Serial Escalation / Live-Action TV

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• 24:
  • How bad a day can Jack Bauer save us from this season? What plots will the terrorist pull this season? Assassinate the president? Steal a nuclear bomb? Unleash a devastating virus? Or many cannisters of nerve gas? How will Jack Bauer kill them? Shooting them with a gun? Two guns? Run on the wall while simultaneously snapping their necks? With a cell phone?! Biting their necks out?!?!
  • How many people will Jack torture using Improvised Weapons this season? How Cold Blooded will that torture get? Terrorists, diplomats, his own family?
  • All that, and Jack never has to eat or go to the bathroom. Ever.
    • And how many traitors can appear in these 24 hours?
    • How many times can we put Jack Bauer through shitloads of physical and emotional torture and suffering until he's completely broken and either puts a gun to his own head or just snaps and goes postal?
• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: When Coulson is speaking with Cal, who knows more about the artifact he's chasing, he asks if it's as powerful as the Tesseract (an Infinity Stone, and one of the six most powerful objects in existence). Cal says yes... before admitting he doesn't actually know what the Tesseract is. In the end, the artifact is important and dangerous, but nowhere near the scale of an Infinity Stone.
• The annual crossovers set in the Arrowverse have been gradually getting larger in scope with each installment.
  • 2014, Flash vs. Arrow: The two episodes (one apiece for The Flash (2014) and Arrow) are mostly self-contained and have no impact on each other.
  • 2015, Heroes Join Forces: This time around it's an actual two-parter, with the Arrow episode taking place directly after the Flash crossover, and sets up the next series Legends of Tomorrow.
  • 2016, Invasion! (2016): a three-part epic in which Team Flash, Team Arrow, the Legends and Supergirl (2015) have to repel an Alien Invasion.
  • 2017, Crisis on Earth-X: Unlike last year, all four shows have an episode dedicated to the event (when previously Supergirl was only a Red Skies Crossover), plus a few newcomers from Freedom Fighters: The Ray making their debut. It details the wedding between The Flash Official Couple Barry Allen and Iris West, only for the ceremony to be interrupted by parallel-Earth Nazis.
  • 2018, Elseworlds (2018): This one scales back to three episodes, leaving the Legends out, but Superman makes his crossover debut and Batwoman is introduced in anticipation of her own show. While previous crossovers were fairly self-contained, this one is clearly stated to be a trial run for a crisis that's just around the corner...
  • 2019, Crisis on Infinite Earths (2019): The one they've been building to for years, featuring a threat to the entire multiverse that brings in cameos from across decades of DC film and television history. Black Lightning makes his crossover debut, Ezra Miller's Flash from the DC Extended Universe makes a cameo, and it ends with the current CW DC shows becoming a Merged Reality to make future crossovers that much easier.
  • Each season of The Flash (2014) thus far have their main villains reaching new levels of speed and different ways to foil Barry.
    • Reverse Flash could go so fast he could appear to be at 2 places at once. As his name suggests his costume is a darker inverse of Barry's costume.
    • Zoom can rip portals into different earths through pure power. His suit is a black version of Barry's suit with a demonic cowl.
    • Savitar is Invisible to Normals, can go so fast he seems to be teleporting. His armor is silver and is about 8 feet tall with blades coming out of his wrists.
  • The Big Bad of the first season of Legends of Tomorrow was Vandal Savage who other than being completely immortal was mostly a Badass Normal, then in season 2 they were fighting a Legion of Doom led by evil speedster and super genius Eobard Thawn / The Reverse Flash, when they defeated them they unleashed an Eldritch Abomination and when they defeated him they unleashed a whole prison filling history with fantastic creatures with the implication that they're saving the worst for last. In this case it could be argued that as the villains are getting more powerful so are the hero's since in this time they've added members higher on the Super Power Lottery such as Wally West and John Constantine.
• The A-Team: How many rounds of ammunition can they pointlessly waste today? How many cars/jeeps/trucks will flip over? Will they destroy more property than in the last episode? Can Murdock's latest delusion be any funnier and/or more ridiculous than the last one?
• In Auction Kings, Occasionally lampshaded, when a piece comes in that is a more extreme version of something they previously sold.
