The Chris Carter Effect / Live-Action TV

• The X-Files has the Trope Namer, Chris Carter, creator of the show, who is infamous for this:
  • For the first half of the 1990s, the fans were convinced that Carter had plotted an elaborate and minutely thought-out web of deceit and lies for his FBI agents to unravel. Forests of Epileptic Trees sprouted around every new tantalizing hint revealed. No reference was too obscure for devoted X-Philes, who cheerfully threw themselves into history, folklore, myth, science, or any other branch of human knowledge that seemed like it might shed some light on the story. By mid-decade, though, the Myth Arc story had churned along for years without really answering any of the questions raised. In fact, even when the show would answer something it would raise at least two new questions in the same turn, and even the old answers were very prone to getting subjected to Retcons. Eventually, the overarching story had effectively mutated into a dense Kudzu Plot, and fans began to suspect that there was no intricately plotted story — Carter had just been making it all up as he went along. (Carter himself eventually confirmed this suspicion.) Fans were irritated by the resolutions to side plots that were long-running, such as the fate of Mulder's sister — turns out she was spirited away by the fairies! This eventually went on into the finale which made promises of resolving the Myth Arc which not only fails to do so but also in the last ten minutes presents a teaser for an alien invasion set to occur in 2012 (which was not only never resolved, but was never brought up again).
  • When the series was given an unexpected revival in 2016, it didn't take this trope long to hit it again. Pretty much true to form, the first episode begins with a massive Retcon that makes a hash of a lot of the previous mythology, aliens not having much interaction with humanity at all, and most of their supposed crimes being the work of humans using stolen alien technology — despite the numerous aliens that had been on the show before. Most of the season was filler, and the season finale ends on yet another Cliffhanger, despite another season not being greenlit at that point and the principal actors not signed on for more. Fans who were hoping to finally get some closure after years of waiting were left sorely disappointed.
  • Two years later, the revival would get a second season, only for it to start with the extremely controversial twist that Scully was essentially raped by the Cigarette-Smoking Man to produce William, and end with the Cigarette-Smoking Man yet again being killed for presumably the last time, and yet again the X-Files are shut down as a Cliffhanger. Once again, fans were less than satisfied, though general reception for the season was more positive than the first.
  • Also by Chris Carter, Millennium (1996) is a good example of this. The show got increasingly bizarre and difficult to follow as it went on, and the end of the third (and final) season provided no closure at all. Each season had a different showrunner(s), each with a very different idea of what the show should be (Are Frank Black's flashes simply a visualization of his deductive skills or psychic visions? What is the Millennium group's agenda?) and no one from above willing to set boundaries. After the cancellation, the whole thing was put into the laps of The X-Files team. This resulted in a Fully Absorbed Finale for Millennium (1996) within The X-Files that also failed to resolve anything.
  • This trope is a suspected contributor to the failure of X-Files spinoff, The Lone Gunmen.
• Carter's attempted Amazon series, The After, was ultimately called off because of this trope. Amazon wanted a "show bible" before the first season was made, Carter preferred to make it up as he went along. It was an especially tough sell since Carter wanted the show to last for 99 episodes^note (To match the number of cantos in The Divine Comedy: the big twist was going to be that the show was actually set in Hell) at a whopping $40 million per 9 episode season.
• Lost. At any given time, exactly half of its fanbase believed that the show's creators were making the next Twin Peaks and had no idea what endgame they desired, while the other half argued that the threads were finally coming together, and a satisfactory revelation was all but guaranteed. In the end, it's a matter of opinion on how it all turned out. The most diplomatic way to phrase it would be to say that there were two groups of fans: those who thought it was about the characters, and those who thought it was about the plot and mythology. The former seem to have generally been pleased by the ending, while the latter were generally very upset and firm believers that this trope was in effect. Generally, science fiction can have an open ending as long as the fates of the most interesting characters are resolved. Unfortunately, on Lost, a large chunk thought the island was the most interesting character. Even more unfortunately, the popularity of Lost led to a lot of networks greenlighting their own shows with heavy Kudzu Plot and Myth Arc and even less consideration for a resolution, leading to a lot of the examples on this page.
