- This year, many TV shows in their second season have fallen flat compared to their first season.
- The Handmaid's Tale, Luke Cage, Westworld, Legion, 13 Reasons Why, and Sneaky Pete are among this year's slumps that seem to have fundamental flaws.
- Historically, comedies tend to improve with each season, while dramas often reach a peak in their first season and go downhill from there.
- There are five main factors that make dramas more difficult to maintain, and they all have to do with the people writing and producing them.
- TV isn't "movies, but longer"— a lot of shows are in the hands of people who never learned that.
2018 has been the year of the sophomore slump. "The Handmaid's Tale,""Luke Cage,""Westworld,""Legion,""13 Reasons Why," "Jessica Jones" and "Sneaky Pete" were among the second-year shows to disappoint, frustrate and/or inspire reevaluations of their acclaimed debut seasons.
But ironically, it's also been the year of the sophomore surge. "Atlanta,""The Good Fight,""One Day at a Time,""The Good Place,""Brockmire" and "Timeless" (RIP) were among the shows that managed to, at the very least, equal what made them so beloved to begin with. In some cases, they even surpassed their standout first seasons.
If you look at those two lists of shows, you'll note that all the ones on the former list are dramas, while most of the ones on the latter are comedies (even if "Atlanta,""Brockmire" and "One Day" can all go to dark places). There are a lot of different reasons for how and why the first group of shows went awry. But if there's a Grand Unified Field Theory to the phenomenon, it's this: Like second novels and albums, sophomore seasons of TV dramas have an awfully hard time living up to the original, while comedies are much more immune to this.
When you look back over the last decade and a half of television, there are in fact plenty of comedies whose second seasons are not only clear improvements over their first ("Parks and Recreation,""30 Rock,""Brooklyn Nine-Nine"), but stand unquestionably as the show's best runs ever ("The Office,""Community,""Chuck"). And you can find a few dramas from the same period that got better in Year Two ("Breaking Bad,""Dexter") or even peaked at that point ("Justified,""Sons of Anarchy"). More often, however, you'll find sophomore years that ranged from disappointments ("Mr. Robot,""Homeland") to outright disasters ("True Detective," that "Friday Night Lights"year when Landry killed all those people).
What makes dramas more susceptible to this than comedies? There are a variety of problems they have to face, starting with the biggest (unavoidable spoilers are coming for many shows):
1. The plot problem
By and large, contemporary sitcoms are more dependent on characters, while dramas — particularly the intensely serialized kind that's become ubiquitous in the streaming age — lean much more heavily on plot. The more everyone (both the people watching shows and the people making them) gets to know the characters, the stronger the comedy can be, which is why you hear comedy writers talk about needing a half-season or more to fully capture a character's voice and figure out how best to utilize the talents of the actors playing them. The Office needed a summer off to make Michael Scott less of a creep, while Parks and Rec had to reframe how other characters reacted to Leslie Knope, while also recognizing that Chris Pratt was much better as a lovable doofus than a selfish heel.
This happens with dramas, too — look at how important Breaking Bad eventually made Jesse Pinkman, who was initially supposed to die within a few episodes, once everyone saw how good Aaron Paul was. It just doesn't occur as often, particularly as most of them prioritize cliffhangers and twists and other attention-grabbing plot devices. And characters tend to be more of a renewable resource than plot: If the audience understands what makes these people tick and what can make them hurt, then the show can work even if the storylines are less thrilling the second time around (or are an outright rehash). But when you lean more on "and then this crazy thing happens, and then another crazy thing happens, and you won't believe the third crazy thing we've got planned," then you tend to burn through your most potent material — and the audience's goodwill — much more quickly.
Ideally, a drama has great characters and a thrilling plot (again, see Breaking Bad). But it's not a coincidence that Mad Men, one of the most gracefully aging of recent dramas, exhausted a lot of its big story points early on (Don's secret identity, Peggy's pregnancy) yet had such a richly drawn group of characters that their reaction to the story was usually much more exciting than whatever the story actually was.
2. The first album problem
It's an old saw in the record business that every musician had a lifetime to generate the material for their first albums, and then a couple of months to figure out what to put on the follow-up. TV shows don't always work that way (J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof threw together the Lost pilot script over a few weeks after another writer got fired), but at minimum, there's often a sense in freshman-show writers' rooms to put the most vital and resonant material into that first year to make as big an initial splash as possible.
That's why, for instance, most recent comic book shows use their hero's most famous arch-villain in the first season, then have to flail around to find another one as compelling as Reverse-Flash or the Kingpin. Luke Cage and Jessica Jones both suffered from this to varying degrees this year. (Though, really, Cage had been in trouble since it killed off Cottonmouth halfway through Season One, while Jones wasn't as badly hurt because its heroine is a more fundamentally interesting character no matter who she's up against.) Sneaky Pete is not a superhero show, but it couldn't have asked for a more perfect Season One villain than Bryan Cranston, whose absence left a charisma vacuum that Season Two could never entirely fill, among its other issues.
This doesn't have to be a crippling problem — The Sopranos never had a better villain than Tony's mother, and David Chase had spent years mapping out some version of that Season One arc. But it requires an incredibly high degree of execution to pull off and a dramatic infrastructure and characterization that are strong enough to move on past a show's initial idea. (Even back in 2000, Sopranos fans were grumbling that Janice and Richie were disappointing antagonists compared to Livia and Uncle Junior.) If you look at the outlier dramas that improved significantly in Season Two, they were uneven at the start and needed a year to figure themselves out. When you start brilliant, there's often nowhere to go but down.
3. The miniseries problem
American Horror Story, Fargo and other anthology miniseries have made the one-season story a bit more fashionable than it used to be, but the TV business is still inclined towards stories and characters that continue on for as many years as prove profitable to do so. This leads to a lot of shows with premises best suited to live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse instead sticking around into awkward zombie middle age.
The most glaring example of this in the last decade was Homeland. A miniseries that ends with Brody blowing himself up, or even with Carrie stopping him at the last second, would still be talked about in awed whispers. Instead, it awkwardly kept him around (and around, and … ); by the time he died for real and the show reinvented itself as a classier 24, the whole thing felt like a cautionary tale.
13 Reasons Why and The Handmaid's Tale were even more overtly suited to a one-and-done treatment, since their first seasons exhausted the plots of the books that inspired them. Handmaid's at least ended on a cliffhanger, and there were ways in which the second season improved on the first in the way that it (like many of the aforementioned late-blooming sitcoms) delved deeper into its characters and the world they occupied. But the fact that June escaped captivity three different times and it never quite took suggested the fundamental limitations of this premise, no matter how many interviews the showrunner gives about his 10-year plan. And 13 Reasons Why embarrassingly contorted itself this way and that to re-solve a mystery its first season had exhaustively solved, simply because the show was apparently too popular to cancel.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