• Babylon 5: What with all the WhamLines and WhamEpisodes, sometimes creator J. Michael Straczynski seemed to be asking "How many times can I screw with the viewers' expectations without contradicting everything that has already happened?"
• Battlestar Galactica (2003): How could things possibly get worse? Who hasn't had anything life-alteringly horrible happen to them recently?
• A big part of the appeal of The Blacklist. Just when you think it's the climax and things can't get any crazier, something is revealed that takes everything even further. For example, the reveal that Tom is actually a violent spy for the current Big Bad is shocking enough, but than the next season reveals he was actually hired by Reddington, the main protagonist.
• Bones: In what ridiculous location or circumstance will the next mangled mystery corpse be discovered? How terribly can we mangle it and still show it on-screen, before the censors tell us to knock it off with the gorn, already? Also, how many times will Christopher Pelant get away with his crimes before he finally gets killed off?
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • How much more emotional trauma can we inflict on Buffy? How many times can the Scoobies prevent the end of the world?
  • Lampshaded several times in the show, once by the entire Scoobies who respond to Giles saying "It's the end of the world" with (in chorus) "Again!" and later by Riley, who says to Buffy "Before I met you I never needed to know the plural of apocalypse".
  • And how much more dangerous can each season's Big Bad get?
  • What kind of sadistic trauma can we inflict on Dawn this time? Her mother and sister dying within months of each other? Her sister coming back from the dead and ignoring her? Her mother figures breaking up, one of them trying to kill her, the other dying, the first one trying to kill her again and then leaving for months? Her sister treat her like shit again? Turn her into various mythical creatures? It's a wonder the girl didn't snap and slaughter them all.
  • "Hmm, Angelus certainly did a good job inflicting torture and trauma in Season 2. How can we top it?" They continue this trend throughout the series.
  • From Season 9:
  Whistler: "You think you [Angel] and Blondie knocking boots was radical? A vampire and a Slayer? Try a pureblood demon and an agent of The Powers That Be. Evil incarnate and a servant of good. Or, as I like to call them, Mom and Dad."
• Cosmos: A Personal Voyage: Carl Sagan used this to explain the concept of eternity and infinity: He described the Googolplex as a really big number (10^(10^100)) and then compared it to the number of atoms in the universe (something around 10^80), and yet he states that ''infinity is bigger'' and the googolplex is as far from infinity as it is the number 1. To put the immensity of the googolplex into perspective, if you tried to write it out (a 1 followed by a googol zeros), you'd run out of atoms to put your zeros on before you finished. Googolplex is one of the smaller examples of a Really Big Number. To put the insignificance of googolplex into perspective, most people's concept of infinity is much, much smaller than, say, the first (of 64) terms used to describe Graham's Number.
• Deadliest Warrior: How much gorier can the tests get? How much trash talk can the groups dish out ot each other? How Badass, Evil, and Savage can the warriors get?
• Doctor Who:
  • The series finales of the new show seem determined to top the previous ones every year. They've gone from having the Daleks invading Earth, to the Daleks and the Cybermen invading Earth, to the Master and a race of devolved humans from the end of time itself actually conquering Earth and massacring a tenth of the population before enslaving the rest to construct an army of warships that would invade the rest of the universe.
    • The fourth series finale tops even this, putting every single universe in peril. If that weren't enough, it features all three of the Doctor's main companions from the New Series returning, plus Sarah Jane Smith, her son, computer, and robot dog, Captain Jack Harkness and the Torchwood crew, plus Rose Tyler's mother and ex-boyfriend (i.e. around 80% of all returning characters from the New Series, probably excepting only those who couldn't fit filming into their schedules). And let's not even get into which villain from the Classic series returns, or which ship finally sets sail.
    • The 2009 Christmas special tops even this, with the Master turning every single human on earth into a copy of himself, which is only the warm-up to the Time Lords coming back from with the intent of destroying the entire fabric of space/time, to allow themselves to "ascend" and become creatures of pure consciousness. The only mercy is that Russell T Davies stepped down after this, so he wouldn't be tempted to top even this next time.