• Twin Peaks:
  • Writer and committed Lynch fan David Foster Wallace opined in an essay that Season 2 was some of the best television he'd ever watched, in that it was some of the worst television he'd ever watched. If one watches it all in a row, it's pretty clear that it's one long nervous breakdown on the part of Lynch as he never intended the mystery of Laura Palmer's murder to be solved, with the series intended to be more of an exploration of the characters. Executive Meddling forced him to solve the mystery mid-Season 2, which left him with literally no idea where to go from there and hence he opted to work on other projects. As a result, Lynch was hardly involved with the rest of Season 2 — he didn't write or direct any of the next 14 episodes and returned only to direct the finale. There's a consensus among Twin Peaks fans that the episodes directed by Lynch are the best of the series.
  • Ironically, it seems to be an inversion of this trope: a show's downfall caused by the resolution of a plot thread that was never intended to be solved. The series had a Kudzu Plot driven by a Driving Question that was mistaken by ABC executives to be this, and the forced closing of plotlines led to Seasonal Rot and cancellation.
  • Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me was an attempt to avert this with Lynch planning two more movie sequels, presumably to wrap up the show after its cancellation, but the movie flopped and initially polarized many viewers, which subsequently led to the sequels being canned.
• Pretty Little Liars used this to sustain itself. Every time someone looked like they might be the stalker of the girls — known only as A — they inevitably turned out not to be and old characters were brought back to deepen the web. By the fifth season, fans were growing tired that A was still running rings around the main characters, and progression was made in the sixth season.
• Perhaps the ultimate example is The Prisoner, which posed lots of ongoing questions — Who runs the Village? Why did Number Six resign? Who is Number One? — but ended with an utterly incomprehensible Grand Finale that answered none of them. The series did a sequel via the "Shattered Visage" graphic novel that did at least attempt to bring closure to Number Six. It's apparently more or less official, as the famously cranky Patrick McGoohan "didn't hate" the plot.
• Strictly speaking, The Pretender never resolved any of its over-arching plots. The show creators joked that a detailed master plan for the narrative was hidden "inside the pickle jar" and buried in their backyard, but in actuality, the writing sessions were becoming increasingly devoted to impromptu games of poker among the staff. This may explain why, though the exact circumstances and reason for series protagonist Jarod's abduction as a child remained unclear, nearly every character in the show was revealed to have uncertain parentage or a long-lost relative. Following the unintentional finale, two successive Made For TV Movies, both of which ended with Cliff Hangers, introduced more questions than answers.
• This was pretty much what got The 4400 canceled. The long-awaited elaboration of the fabled 'Future People' was half-answered very late in the show, but then about twice as many new questions cropped up. The cancellation then abruptly cut off any hope of the rest of it being resolved. Damn shame, really.
• The first season of Heroes was hailed as great, tightly-plotted, and well-written storytelling, with a clear goal in mind. Its second and third seasons, though, were prime examples of the Chris Carter Effect in action — the writing team flailing around, directionless, at war with its own continuity — and it only started to re-establish its arc as of Volume 4. Unfortunately, the writers had envisioned each "volume" to be about a different set of heroes with a different set of problems to solve. In regards to season two, they had planned a long, elaborate 2-volume (i.e. season-long) arc in which all the seemingly-loose plot threads would have come together. In the original ending of volume two, Peter wouldn't have caught the virus vial, and it would have been let loose in Odessa, causing the pandemic seen in "Out of Time". Volume Three would have been about the pandemic. Claire's blood's healing properties were going to be used to heal virus victims, and resident Scrappy Maya would have used her powers to absorb the virus and sacrifice herself to save the world. Unfortunately, the writer's strike cut the season in half, and instead of waiting an undetermined amount of time to resolve plots new viewers wouldn't be up to date on, they chose to wrap up the season and abandon all planned story arcs.
• Burn Notice based itself on there being some sort of big Government Conspiracy that was behind Michael getting fired from the CIA. Each season does manage to shake up the Myth Arc, it goes from everything being a complete mystery to him having a love/hate relationship with the organization that burned and eventually gathering evidence to bring to the CIA that they actually exist and work with them to start dismantling it. The issue fans have with the status quo is built on four parts:
  • The show's deliberately set and filmed in Miami (trying to avoid California Doubling) and thus Michael can't do too much globetrotting,
  • Each episode is consistently split in half between an episodic story and a Myth Arc story that makes for a rather detached A and B story,
  • The episodic story often becomes more about the accent Michael has to use,
  • ... And even the myth arc story is organized as Michael following a trail of bread crumbs that leads him to the big twist of the season.
