Ask JKM a Question: Series that Lasted Too Long, or Wrote Themselves into Corners?

A regular reader writes:

“We all know of TV series whose life was cut too short by low ratings. The Internet is littered with fan campaigns to bring back shows, some successful and some not.

But what about the opposite? Any shows you felt actually went on too long? Shows that dragged out a quest past the point of tedium? Or shows that wrote themselves into corners?”

I love this question!  It’s a good one, and a nice inversion of the idea of TV programming that gets cut down in its prime.

My answer probably won’t be popular, but I feel that the first several Berman Era Star Trek shows -- The Next Generation (1987 – 1994), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993 – 1999) and Star Trek Voyager (1995 – 2001) -- all peaked in their sixth seasons, and the seventh (and final) seasons tended to be big disappointments, featuring many episodes that just didn’t succeed artistically. 

I am a big Star Trek fan, obviously, and feel especially fond towards Deep Space Nine, but I can’t say that I ever fully got on board with the notion of Captain Sisko’s mother Sarah having been possessed by the Wormhole aliens/prophets, thus transforming the good Captain into a quasi-alien character with mystical qualities.  The final episodes of the series -- with wraiths and other “magical” forces battling it out felt -- like a betrayal to me of Star Trek’s scientific, secular grounding.

But in particular I feel that this plot development with Sisko was poorly conceived and took away from the “human” adventure.  I similarly disliked the idea (presented earlier than the seventh season if memory serves…), of Dr. Bashir being a genius genetic augment

For some reason, the people behind these Trek series felt it necessary to have every character boast some “special” power or capability by the end of the run.  They couldn’t just be human heroes, like Kirk, McCoy, or Scotty.  I felt that the Sarah Sisko plot just stretched the idea way beyond believability.

The last season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, featured some really dreadful episodes (“Phantasms,” “Dark Page,” “Homeward,” “Sub Rosa,” “Eye of the Beholder” and “Emergence”), but none worse than “Force of Nature,” which rewrote the rules of Star Trek to suggest that warp speed travel was an environmental hazard to space/time.  

You would think that the Traveler’s people -- who zipped about at speed far greater than the Enterprise ever did -- would have been aware of this fact.  This idea is probably one of the worst conceits in Star Trek history, and follow-up episodes had to laboriously explain why the Enterprise was breaking the restriction on warp speed limits.  Yech.

Star Trek: Voyager ended on a sour note for me with the unexpected, unnatural development of a Chakotay/Seven of Nine romance.  These two characters and performers shared no chemistry, and no history of romance, and the whole plot was as contrived as the Sarah Sisko revelation on Deep Space Nine.  The first several seasons had established the groundwork for a Janeway/Chakotay rapport and connection, and by the seventh season the idea was just dropped.  Also, the episode that brought Kes back into the fold is one of the worst stories I’ve ever seen on network television. 

So, in my opinion all three programs hung around too long, especially since the sixth season was so strong in the case of Next Gen and DS9.

So far as programs writing themselves into a corner, I’m afraid I’m going to harp on the two genre programs I have commented negatively upon lately, the remade Battlestar Galactica and Lost.

I would again like to plead my case that I don’t hate these programs or feel that they were worthless, only that in the end they both squandered a great deal of audience love and good faith by having no real plan for their closing seasons or installments.

Both shows had to go endure creative contortions to justify their ending episodes, and even with those contortions, the finales failed to impress. 

So many mysteries on Lost were never adequately explained. The Others, who originally could seemingly rip people out of existence, changed into just another tribe on the island, for example.   The series introduced -- and then just as quickly dropped --  the Tail-ies and new characters such as Mr. Eko, Nikki and Paolo.  The overall impression was of a series lurching from one idea to the other with no coherent plan at all. 

Battlestar Galactica similarly had to survive creative contortions to justify Mrs. Tigh as a secret Cylon, and the whole final subplot with Starbuck as some kind of weird angel-thing just never worked at all. 

Lost peaked after one season in my opinion, and BSG after two. 

It’s ironic, but after the finales of both programs, fan interest dropped off precipitously because the final chapters didn’t live up to expectations.  Had Lost or BSG been canceled earlier, they would be championed and talked about constantly today as great sci-fi series that died before their time.  

Instead, they serve as powerful reminders to current genre programs of a serialized nature that all the artistic and creative “good” leading up to the last chapter may be, in the end, worthless, if the final “pages” of the story disappoint.