  • "The Big Bang" tops even all those with Daleks, Cybermen, Silurians, Judoon, Sontarans, Sycorax, Autons and more. In an alliance. To trap the Doctor. Which leads to most of time and space never having existed in the first place! Then, the universe gets better, but at the cost of the Doctor never having existed at all. (Okay, he gets better too. But barely!)
  • Hell, the Moff made the opening episode of Series 6, a Wham Episode! If that's not Serial Escalation, than what is?
    • "The Wedding of River Song" involved River Song changing a fixed point in time. History itself collapsed.
      The Doctor managed to change the same moment safely through some Loophole Abuse He just had to be at the lake at the time, so the "Doctor" shot was actually the Tesselecta from a previous episode. The Doctor was inside it. Fixed moment? Changed. History? Intact. And then we get to what they were worried about. the Question? Doctor Who? Yes, the show's name is a plot point now.
  • The Series 7 opener has every Dalek ever.
    • And, topping them all, that series' finale has the revelation that there is ANOTHER Doctor that has never been discussed before, one who's done something so terrible that the Doctor now refuses to acknowledge ever existed. And that's all after the Doctor finally visits Trenzalore, we find out it's the location of his future tomb, the Great Intelligence rewrites every victory the Doctor's ever had BY ENTERING HIS TIMELINE, and the truth about Clara is finally revealed. Oh, and that's just at the end of the episode. It STARTS with the First Doctor and his very first companion, granddaughter Susan Foreman, stealing the TARDIS and fleeing Gallifrey.
  • And all of THAT is topped in the 50th Anniversary Special, in which Gallifrey is rescued with the help of every Doctor — yes, including the redeemed War Doctor and the Twelfth Doctor, who doesn't formally debut until the Christmas special that follows!
  • In the follow-up Christmas special "The Time of the Doctor", Eleven, realizing he's actually on his final life, defends one planet for 900+ years — and then Clara convinces the Time Lords to help him from their pocket dimension. He gets a whole new regeneration cycle and Twelve makes his debut!
  • Series 9 starts with a two-parter featuring the Twelfth Doctor encountering Davros as a innocent child and abandoning him, and subsequently embarking upon The Last Dance in 1138 Essex as he prepares to atone with what might require his death when the now-dying megalomaniac realizes who he is. From there, there's the return of Missy (the female incarnation of the Master) as a twisted ally to Clara, a new Dalek city on Skaro crawling with villains, and a part one cliffhanger that suggests Missy, Clara, and the TARDIS are no more! The season finale is a three-parter that involves (among many other things) Clara's final fate, a fabled Time Lord-Dalek hybrid warrior, and the Doctor finally making it back to his home planet and people — and he's mad as hell. Oh, and on top of it all the finale trilogy's middle episode takes place over 4.5 billion years and ends up being nothing more than a desperate attempt by the Doctor to save the life of a companion he'd fallen in love with..
• Double Dare: How much more messy could this show get? How much more ridiculous can the stunts get? How much more can the host who suffers from OCD (!) take before even showing it on camera?
• The Goodies:
  • While the show itself is not an example, one episode has Graeme start up a pirate radio station outside the five mile limit of Britain for Bill and Tim, then getting the idea to run a pirate post office on the side. He starts going mad with power, adding on a pirate bus station, then a few other ideas, until finally he tries dragging Britain outside the five mile limit for a pirate country.
  • The show itself could be an example. What new assignment will make hilarity ensue? How many Incredibly Lame Puns can be worked into an episode? What new insane gadget will Graeme think up? Can Bill Oddie's background songs be catchier? What next overblown monologue will Tim lead about England while playing his record of Land Of Hope And Glory? And most importantly, (how) can the episodes set in one place really be as good as the others, if not better?
• Heroes:
  • How dumb can Peter/Mohinder/Hiro get? How many times can we get Claire to cry? How much darker can this show get? How many powers can Peter have? How many of those will he actually remember? How many overpowered characters that nothing can kill can you put into one show?
    • Infinitely, often, loads, virtually all of them, virtually none of them, and six.
  • How are they going to kill Nathan again in the next Season Finale? We assumed in the first season that he was disintegrated by Peter exploding; the second season had him getting shot several times by Peter who came from the future (don't ask); the third had him getting his throat slashed by Sylar, which threw in a new twist by having Matt mindbend Sylar into permanently transforming as Nathan (Again, don't ask). It appears that they will be stopping this- Nathan has been Killed Off for Real as of the latest episode.