  • Still, Seasons 5-6 managed to really change up the We Help the Helpless monotone of the episodic story and managed to merge both the myth arc and episodic plots as working together.
• Star Trek: Enterprise:
  • The pilot left the audience wondering who the shadowy individual directing new bad guy race the Suliban was. At the end of the series, they're still wondering, and apparently no-one behind the scenes gave it much thought either. Instead of answering the questions the Temporal Cold War threw up or explaining characters' motivations, the show instead introduced more and more factions, their motives and goals just as nebulous as the ones that were already there. When a new showrunner took over for the beginning of Season 4, he introduced yet another new faction who were apparently the worst of the lot, blew them up and announced that the war was over and indeed had never happened (even though several events that were a direct result of the war clearly still had). Uh-huh?
  • Even after the show's cancellation, the identity of "Future Guy" remained muddled. Rick Berman claimed that they had never established his identity, while Manny Coto and Brannon Braga said he was probably a Romulan, only for Braga to later go back on that, claiming he had always intended him to be Archer, which still leaves unresolved why Archer would be doing all these horrible things. Meanwhile, the EU novels took his character in a different direction than any of those stated possibilities, making him Jamran Harnoth, the leader of a eugenics movement who was also using time travel to ensure his own existence (being of Suliban, Tadaran, and Romulan descent). Star Trek Online, conversely, identified him as Noye, a Krenim researcher altering the timeline who's basically an Expy of Annorax from "Year of Hell", in that he's altering the timeline to rescue his beloved wife.
• Carnivàle on HBO created this in one scene. Early in the show, one of the characters has a vision of Ben and Sofie kissing as a nuclear warhead detonates in the background. Since the show took some pains to ground itself in the real timeline, this would put the vision in 1945. But the show was set in 1935, and the pace of the plot meant that some fans immediately concluded that it'd never pay off. They were right. Knauf had planned a five-year time skip between Seasons 2 and 3, which would have brought the show to 1940, with further seasons to bridge the rest of the gap between then and the Trinity test, but then the show got canned.
• War of the Worlds was based on the idea of humans discovering that the aliens from the original 1953 invasion had survived and were now resistant to radiation. Season 1, while obviously lacking in special effects, built up a number of story arcs that were intended to be long-term: the humans working to discover the identities of the aliens and out them to the world, allies which made guest appearances (and then promised to come back in the future), an alien "invasion force" that was set to arrive in just a couple of years, etc. With Season 2 (and an entirely new production team), all the carefully constructed work that went into Season 1 was tossed out the window. Half the characters were killed (including the villains of Season 1), several angles were simply forgotten about and the theme of the show even changed. When fans tuned out (which caused the series to end its run prematurely), several arcs from Season 1 were left unresolved and there were more questions than answers.
• Stargate-verse:
  • Stargate Universe seemed to have this problem. Rather than simply go the episodic or mini-arc route, the producers introduced a half-dozen secret soap opera storylines at once, storylines that sometimes overshadowed the genuinely dramatic plotlines on the show. While this may not have been the only reason the series was cut short, it certainly didn't help.
  • The series' predecessor, Stargate Atlantis eventually began to head in this direction, although Atlantis was still far more episodic than Universe ever was, which may be part of the reason Atlantis ran for 5 seasons to Universe's 1.5.
  • SG1 and SGA had arcs too, it's just that Universe was about the soap opera storylines, and the "run-down spaceship we can't actually steer" setting was just the reason why they were all crammed into the same place. Even the planets they visited to collect supplies were always uninhabited — going through the Stargate doesn't mean "Soap opera over, enter the new Goa'uld/Ori/Wraith!" but instead "the same argument from before is continued in the desert." The sci-fi plots anyone who was watching because it was Stargate wanted to see were never intended to take center stage and the clearer that became, the fewer people watched.
