Does going against a TV show's premise work?

I think it's a fair question. There are a number of shows that have Unresolved Sexual Tension as a premise, but the minute the UST gets resolved is the minute the shows are doomed to be cancelled.

Take Revolution. The premise of the show is a worldwide, seemingly permanent blackout. The first season finale results in the blackout coming to an end...just in time for a bad guy to launch Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles at a couple cities. That, and the US government is revealed to be alive and itching to take back what's theirs. It remains to be seen how the second season is going to handle this. Some people are sure that the blackout will occur again, because what's the show going to do without a blackout as its premise? Eric Kripke on his part claims that the show will be "transformed" in the second season, and he even hopes that the show will get a third season.

So, if you go against the premise of a show you make, what do you do? Do you put in a new premise in the next season?

I don't think that UST is the sole premise of a good show in the first place. There should be always more to it. And I also think that so many shows are cancelled shortly after the UST gets resolved is not because of the changed relationship, but because either the whole concept has gone stale by then or because the writers run out of ideas. Take Leverage for example. The show allowed the two relationships in the show to develop naturally, and especially with Parker and Hardison, they were just as fun as a pair. The reason the show had to end was because the team had done so many capers towards the end, it just felt like you had seen this before.

I'm not entirely sure Unresolved Sexual Tension is exactly trope you're looking for. At the very least, it doesn't seem to be the trope you were intending to discuss...

There is a big difference between a show working because of the UST and it being the premise. The premise is not the reason why you watch the show, it is the specific setting, purpose and characters that the show works with.

It kind of reminds me of how some people describe The Big Bang Theory as supposedly being about nerdy people doing nerdy things, but that isn't the actual premise of the show (very few episodes are actually about them playing games or watching movies). It is actually about nerdy characters looking to have a more fulfilling life than the bubble they created for themselves. Accusations about it "becoming" a romcom ignore the truth that the show had a major relationship focus to begin with.

I think a show can play with their own format and push the boundaries they have set for themselves and it results in a more well-rounded show in general. M*A*S*H is one of the premier examples of that, it would have fallen apart in the first season if they didn't embrace the war setting like it did. Other shows dumb down the original idea and simplify the characters, losing what made it interesting and unique. Sliders lost a lot of the social commentary and instead ripped off whatever movie was popular at the moment (asteroid episode shortly after Armageddon, dinosaur episode after The Lost World).

Very rarely. I think it is possible, but too often, when a show feels the need to retool the gas tank is empty. Formulaic shows are long runners and if the writers have lost their curveball, they either leave or try writing for another show while trapped in their current one. That's one reason why spinoffs are good, because the characters need an entirely new sandbox.

I haven't seen much TV, honestly, but I can recall a few examples. Law and Order CI had a retool which introduced more character focus, low key stories and shaky-cam. It was a nice change at first, but the show was already burned out and thus they couldn't do much with the new format.

Lois and Clark had the leads hook up. This was not a total failure, because it challenged the show to integrate Lois into the heroics. But for some reason they backtracked by having Lois get amnesia two or three times, and a whole year was wasted on that. They never got their groove back.

Burn Notice ditched the "client of the week" fun for a season-long thriller arc, and it was terrible. Maybe some die hards liked it, but the humor and flavor is gone.

Angel completely changed in its last season. Each season had a distinct tonal shift, which softened the blow, but Season Five was just too radically different. The show was canceled and Whedon basically recycled the Season Five setting with Dollhouse, which also failed because he was overextended by that point.

My conclusion is that TV should either end on a high note, when it can't top itself, or just stick to episodic plots and give people what they're familiar with.

I was using UST as an example of what tends to be used in driving a show forward. The fact that it tends to go hand-in-hand with another driving force shows that UST alone is usually not enough.

How about Bones? You have a Mystery Of The Week format combined with the UST between Bones and Booth. The UST did get resolved, but I bet the writers thought it would make the show boring. Now they have Christopher Pelant, who I find detestable. Not just because he's a villain, but he's an Invincible Villain and the equivalent of The Joker, in the sense that he keeps escaping justice in ludicrous fashions (Son of an Egyptian diplomat? Does he even look remotely Egyptian to you?) and that he needs to be killed off by one of the cast...but the trouble is that no one will cross that line as long as the show goes on. Oh, and I forgot to mention that Bones and Booth are not married, despite living together and having a baby. They tried to get married, but Pelant made sure that they would never get married as long as he lives. That's right, the writers blatantly turned Mr. Invincible Villain into a Plot Device that ensures that the main characters will never get married as long as the show goes on.

So, you've got a problem with how Serial Escalation? As long as it's handled correctly, I see no problem.

And it's not that unrealistic for two people to have a kid and not be married.

I don't think Tiger is complaining, I think they're trying to the thread to talk about theory.

To which I say, "Yes, mixing up the status quo is the only way I could be satisfied with a show" — the alternative is just stagnant and boring, and I stop watching pretty quickly. You can keep core ideas the same all the way through, but shifting around ideas and concepts is integral to the stakes of a show if nothing else.