  • How much Sylar can we inject into this week's storyline...just because?
• iCarly: How many more things can Spencer set on fire? Exactly how sadist can you make a Sadist Teacher? How long can the Word of God continue to Ship Tease both sides? How neurotic can Mrs. Benson get? How much abuse can be heaped on poor defenceless Freddie? How much more Les Yay can they pack into a children's television show?
• The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret : The essence of this show. The titular character is constantly creating increasingly awkward situations with his lies and posturing.
• It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: How horrible can the people in it get?
• Kamen Rider: It's "how many more forms?"
  • Kamen Rider Ex-Aid: Adding to the above, how high will the Riders' levels get? How much more ridiculous will the suits look? How much can Kuroto Dan get away with (and can he get any hammier in the process)? How will Emu's day get ruined today? Will the next tie-in movies become even crazier? How much of the show can Yuuya Takahashi write or supervise?
  • The next series outdid themselves with their form quantity. This series has over 900 forms, due to W gimmick with multiple configurations. Let's not bring in multiple Super Forms. With so many forms, it will be no brainer that Super Duper Form will cause a nuclear blast, just like Kuuga.
• LEGO Masters: What will the teams be asked to build out of Lego bricks next? What kind of outrageous challenge can said build be expected to accomplish and still manage to hold up somehow?
• Leverage: What improbable thing can they steal this week? (A hospital? A mountain? A miracle?) How much more terrible can the villains get? (In with the mob? Financially ruining innocents? Kidnapping orphans to use as a cover for their gunrunning operation?) How crazy can Nate's plan be? Who will have a morality crisis this episode? Who can Eliot beat up? How much can they get away with?
• Lexx: Win, place and show must go the second season, in which the Big Bad managed to convert every piece of matter in the universe into one of his robots (except the Lexx and its passengers.) Our heroes still managed to defeat him, by causing the universe to collapse and create a wormhole through which they escaped. And to top that? In season 3, they destroy Heaven and Hell. As in, actual Heaven and actual Hell.
• Lost: What Arc Words are going to come up? Can Ben Linus be even more of a Crazy-Prepared Magnificent Bastard? How many more questions can they create by answering one of them? Who can they give A Day in the Limelight to (I mean, we have to get to the dog eventually)? Will they drop hints on a Alternate Reality Game? What type of Flashback Twist can they do, how about a Flash Forward, now how are they going to outdo that, wait, how about a flashback and a flashforward at the same time and they don't tell you until the end!? How can they, what? Slaughterhouse Five!?!
• Madan Senki Ryukendo: What act of heroism will Kenji pull off? How much further can he be powered up?
• The Masked Singer: How bizarre will the costumes be this season? Which celebrities will raise the A-list factor even higher? What new mechanic will push the boundaries of the show further? What madcap guess will Ken Jeong theorize about next?
• Michael Irvin, American football legend, has a TV show on Spike where people who couldn't make the NFL due to external factors are given a chance to compete for one spot in the Cowboys training camp roster, which is basically a shot at having a shot at making a team. After a series of already absurdly difficult practices, they are given a night on the town, which is basically an excuse to get them as far off-rhythm as possible. The next MORNING, he puts them through an Unwinnable practice, where the only way out is to quit the show. They are expected to last 30 minutes. Instead, they last FIVE HOURS of practices, in the middle of Texas, in September (around 80 degree weather), in what several pro football legends called the most extreme practice they had ever seen. Had the episode been filmed in the month when it had aired (June, 100+ degree weather), the creator/host acknowledged someone absolutely would have died. The only reason why the practice was stopped at 5 hours was because Irvin had to prevent this from happening, as it became apparent the competitors absolutely would not give up.
• The Middleman: How many awesome pop-culture references can they fit in this week? How much stranger can they get? Can they possibly top trout zombies? Yes, yes they can.
• Mind Freak: From Criss Angel being Buried Alive twice to him predicting someone trying to kill the president with a grenade.