  • The Stargate franchise's biggest offender was The Ancients. Introduced in season 1 as 1 of 4 unnamed old and intelligent races, they gradually grew in scope, with each new addition making their backstory a bit more convoluted. Atlantis's addition that they had left the Milky Way after the plague, leaving it to repopulate itself, didn't break things too badly. But when Season 9^note Seasons 9 & 10 were originally slated to be a spin-off series, but the network was afraid it wouldn't bring in as many viewers so they tacked it onto SG1 as additional seasons retconned their origin right out of the Milky Way entirely and turned them into a splinter faction that had fled here from a distant galaxy to pursue science instead of religion 10s of millions of years prior, well, things just got nuts. Then came Universe.
• Game of Thrones: When the show premiered in 2011 it was more or less clear exactly where the show was going, as it was based off the A Song of Ice and Fire series by George R. R. Martin, with five books already published and two more on the way. Martin believed and assured the showrunners he would be able to finish his book series before the show caught up. As the years passed and the show inexorably approached the end with no new book in sight, fans and critics began to speculate what would happen if the show reached the end of Martin's written material. In the event, the show would premier, run for eight years, and conclude, all without Martin publishing a single new book. Starting around season 5, fans and critics wondered how the show was going to resolve its multitude of unresolved plotlines. Realizing they couldn't wait any longer, and based off some broad outlines given to them by Martin, the showrunners had to come up with new ideas on the go. Some think this explains the precipitous drop in writing quality starting around this time. In the end, however, this trope was not in effect. The audience did not abandon the show, and stuck around to see how it all resolved, but the actual resolution in Season 8 received a legendary backlash.
• Sons of Anarchy has an infamous amount of this and it got worse as the seasons went gone on. It is common for the writers to stretch a single question across an entire series. A running joke amongst fans is that Jax always says he will get to the bottom of something, but doesn't. Season 6 is particularly directionless both due to FX letting every episode be 90 minutes or longer leading to a surplus of pointless subplots in every episode and the planned season-long Big Bad having to be offed four episodes in due to the actor's schedule. Thanks to this there is no main driving conflict for much of the season but instead several plotlines piled on top of one another with none really taking primacy.
• The Event: The show's creator had planned the story arcs to unfold over five seasons and promised in his tweets after the first episode that the show would resolve most of its mysteries within an episode or two of introducing them—which it generally did. Due to declining ratings during the fall, NBC forced him to speed up his timetable after the hiatus so that plot developments he had planned for the second season instead took place during the second half of the first, with predictable results.
• The Killing eventually answered the central question of "Who killed Rosie Larsen?" at the end of Season 2. Problem is, throughout Season 1, fans started to feel that the show kept throwing out Red Herring after Red Herring... and when the season finale finished with nary a hint as to who might actually be responsible, professional critics actually flipped their shit, with at least one saying they had absolutely no reason to want to keep watching.
• Semi-enforced on How I Met Your Mother: although the creators intricately plot out certain subplots during each season in advance, they were never guaranteed more than one season at a time, so they were forced to keep their options open enough to be capable of making shit up for how Ted met his kids' mother in case they got cancelled. When they were guaranteed two more seasons near the end of Season 6, the show visibly hiked up the foreshadowing (mainly in the form of flashforwards and/or Future!Ted casually Jossing possibilities or stating facts about the future) of a far denser and more detailed plot in the later episodes of Season 6 and the earlier ones of Season 7. Still, Season 9 is the end.
  • This was actually referenced as a common criticism of the series finale. The show ends with the entire nine-season story being a thinly veiled excuse for Ted to justify to his kids that he's going to get back together with "Aunt Robin" after the mother/Tracy's death. The footage used for this reveal was actually shot during season two, as the kids look much younger than they are in the rest of the clips from said finale. The reveal was criticized by people for being a last-minute plot thread in a series that had seen all manner of extraneous storylines, Ted going through numerous relationships and eventually coming to the realization that he would never have Robin (and seeing her literally floating away in his mind after they both realized that love just wasn't enough) and a decade's worth of characterization in the interim. Fans complained that the only way the ending made sense is if you disregarded the last eight seasons of development, and the poor reception may have been a factor in why the Spin-Off How I Met Your Father was initially stuck in Development Hell (due to viewers shying away from another long-term Myth Arc that never pays off).