Edit: A better example would the sexual tension between the leads of Moonlighting, which IIRC was infamous for being resolved in a way that turned off a lot of the audience. Jonathan Creek too.

edited 30th Jun '13 8:52:40 AM by Nicknacks

I think it'S a difficult balance - on the one hand, you can't just stagnate the premise. It destroys a show if you don't want to make the next step, it becomes boring at one point. On the other hand you can't destroy the premise, either. Take White Collar, for example. The moment when Neal becomes "honest" and there is a 100% trust between him and Peter is the moment the show becomes like any other cop-buddy show (which leaves the writers a little bit between a rock and a hard place). With shows like Castle on the other hand...I don't watch the show anymore, but I don't think that it would have "lost" anything if Castle and Becket had come together earlier. What originally drew me to the show was the meta about writing (which went out of the window far to early) and the way it originally really made for the people in the cases of the week. It often made me think. It was when the show shifted the focus to the UST and the stupid arcs when it lost me.

Some people believed Buffy The Vampire Slayer was dependent on its high school setting to work and the show was all downhill after they graduated. Others believed all the metaphors the show ran off was greater than simply high school and any Seasonal Rot was incidental to that.

Ultimately it depends on what the individual considers to be the premise, which as I said earlier is often mistaken for "the reason I watch."

@ Geth Knight: Aha, Serial Escalation. That's a concept that I believe has to be handled carefully. Sure, cranking up something in a show is a fun thing to do...but sooner or later, it will hit a ceiling. When that happens, it becomes boring or ridiculous. If SE is a big part of the premise and you hit the ceiling, then it's time to change the premise.

edited 30th Jun '13 11:16:28 AM by TiggersAreGreat

I thought Buffy suffered from its new producer trying too hard to Whedonize the scripts... but it's true that college-based shows can't seem to get off the ground. There's just no sense of urgency, apart from tests - which Americans don't even care about; when I'm online, it seems the only kids wigging out over their exams are european. And shows based in small towns are, without fail, soap operas.

I wouldn't mind Buffy transferring to a big city setting, a la "Anne". (Though that would be pretty odd, given that she fled to the sticks precisely because she was under investigation in the city.

edited 30th Jun '13 11:20:35 AM by johnnyfog

I haven't watched it in a while, but I know that over time Burn Notice has shifted from the original premise (spy is burned by the CIA and tries to find who burned him while helping the helpless). As I understand it, as the seasons progressed, he found out more information about the burning and developed more ties with the CIA, and as of this season is back in, but in a Darker and Edgier way.

Sounds like a good idea of doing it gradually.

Also, there are a lot of shows with a Villain Protagonist who tries to stay one step ahead of the law and not be identified as a criminal, and there is the option (likely in the last season) to have the authorities find them out and have them be on the run (I suspect this is how Breaking Bad will go). For an example of that not done well, see Homeland (which doesn't do this as a final season thing).

I thought Sabrina The Teenage Witch suffered from the switch from high school to college.

I never watched Prison Break, but it seemed like every odd-numbered season the main characters were in prison while the even-numbered seasons were about them being fugitives after breaking out.

Likewise, I never watched Chuck, but in my mind the concept was "bumbling nerd downloads the CIA mainframe into his head and gets caught up in a hotshot spy world he doesn't understand and can't keep up with", and then at a certain point he downloaded every skill he needed to be a superspy.

How do the seasons of Doctor Who where the Doctor is exiled on Earth and running James Bond missions with UNIT gel with the "traveling" format? Does Who get a bye on this because it's been reinvented so many times the point of the show has become the reinvention?

Your mileage will vary. Quite a lot of people love Pertwee, either because they grew up with him or because he's the epitome of cool. The third doctor is an oddball not because of the UNIT stories but because of his patrician attitudes. The show has see-sawed from being wistful about the British Empire to Andy Warhol-levels of camp. It's all over the place.

I guess I'm a big softie, because that doesn't sound like Burn Notice at all. It was a comically serious spy doing jobs for lovable oddballs, and the show had a lot of heart. If fans prefer it to be more Breaking Bad and less Kindergarden Cop, that's their right but I don't share their need to deconstruct everything.

I don't think that the High-School Setting was necessarily the premise of Buffy. It was part of it, in that the original Premise was "Teenage Girl has to fight Vampires" and you normally find teenage girls in High School. But there was a very good reason to abandon the High-School Setting, because the characters aged. High-School or not, the "Girl fights again Vampires" part was still there. But take Beverly Hills 90210, there the premise WAS the High School setting (the address of the High School was the title, after all). This and "simple family from Minnesota has to deal with the world of the rich". Plus the producers changed the format from mostly self-contained episodes to a soap opera structure - the first seasons were surprisingly thoughtful. The later ones were crab, because the show had nothing in common with what it was originally about aside from the name and a couple of actors.

The changes to Burn Notice were less about the formula and more about the details. They started getting involved less with random people in need of help and more often went on actual CIA operations with a more mundane side-job connected to it (like a favor to a friend to get some important information). I can imagine it being a response to the criticism of having two unconnected plots in every episode. But still, the pattern of an infiltrating teammate working their Jedi Mind Trick around an unsuspecting criminal stayed mostly the same.