• Mock the Week: How much more offensive can Frankie Boyle get? Since he's left the show, not very. But then came Tramadol Nights.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000: How awful can the movies get? How obscure can the references be? How many jokes can we pack into one and a half hours? The last is particularly impressive, as most episodes have over 700 jokes, which is to say a joke every '7.15 seconds. The fastest riffed episodes have a joke every 5 seconds!
• MythBusters: What ridiculously complicated automation are we going to construct to test this myth? How much crap can we blow up? How badly can we totally maim the show mascot, Buster? How the hell are we going to talk the next poor sap into donating his motorcycle/car/motorboat/747 jetplane to us, knowing it's going to end up scattered across California in a bazillion microscopic pieces? Just how are we going to completely sandwich that compact car between two fully loaded semitrucks like the myth says? How much dakka can we use? What other novel ways can we find of destroying things? How many ways can we repurpose Grant's one-time sword-swinging rig?
• Ninja Warrior (also known as Sasuke in Japan): This show is one of the most absurdly difficult strength/balance/skill competitions ever. Some of the most notorious obstacles in the 4 stages are the Warped Wall (Stage 1) and the Salmon Ladder (Stage 2). There are 100 competitors in each competition. In the 19th, a particularly evil event, 98 people, including ALL of the "All-Stars", failed the first stage. The remaining two failed the Salmon Ladder, which is only the second obstacle in Stage 2.
  
  The show goes up to eleven. In the 25th competition, the two obstacles that were already arguably the most difficult, the Salmon Ladder and the Cliff Hanger, were both upgraded. The Salmon Ladder now has a second Ladder to climb up, and the Cliff Hanger(stage 3)... well, just look at it.◊
• Psych: How much more brazen can Shawn get? How much more ridiculous can the truth of the next crime be? The latter is a necessity of the format in this case, since due to Shawn nearly always being right, the only way to keep the police from believing him right off, is to commit incredible crimes... and we're a season two seasons past the victim being killed by a tyrannosaur.
• Pushing Daisies:
  • How hilariously cartoonish could the murders be? (Lampshaded by Emerson in "Smell of Success")
  • How awful could Ned's childhood get? He's like an onion of trauma, you just peel away one damaging event after another.
• The Red Green Show: is there any limit to what can be cobbled together out of old parts, lawn mowers, duct tape, K-cars, and the Possum Van? In the Series Finale, he made a perpetual motion machine. With corn.
• Revolution: For a given episode, how many characters will get killed off, and who will those unlucky characters be? What will General Sebastian "Bass" Monroe use to obtain victory? First it was a fleet of helicopters, featured in episode 10 and episode 11. Then a small atomic bomb, featured in episode 13 and episode 14. Then anthrax, featured in episode 16. Finally he used unmanned combat air vehicles (or drones), featured in episode 17.
• Saturday Night Live:
  • This basically encompasses Bill Brasky's life. How many horrifying and magical things can he do? How many things can he destroy? How many people can he kill? How many people can he rape? How much gin can he drink? And how can we not love him for it? To Bill Brasky!
  • Also the Stefon segments: How crazy can John Mulaney and Bill Hader make the club names? What's going to set Bill off into cracking up? Not to mention how they ended the love story between Stefon and Seth Meyers (with a parody of The Graduate featuring Anderson Cooper and all of the bizarre characters Stefon has ever described.
  • One Digital Short featuring Rainn Wilson as the head of a company who assembled his employees to figure out the year's budget. He asks each of them for their opinions, and things start out normally. Then we get to people like "Derek's Twin Brother" (who agrees with what Derek said) and "Red," a redheaded man; after that comes the Invisible Man (who's out sick), the water delivery guy (who doesn't work there), and an employee dressed like Wonder Woman; next comes "Captain Pajama Shark" (a pajama-wearing man with a shark's fin on his head) and a man in a straitjacket; next is a sentient Gigantic Turkey Sub and a talking tiger head mounted on the wall; and then musical guest Arcade Fire chimes in. How could they possibly end such a bizarre sketch? Simple—the entire building explodes.