• Supernatural headed this way during Seasons 6-7. Since the showrunner changed at the end of Season 5, fans in general have become increasingly less happy with the course the show is taking, feeling that the new showrunner had abolished most of the important plot threads and as of Season 7 secondary characters that were popular with the fandom and a large part of the show's success in previous seasons, and is now relying purely on a series of one-shot guest stars to maintain viewers. In addition to the showrunner's apparent insistence on writing out well-loved characters in favour of poorly received suspiciously similar substitutes, this approach has not worked as intended. General consensus seems to that since Sara Gamble's departure and Jeremy Carver's debut, the show — while still not as good as the earliest seasons — has managed to get back on course, having completely abandoned the boring Leviathan mythology, and returning to the Angel and Demon mythology.
• Doctor Who:
  • In the original incarnation of the series, Seventh Doctor Sylvester McCoy's tenure was marked by the Lungbarrow Plot (a.k.a. the Cartmel Masterplan), a multi-season story arc designed to reset the continuity of the series and re-establish the mystery of the title character. This really was written in advance, and the payoff for the audience really was there... until Executive Meddling led to the show being cancelled early. The seeds which began to be sown in Season 25 continued to grow in the subsequent New Adventures novels (leading to a wonderful climax in, appropriately, Lungbarrow)... but never addressed in the 2005 revival thus far.
  • Series 7B had to contend with the aftermath of old companions leaving, the Doctor possibly leaving his travels, the Doctor possibly being on his very last incarnation, meaning a way had to be found for their life to be extended to allow a new incarnation to replace Matt Smith, and the retconning of the Last Great Time War. The resultant "Impossible Girl" arc was criticized for robbing new companion Clara of some much-needed character development in favor of tying up some plot threads and was followed by establishing a new yet old incarnation of the Doctor to be responsible for the Last Great Time War ending in the 50th anniversary special. Finally, the Christmas special had to wrap up everything else in the Eleventh Doctor era (namely the Silence arc) rather abruptly. Much of this resulted in calls for showrunner Steven Moffat to leave.^note  In fairness, he himself admitted via an interview in Doctor Who Magazine that this was a mess, and that he had been trying to run two shows and work out the 50th anniversary all at the same time.
  • Moffat however remained for Series 8-10, the Twelfth Doctor era, which didn't have as bad a case of this trope going — Series 8 and 9 actually spent a lot of time patching up leftover plot threads from 7B, such as the identity of the woman in the shop who brought the Doctor and Clara together (and from there how and why she did so) and Clara's personality. Series 9 went on to use its Season Finale to get the Doctor back to Gallifrey at last and its Christmas Episode to reveal the circumstances of the Doctor and River's final night/proper wedded life, partially because Moffat went into the season intending it as his last. But come Series 10 he never did resolve the new plot threads that the Series 9 finale left dangling regarding Gallifrey and the Doctor's relationship to it in favor of giving this Doctor's Myth Arc, his complex relationship with Arch-Enemy Missy, a proper conclusion.
• Happened with Smallville. The show kept dicking around with viewers wanting to see Clark's development into Superman by focusing more on his on-again-off-again relationship with Lana most of the time, and then by the time she was finally gone from the series in Season 8 they still managed to get renewed two more times and drag things. It didn't help that they also seemed to be finding increasingly complicated ways of making Clark do "Superman" things without actually coming out and making him Superman. The series finale wasn't exactly that satisfactory to certain sections of the fanbase either.
  • Of course, since Smallville is a prequel to the Superman mythos, they actually knew exactly where all the key plotlines were going — it's just, since it took ten whole seasons to get there, they ended up coming up with any number of sub-plots to fill up the space; in that regard, it's actually an inversion. From Season 4 onwards — likely, longer than they expected the show to last — they changed tack and began bringing in supporting characters and villains that Clark would normally only have met after he left Smallville, such as Brainiac and Lois Lane (Lex Luthor, in some versions, really did live in Smallville and was friends with Clark, so he made sense). By the end of the show he's met most of his major allies and villains and started the Justice League, all before he even puts on the cape!
• Once Upon a Time also suffered this as it went on, as several plots and characters got discarded and forgotten about in favor of new ones with each passing season.
• Nearly every plot thread in Primeval is left unresolved, be it the fate of Claudia Brown, the motivations of the villain in Series 2, the origin of the future city in Series 3, the significance of Patrick Quinn, etc. No matter how significant something is played up in one series, you can be sure it'll be forgotten about in the next one. Rather than try to resolve any of them, the latest series ended by introducing a completely out-of-the-blue twist merely for the sake of a cliffhanger, and given it's unlikely to be renewed for another series, it's unlikely even that will ever be expanded on.
