. Or she does, but you can't find another one of her.

You see billionaires buy their way into being big-time movie producers but you never see them buy their way into being big-time screenwriters.

Absolutely. Good is what you enjoy. Mandalorian is predictable friendly format produced with maximum talent.

You can love just watch just the "production value" and not to be ashamed to like endless repeating of familiar.

Star Wars franchise also provides frequent scenes of characters taking a posture and saying some short sentence that becomes a meme you can share with friends.

> Star Wars franchise also provides frequent scenes of characters taking a posture and saying some short sentence that becomes a meme you can share with friends.

Or you can cram a movie full of it and call it Star Wars IX...

there are a lot of visually/technically impressive movies and tv shows that are (subjectively) awful-mediocre in terms of their substance (see: Avatar)

i don't see how the OP's take on the mandalorian is at odds with the idea that the people who make it are probably pretty good at their jobs

I assume you're talking about the James Cameron Avatar, and not disparaging the beloved Last Air Bender!

Good point about producing "content".

"Content" is to series, movies and films what "grub" is to good food and fine dining. When creators say "content", they in a way degrade the quality of their own work (they should sell it as the equivalent of good food or fine dining, not as "grub"); when those that watch just call it "content" they probably don't have a very deep connection to it: So much better when the viewers come away from something and think of it as a story, and experience, a show, rather than "content".

We are watching The Haunting of Bly Manor at the moment, and I'm not sure if its a creative experiment, or an attempt to just add fill, but OMG, everything is sooo slow and so repetitive. Every scene could be cut in half.

I think you should add firefly to this. The first season was great, the second was good. Not sure if it would make sense to do a third.

Firefly only has 1 season.

"The Black Adder" and "Gravity Falls" memorable and to the point compared to the "The Big Bang Theory" and "CSI" which dragged on for years.

I mean personally I feel The OA season 2 was better in many ways and I was quite excited for Season 3. If only Netflix would be required to release some basic popularity numbers :/

Many shows run too long, yes, but that feels orthogonal at best to the reasoning for Netflix cancellations. Especially as they go and do the opposite with many longer shows that they deem "worth" running into the ground.

Basically, your reasoning seems like a discussion to be had, but I simply don't think that's the conversation happening within the Netflix content team.

>"It's star wars Content"

Like Walking Dead with top-notch production value.

I don't watch Disney content much but I own their stock because they really know how to milk every drop from the franchise. When they can't milk no more, they wait few years and they restart. With young audience it's just endless source of new minds to corrupt. It's like junk food for the mind.

"Content is King"

But maybe what Neflix needs to do is add more "100x" developers to make the user interface even more polished, and that will bring the users in... /s

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24618541

Freaks and Geeks deserved at least 2 more good seasons. Such an incredible and thoughtful show.

Exactly, Netflix is avoiding the cash cow syndrome

> Freaks & Geeks: 1 season, amazing. Ditto UK The Office.

Do I have news for you...

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