Now how well they executed that change is an interesting debate. I liked that the show started writing more complex plots but the trade off resulted in the characters doing some stupid things that you thought they were above doing.

Most people, including me, didn't like the clunky transition between the pokey clients and grim CIA wetworks. However, when the contrast did work (during season breaks), it worked really well. Unfortunately I'm not convinced the writers knew what they were doing. Once the CIA stuff became a full time thing, the characters — supposedly hardass agents and spymasters — carried on talking like pokey backwoods criminals.

@OP: Not really, no.

edited 1st Jul '13 11:00:30 PM by joeyjojo

I have no idea what this discussion has to do with UST, but changing the premise is sometimes neccessary to not have a show become stupid. As example, take ST Voyager - the premise was "stranded in unknown space, trying to make it home". At various points, the crew gets a chance to return home, but decides for increasingly sillier reasons to not go anyway because reaching home would end the story. After a while, you get the impression Captain Janeway happily violates the Prime Directive for anything but the main goal. Sure you can blame the writers for giving the crew chances like that in the first place, but it would also have been silly if they never really tried to get home. Ultimately, it was a bit of a silly idea to have a premise like that for a show that would run for so long, without ever changing it.

Most mystery shows have to change their premise of "X happens for mysterious reasons, people try to uncover the truth" because it would be both silly and annoying to watch if no-one ever found out (or tried to).

Yes, it works quite well if the show begins getting stale (Bleach, Naruto, Star Trek Voyager, The Walking Dead, etc).

You can't keep the same plotline running for 4 seasons.

I don't know if changing the plotline is the same as changing the premise. The premise is more of the "draw" to a show.

For example, Skins had an entirely new cast every two seasons, and with it, entirely new plots. But the premise - a dark teen drama but with more drugs, partying and sex scenes - remained the same.

As for UST, I think that's a discussion separate to this one, as others have said. But I think writers can go overboard on trying to maintain the UST state of things that it can be almost a reversal of Shipping Bed Death, where the viewers lose interest because they keep delaying the clearly inevitable. Glee comes to mind as it did that with Rachel/Finn for the first two seasons, constantly finding new reasons to keep them apart when it was obviously they were "endgame" (at least, as much as a couple can be for that show).

(God, I hate admitting that I used to be really into Glee. I haven't watched it regularly for a couple seasons, I think.)

edited 8th Jul '13 12:23:30 AM by BobBensonIsHomunculus

I think every story-line has some sort of expiration date, but sadly writers tend to hold onto certain things way too long because they are afraid to change a show too much. Often it's UST, sometimes it's something which has to be revealed or a goal which has to be reached. There is simply a point at which the audience gets tired of getting jerked around. A show has to develop in order to stay interesting, the time in which a show could repeat the same plot again and again are over. But at the same time, a show has understand what the main audience drew to it in the first place. If a show is popular because the audience enjoyed were grounded characters, you just can't add a soap opera plot. If a show is popular because it shows great capers, it has to deliver great capers and can't loose itself in a romantic subplot. If a show is popular because it has great detective stories which allow the audience to draw their own conclusions, you can't suddenly introduce the real culprit during the last minutes of the ep.

I think a lot of TV writers are eager to hang on to UST because that kind of tension really is the sort of thing that can drive a narrative and keep viewers watching. Shipping Bed Death is a trope for a reason; even in real-life, watching happy couples gush over each other can be annoying and is certainly not as fun as, say, trying to set people up. But I do think that either there has to be some actual doubt as to whether these characters will end up together or, if it's obvious, at least keep the couple interesting enough that the They Do at the end is still as satisfying as they could be.

Glee's treatment of Rachel/Finn in the second season onward failed on both counts: there was no doubt in viewers' minds that the characters were going to end up together, and they had ceased to be interesting. Part of that was probably that, at that point, the show was receiving more acclaim for its LGBT characters and same-sex relationships, but I don't think that's all of it. The writers honestly seemed to be doing everything they could to make them as dull as possible - even dragging up the same two Romantic False Leads from the previous season! - and on top of that it was just so obvious that they were going to find their ways back into each other's arms that the viewers just got bored. It's one of the many ways in which Glee is increasingly an exercise in bad TV writing.

Now that Finn Hudson's actor is dead, I would say that UST in that area has been killed very dead.

That one writer Eric Kripke has apparently come to realize that the answer to this question is no. Just check out this link where he talks about his screw-ups with season 1 of Revolution, and beware of spoilers and tl; dr.

http://www.tv.com/shows/revolution-2012/community/post/comic-con-2013-revolution-is-blowing-up-its-world-for-the-better-137433974209/

1. Kripke actually thought the search for Danny Matheson would last the entire first season, like the search for Dad in Supernatural. Once he realized it wasn't working, he had to change it quickly.
2. He also points out that in hindsight, he had been going against the premise many times, by featuring a lot of power in a world that wasn't supposed to have any power.
3. If the first season felt haphazard, that was because Kripke was engaging in Writing by the Seat of Your Pants. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but the downside is that it creates at least one Plot Hole.

As it is, Kripke is hitting the Reset Button, and he's going to do a better job with season 2. At least he made sure that there will be no more going against the premise of the show!