• The Mentalist. The Red John Myth Arc has become far more elaborate and convoluted than originally intended. While it appears that Bruno Heller always knew who Red John was going to be (or picked his possible choices early on, at least), the character went from a particularly devious Serial Killer who knew how to cover his tracks, to a Serial Killer who knew a few other killers, to a Serial Killer with a shadow army of fanatically devoted, loyal-unto-death brainwashed followers. In season 6 they took his catchphrase ("Tiger, Tiger") and decided to turn what looked like a cult into a sophisticated criminal organization that nobody had heard of, and made Red John a possible member, to a possible senior member, and finally into the apparent mastermind of the whole thing. Oh, and he's repeatedly performing "psychic" feats that make Jane look like an amateur, that are never explained. Beyond a certain point, he's basically a supervillain and you have to start wondering why he ever resorted to anything as trivial as serial murder in the first place. The Reveal that he is Sheriff McCallister only raised further issues, as many clues that were dropped about Red John turn out to be irrelevant (his height, for instance — the actor in question is taller than Red John was stated to be). Practically all of the clues that pointed to him were only dropped in the sixth season, the one he was revealed in; most ones from previous seasons were never mentioned again.
• 24:
  • This was an unfortunate side-effect of the 24-hour format. The producers often had to write storylines in advance, and would often resort to filler or sidestories to kill time until the next important revelation. Likewise, the villains almost always changed midway through the season, which often threw out the carefully-set-up goals and motivations for the enemies and often resulted in The Man Behind the Man being revealed and fans getting tired of it, even if it made no sense in the long run.
  • Done by necessity in Season 1. The production team had no idea if they would be renewed for the back half of the season, so they closed off the storyline by having Jack rescue his wife and daughter in the thirteenth episode and all plots being tied up. When Kiefer Sutherland won a Best Actor Golden Globe and the show was suddenly renewed thanks to the hype, the producers suddenly had to throw in a number of ridiculous plotlines (including a heretofore-unrevealed second assassin showing up who is having a relationship with one of his target's staff members, Jack butting heads with a sniper who hates him for something he did in the past, the Stunt Casting of Dennis Hopper, Teri's Easy Amnesia, Kim getting kidnapped again and the Ass Pull that Nina was the mole in CTU).
  • The eventual resolution of the three-season arc that began with the assassinations in Season 5, made of equal parts Gambit Pileup and Ass Pull. It is revealed that the businessman Alan Wilson- a character introduced near the end of season 7 and defeated within a handful of episodes- is the ultimate enemy overseeing a chain that passes down from himself, controlling a cabal that includes Jonas Hodges (who was working with Benjamin Juma to overthrow the White House), controlling another group led by Jack's brother Graem (being controlled by his father, who is working with the Chinese government), who is advising President Evil Charles Logan (which was itself caused by one of the writers asking midway through the fifth season, "Hey, what if the President was evil?) and finally to the group of assassins that murdered David Palmer and Michelle Dessler. The failure of season 6 (and the stalling plot arc that was created by this mess) is what forced the show to undergo a Retool and move to the other side of the country in order to get things moving and resolve it. Even then, most fans weren't happy with the outcome — Wilson becomes a Karma Houdini who basically gets away scot-free with his crimes. While the show generally implied that someone was the ultimate Diabolical Mastermind behind these various villains and events, the character of Wilson was a complete Ass Pull as he was an entirely new bad guy who had an at-best tenuous connection to a handful of characters, before being very quickly captured and the whole arc being declared wrapped up afterwards. He never appears again on the show.
• A major factor in Revolution only lasting two seasons. Season one piled on the secrets and macguffins (Who killed the power, how did they do it and why? What are the pendants? Why can they restore power just like that) while answering very few questions. Season two simply ignored many of S1's questions while adding all-new questions (Sentient nanomachines?) and not answering those questions either.
