On Sunday, it was announced that Breaking Bad would be wrapping up sixteen episodes after its fourth season finale. It made sense; the journey of Walter White had to eventually end. As an almost Shakespearean tragedy of a good man's downfall into evil, the series couldn't risk stagnating without losing dramatic poignancy. An end date ensured that the series would go out on the top of its game, as a cohesive work of fiction that tells a full story. The thing about end dates is that they give a show a beginning and a middle, too.
But end dates are commonplace for cable TV. Successful shows on cable networks get to plot their own demises years in advance. Neil Gaiman's upcoming series American Gods on HBO already has decided it will run for six seasons, while AMC's Mad Men is scheduled to end after three more seasons. Rescue Me will air its final episode in September, a few years after FX announced that the show would end after its seventh season.
Few shows on network television have the same privileges. Think about it: in recent memory, the only network show to have received such a boon was ABC's LOST. The show's producers were able to pick when they would end the show a full three years in advance, after unsteady scheduling for the show's third season caused it to lose millions of viewers. That announcement kept the series afloat and provided a narrative resurgence for the series (flash-forwards, anyone?). An end date gave audiences and potential viewers confidence that the show had a plan. And while not all viewers were happy after the realization of that plan, it at least gave the series a clean ending, not letting it spin its wheels until it was euthanized -- er, cancelled.
Is this the pattern that should be followed? For genre television, it should be mandatory.
Take Fringe, for example. It's the finest show on network television. It's struggling with viewership, but from week to week, the writers provide us with complex mythology with a human touch. Jeff Pinkner and J.H. Wyman say that they have a planned ending for the series. With the future of the show beyond its upcoming fourth season in such doubt, why doesn't FOX set them a date to wrap up the story in a satisfying and meaningful way? Whether it be at the end of season 4 or with a shortened fifth season, Fringe deserves an end date. The nightmare for every genre television fan is the anti-finale, when a show is suddenly cancelled and nothing is resolved.
Shows like FlashForward, The Event, and V might have been salvaged if they had been given end dates from the beginning. They all started out strongly, but audiences soon fled. Even I quit watching V in season two because I was tired of knowing that Erica's attempts to stop the alien invasion would always fail. Had those shows been given a set end date when they started; say, three seasons for each, they might have held onto viewership and even thrived. The same goes for shows like AMC's Rubicon, which was sadly cancelled after its first season. Most viewers who stopped watching did so because they felt the show's pace was too glacial (I, for one, loved it). Would they have been so impatient if AMC had declared that Rubicon would run for four seasons?
The reason this will probably never happen is that making such commitments is a gamble for networks. With that plan, failures will plague a network for three years, instead of just one. It's a double-edged sword, too; if a show is wildly successful, having a three-year cutoff date means that the network won't be able to reap the full benefits. Networks want long-term successes, but don't seem to have realized that in the world of genre television, there are no long-term successes.
Shows like FlashForward fail because the viewers who watch them want to see a story with a beginning, middle, and end. But networks won't give them that because they're afraid that shows might fail. It's a never-ending cycle that leaves both networks and audiences with a string of failed shows who had great potential.
The 2011-2012 season will have plenty of genre additions to the network television fray. NBC is premiering the series Awake, which tells the story of a man torn between two realities, at the midseason, while FOX's Alcatraz, about time-travelling escapees of the titular prison, will debut around the same time. Both shows are absolutely stellar, but there's a cloud that hangs over them. Will they be cancelled? It seems likely that one or both of them won't make it to a second season, probably leaving us with unsatisfying conclusions. With the bad track record of genre shows on network television, why don't these networks take a little gamble and try something new? If it fails, they're stuck with a middling show for a couple more years than they would. But if it succeeds, they'll have a successful show (that makes them money, which is what they care about) and happy audiences.
It might be worth the risk.
You know what's odd? There are still people who write about TV and can't tell the difference between "ended" and "cancelled". Just a few days ago, some moron writer twittered that a series had just been "renewed and cancelled", as if that would make any sense. You still get that sort of idiocy once in a while from no more, no less than the specialized media.
Fringe should last the entire 7 seasons originally planned. However, it is up to Fox to tell them if they need to prepare to cut it short.
American Gods would like to run for 6 seasons, but it isn't even picked up to pilot yet, just in development.
If nothing else it would be nice to see fringe make to 100 episodes
Much of the problem really is that they're planning on X number of seasons, instead of just producing the episodes needed to tell the story. Their hoping for the multi-season commitment intrinsically implies that they don't really have their story figured out yet, and that they need more time to develop it.
But then, most series really aren't telling a story so much as they're showing a series of events that might or might not be tied together, should they be allowed to "end" their series.
If Neil and HBO were smart, they would identify the real number of episodes they need to tell the story, go ahead and produce them all, and then maybe break up their broadcast groupings into "seasons".