Knowing When To Quit...

All good things must come to an end, but apparently horrible crap go on from here to infinity.  I know I paraphrased & slaughtered a toy's quote but, oh well.  Lately I have been watching less & less TV.  It's not that I believe the only good TV was made when I was a kid.  There were some great shows then, before & recently.  The problem is that most of the people have no idea how to write a story.


Stories, unless they're merely vignettes or slice of life blips, have a beginning, middle & end, not always in that order.  The writers of today's television are great at beginnings, beginnings are easy, but only so-so at middles & most often horrible at endings.  The ending is the most important part! Without an ending the story loses its importance, its validation. 


To avoid The End writers often turn to crappy plots device.  Hey, let's rehash what we did episode five from season eight, they'll never notice we've done it before.  Hey let's bring in a cousin Oliver.  Why not jump a shark?  Oh to hell with it, we'll do it all & just to be clever we won't just redo it once or twice,we'll redo each previous episode five times.  How do you think The Simpsons has be around for nineteen crappy seasons & one terrible movie?  Yes, I'm aware there are twenty-two seasons of the show, but the first three were pretty good, after that it should've ended. 


Now were facing the same thing with Smallville & Supernatural, more with Smallville.  They brought back the passive-aggressive Clark & his crew for a tenth season.  Mind you by now, most of the original cast has been killed off or had the sense to get the hell off the sinking boat of a show.  In the beginning, they made new ventures into Superman, they breathed new life into old characters & created new ones.  Chloe Sullivan is one of the few characters developed by outside materials to go into comic canon other than Harley Quinn.  These writers even made me like Bo Duke, John Schneider.  But still they prattle on with horrible storylines & have betrayed the very show they created by not drawing it to a conclusion before it began to rot.  Now it's just zombie Smallville.

Supernatural, the Buffy wanna be show, wasn't bad in the beginning.  But now it has totally jumped the shark. Now shark jumping, done in the right way can be great.  Joss Whedon can do it, Sam Raimi can do it, Bruce Campbell built an entire career around the jaws jump.  But you have to have much better writers, directors & actors to pull off shows like the infamously well received shark jumpers & Supernatural just doesn't have the right combination to pull it off.


As much as I have liked these shows & others, when it's time, it's time.  Let the show fade into the snowy backdrop of off-air TV in peace & dignity.