  • The "Wing Pit" sketch in the Pedro Pascal/Coldplay episode initially starts like a normal wing commercial that takes place at a Super Bowl party. However, the amount of wings and sauce escalate as the sketch goes on alongside the increasingly absurd methods of delivery, such as a liquified alcoholic chicken smoothie, three-thousand chicken wings delivered through a black contractor bag that knocks out a football fan, and airdropped ranch. And then there is the revelation that not only Wing Pit owns the police, but the events in the sketch were done to appease a chicken god of death, concluding with the people at the party drowning in thousands of chicken wings delivered via cement chute.
• The Secret Life of the American Teenager: What crazy unrealistic situation will happen next week? How stupid and unrealistic will the characters' behavior be? How much longer can they talk about sex before they'll be forced to address another issue of teenage life? Who's the next girl to get knocked up?
• Sherlock: How much emotional and physical pain can the main leads get? Hm...how about a lot?
  • This trope sums up the series two finale, with each of Moriarty's plans puts Sherlock at a new low.
  • Also applies to the series in general, where each series gets weirder and more intense. The first episode of the show has Sherlock solving a peculiar but mundane set of murders. By the last episode, [[he has a long-lost, supernaturally smart sister who he learns killed his childhood best friend and puts him through a series of Sadistic Choices which destroy him and everyone he loves.]] And that's just a summary.
• Stargate-verse:
  • What horrible new Sealed Evil in a Can will our heroes stumble into and fight for all of the next season? What absurd new weapons will they jury rig to destroy them? How many more times can we kill Jackson? How much more can the Ancients screw up? How powerful can the millennia-old weapons get, and how quickly can the heroes find them right next to the villain's headquarters where nobody bothered to look before?
  • Oh, and remember when they blew up a sun?
  • And then a Solar System, and then (nearly) a whole Alternate Reality.
  • Fact is Stargate knows how to make sweet sweet love with this trope and apply just enough Rule of Cool, Lampshade Hanging, and Continuity Nods to keep it up for eight years, (ten with the reboot).
• Star Trek: Warp Factors can get a little out there in how fast something is supposed to be going. And then you get to Warp 10, which according to the Technical Manual is so fast that you are occupying every point in the universe SIMULTANEOUSLY.
  • Ironically, saying warp 10 was impossible was supposed to rein this in. However, they merely made warp ten go from meaning "ten times faster than warp one" to "infinite speed" (whatever that's supposed to mean) and ships are still Traveling at the Speed of Plot.
    • This actually makes perfect sense, since warp speed is a parabolic function (see below). Warp 2, for instance, is about 16 times the speed of light, whereas Warp 3 is about 67 times the speed of light. Warp 4: 235c; Warp 5: 711c; Warp 6: 1979c; etc. When you exceed Warp 9, which is about 46,883c, you have to start using decimal values, such as 9.1, 9.5, 9.8, etc., with each increase of .1 being a greater increase in speed than the previous. Starships are not meant to travel at such high warp factors (we finally surpass 100,000 times the speed of light at around Warp 9.72) for more than a short period of time. Warp 10 is, quite literally, impossible to achieve, as it is the terminal limit of the parabolic function and represents infinite speed. Regarding the Voyager episode "Threshold", I recommend other Trekkies do what I do myself: just pretend it doesn't exist. It may technically be canon, but I can't in good conscience consider it to be so. The writers for that episode obviously didn't bother with research, and their understanding of Warp Theory is as apparently lacking as their understanding of evolutionary biology, as they so incompetently demonstrate during the last ten minutes of the episode. -=[ * V = 6·(e^W-[{W^2}/2+W+1]) —- C = G-tan(A)/([G-S]+[tan^2{A}+{<G-S>^2}-1]^[1/2])+10 —- D = G-C —- where V = Velocity, W = Warp Factor, D = Delivered Power; G = Generated Power; C = Continuum Drag Factor; A = 5.1050881 radians; and S = 9.8658770244 (Scott's constant. ]=-
    • That's not a parabola. A parabola does not go to infinity for finite input values.
    • And then Trans Warp was FASTER.
    • It should be noted that the warp scale was redesigned after TOS. In TOS, they routinely went past Warp 10, which was retconned as an older system of measuring warp speed that went by the formula "speed-of-light x warp factor cubed" (e.g. Warp 4 = 64c = 19,186,717,312 m/s = Warp 3.48 [TNG scale]).
