Something I've noticed about a lot of American TV shows — the first season starts off with a great idea but by season two or three it has become all about the personal lives of the characters and their relationships and the core idea gets relegated to the background and gets lost.

“House” was a great medical drama at first and I loved it for the medicine but eventually it became all drama and not much medicine. The same with “The Good Doctor”.

(I can contrast this to UK TV but I guess that’ll have to be a post for another time 😛)

“Warrior” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5743796) is a show which doesn’t do this as much and which manages to maintain a balance between the core story and the character development. Or maybe, it’s because the story is all about the characters 🙂

But what I do like about the show a lot is the fact that the characters learn, grow, and change. Characters who started out looking as if they are pure evil start getting shades of grey as you learn about them and their motivations. Others change their attitudes and stance as time goes on.

The show is constantly changing and alliances constantly shift. And it’s marvellous to see these happening and to see a story being told so deftly 🙂

As the end of season 3 approaches, I can see a lot of changes and a bunch of new alliances happening. I hope there’s a season 4 since I want to keep on watching!

#TV #US #English #Warrior #BruceLee

@f From my limited exposure to a writer, the first show(s) are the pilot or extensions of it. If you're doing 8-11 a year, season 1 gets a boost by the good writing that went into the pilot they sold the network. After that, a lot of shows are written by teams of writers who essentially use templates. I suspect that's all the character development. Shows we like might have some original writers avoiding that approach, which is probably more expensive. The industry is weird but profit-oriented.

@stevesplace I assume some people do like all the drama too, otherwise in a profit oriented environment, they wouldn’t be going for that approach, right?

But personally, I don’t like loading up a show with all the personal drama instead of the original subject matter that got me hooked in the first place.

Take shows like “Midsomer Murders” which has run for over 20 seasons in the UK — the show has stuck to its core premise all those seasons. The personal stuff is incidental and is not the main focus of the show. I like that approach much better 🙂

@f I love that show! Although, it strikes me that for a place that size, it certainly has a lot of murders. I also like Father Brown Mysteries for the same reason, with the same caveat, lol.

@stevesplace Yeah, we joke about that a lot when we watch those too 🙂 Same with “Death in Paradise” given that it’s a small island 😛

@stevesplace @f This first became apparent to me in comedies, where I eventually made the rule of

"Any comedy that goes on long enough eventually has the characters just become caricatures of themselves"

Later I discovered the wonderful term for it - Flanderization.

Sadly it happens to any formulaic show these days.

@hlfshell @f That's a perfect term. The person I know worked on several comedies with a writing partner. He checked out a couple of film scripts I wrote. The drama was meh to him. The other he really liked - a comedy I said I wanted to animate. He thought actors would be better. I asked if he'd like to help put finishing touches on. No, b/c he didn't work with that kind of script - feature film. He wrote formulaic comedies for TV & that was about it. Your nemesis may be my friend, lol.

@stevesplace @f I'm hard pressed to say nemesis; I have a hard time being mad at artists just trying to earn a paycheck.

....especially when the likely incentive is almost certainly due to studio executives.

@askonomm Each to their own — I got interested in the show because of the medical cases and the diagnoses they made, not because the main character was an ass 😛 So once it got to be all about House and his co-workers, friends etc. I really wasn’t that interested.

Personally, I think US TV spends way too much time on character development and disregard all other aspects of the story. A more balanced approach probably will cater to both types of viewers, but that’s just my opinion.

@askonomm I do enjoy sitcoms but I don’t watch shows for the drama — I watch it for the medical, mystery, thriller part of the show. Not the drama part. All power to the people who like drama for drama’s sake but there are some of us who’ve had enough of drama 😛

I do agree with you about movies and characterisation but that’s a different medium — in a short form like a movie, the heavy characterisation makes sense. But if you do the same in a long-running TV show, it just becomes too top-heavy.

Sure, there should be character development, but not to the exclusion of everything else.

@askonomm I’m sorry if you feel attacked if I said that I disliked “House” but you do realize that not everybody has to have the same opinion, right? The world would be a pretty dull place if all of us had the same opinions and/or likes/dislikes 🙂

It’s just my opinion. You are free to have your own 😛

@askonomm Without meaning to be argumentative, you can’t really know what the creators intended. Sometimes even the creators don’t know where a show will go — “Lost” is a great example. The creators never knew where that show would end up …

Sometimes they create a certain show and over time it morphs into something else. We loved the first season of “House” it was exactly what we wanted — good medical drama, as advertised on the tin.

It’s the later seasons which relegated the “medical” part to a footnote and concentrated mostly on the drama 🙂

If you re-read my original post, I was talking about how “Warrior” actually balances the core story and the character development well. That’s what I like — not just character development (or drama) at the cost of everything else …