• Supernatural:
  • How much worse can everyone's Daddy Issues get? And how much more emotional torture can the boys take before they top themselves?
  • How much worse can the world get? Can the angels be even bigger dicks this week?
    • On that count, how will either brother be able to out-dick even the angels in the later episodes?
    • Also please note that they are several seasons past fighting LUCIFER. The Crapsack World has been getting progressively worse from there.
  • How much more people can die (and be resurrected)? How many more times will Dean die? Him dying has almost become a Running Gag.
  • How Cosmic a Horror can they punch out? As of Season 11, they've chewed through arch-demons, Lucifer, Lucifer's predecessors, and Death, and are up against God's evil twin.
• Super Sentai:
  • From 2006 onward: "How many mecha can we cram into a single formation, and in doing so how many Mecha Expansion Packs can we introduce?" Fans in the Periphery Demographic aren't exactly pleased.
  • Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger: Has finally outdone themselves with regards to team-ups, just look at the page image for it. God only knows what'll happen in the next anniversary....
  • Starting with Uchuu Sentai Kyuranger, the series started to explore how far they could go with breaking the standard formula. Kyuranger reached a total of nine rangers in the first few episodes and ended up with a total of twelve, more than any other show and having all of them be permanent members. Lupat had two teams of three rangers competing with each other for the whole show who were then joined by a seventh ranger who has two forms. Zenkaiger was an extremely wacky parody season that had the leader and main character be a non-red ranger and had four of the rangers be robots that turn into forms based on the mecha of previous seasons while the three human rangers are based on the forms of rangers of previous seasons with elements of their mecha and the rangers could summon the spirits of previous rangers to aid them. Donbrothers is the first time in decades that Sentai has done a sequel season by retaining several elements of Zenkaiger it also is unique for having no Big Bad for nearly the entire season and focusing mainly on drama. King Ohger takes place in an Alternate History resembling a high-tech version of the Middle Ages with most of the Rangers being monarchs from the different nations and it also bumped up the quality of the CGI by a huge degree, bringing a new level of Visual Effects Of Awesome to the franchise.
• Survivor: About 15/20 of the players were stupid beyond all belief, never learning to keep an eye on the idol hunting Russell and practically lining themselves up to be voted out one by one. It was assumed there'd never be such a stupid cast ever again...but Redemption Island takes the cake for dumbest cast ever. When you're playing with someone you already know from the show, that puts a pretty big target on their back. When you're playing with people who have played the game multiple times, were known as the best players in the show when they played, have been the sole focus of their seasons, and managed to get shows slanted to keep them around as long as possible, that doesn't just put a target on your back. That basically straps a huge billboard lit with neon to your back reading, "Vote me out - I'm a threat! I'm gonna win!" The ometepes literally ignore that "vote me out!" billboard on Rob's back and, not surprisingly allow him to win. After the foolish players in Samoa, that amount of sheer stupidity really says something.
• The Thick of It: How much darker can satire get? How much harder can Malcolm's veins throb? How much more baroque can the swearing get? How much more shit can we pile on every single character^a.k.a. Glenn?
• Tomica Hero Rescue Fire: What can we set on fire as the Monster of the Week? What's the new finisher? Projectile cars? A hurricane? Rainbow Road?
• Tomica Hero Rescue Force: How needlessly cool can this show make the Rescue genre? What kind of Wave-Motion Gun will be used to save the city this week?
• Top Gear:
  • What ridiculously hard task can the producers set the three presenters this week? They've gone from buying used cars and driving from Florida to New Orleans, to buying used, two-wheel-drive cars and driving across Africa from one border to the other. And what about the episode where they attempted to turn a Reliant Robin into a functioning space shuttle?
  • A space shuttle that almost worked. The only reason it didn't? One single bolt did not come loose.
  • I know. Let's drive to the North Pole!
• Vikings: Season 1 had two major battles. The first one involved groups of plus 30 people duking it out and the second close to a 100. Come season 3 the final three episodes involes thousands of Vikings laying siege on Paris and by season 5 there are battles involving over 6000 every other episode.
• Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego: How exuberant and disturbingly ambitious can Carmen Sandiego's crimes get? What priceless relic/building/country will she steal next?

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