• Under the Dome is one of the most extreme examples since the turn of the millennium. While the first season was reasonably coherent in its storytelling, the next two quickly turned into an utterly incomprehensible mess of dangling plot threads, introduced new Ass Pull twists in every other episode, almost never resolved anything, and even in the rare case some question was answered, the solution was usually far-fetched to the extreme while creating a whole bunch of new mysteries that never went anywhere. It's little wonder the series rapidly lost market shares and was cancelled after three seasons, although the final episodes did their damnedest to resolve the story in a satisfying way. Viewers are split on how well it managed to do that, but points for trying anyway.
• Arrowverse has this in spades, particularly Arrow and The Flash. What didn't help matters is the first seasons of both shows were focused on a very specific arc at the centre of the characters' motivation, the Undertaking conspiracy with Arrow, and who killed Nora Allen in Flash. Once those were resolved, the writers didn't really have any plans going forward, so they've largely just made shit up as they go along.
  • In Arrow's case, this started in the third season, first by killing off Sara Lance, the Canary, in order to create a subplot where they have to solve her murder and inspire her sister to follow in her footsteps, thus abandoning Sara's own arc (though this itself had already been abandoned when after half a season of You Are Better Than You Think You Are moments, she rejoins the League of Assassins and her 'happy ending' is going back to the cult that made her hate herself). Alongside this, Oliver's life is imploded by the League of Assassins...except they didn't really know why the League of Assassins wanted to mess with him, going from 'it's his fault Sara died', 'he's protecting Malcolm', and 'they want Ollie to be Ra's heir'. In the end, they also reveal that the League of Assassins will wipe out the city, in order to erase Oliver's history, which completely flies against their beef with Malcolm since the whole entire reason they had for wanting him dead was he tried to destroy the City, and this was 'against their code'.
    • Season 4 was no better in this regard, and it's made worse since it deals with several building myth arcs concerning Hive, Damien Darhk, and Andy Diggle. Adding to matters, the viewer finds out one member of Team Arrow is going to die, but the identity of who is a mystery to the viewer, and also the writers because they later admitted they didn't have anyone actually planned. Several other subplots are set up and never resolved, while the grave plot is resolved by killing off Laurel Lance, with the writers citing the fact her story was 'done', despite her character having literally just been set up with a power boost, a potential new status quo of working for the mayor's office to infiltrate Darhk's operation, the fact she'd begun to realise she was still in love with Oliver, and being the team's most personal connection to Nyssa Al Ghul, meaning so much set up for her character goes nowhere. A lot of viewers gave up on the show after this point, and it continued to bleed viewership as time went on.
    • The Black Canary mantle ends up being something of a character-specific example of this. Initially the role of the Black Canary is Sara Lance, who as noted above was set up as someone who hated herself and wanted to escape an assassin cult. After most of a season of her learning to love herself and that she's more than just a killer, she's sent off back to the assassin cult. When she returns, she's killed off so her sister Laurel can take over. Laurel spends a season building up to becoming the Black Canary and improving, is set up with several building sub-plots, then killed off. Her death leaves a void and they decide to try and fill it with a new Black Canary, and introduce a metahuman police officer to fill that void, though then she later gets depowered in order to make way for an alternate universe Laurel who until that point had been a remorseless killer who now suddenly doesn't like being a killer. Ultimately the mantle is just a series of characters whose plots are cut off so they can be replaced, leading to a long, convoluted legacy.
  • The Flash started this with Zoom. Zoom's exact motivation is never consistent between episodes, with him initially seemingly wanting to kill Barry simply to have no challenger to the Fastest Man Alive title, then revealing he actually wanted to make Barry faster so he could drain his speed. This turns out to be because Zoom destroyed his body with a speed-enhancing drug that he's dying from, and needs Barry's speed to fix himself, but when he gets that speed he then decides that his actual plan was to take over their earth 'like he did Earth 2' (despite what we see showing he was just a gang leader who terrorised one city, that was still in good enough condition that its police force were actively fighting back). Only then it turns out he was actually planning to destroy the multiverse and leave Earth 1 to torment, which he was somehow now smart enough to do. The repeated changes to his motivation and powers led to plots coming and going out of nowhere, while also having other subplots, like the introduction of Wally West and Jesse Quick, being dragged out so their characters' hero origin get delayed.
    • Savitar in the next season was even worse, as exactly who and what Savitar is gets dragged on for the entire season without explaining what it is Savitar even wants. Meanwhile Wally and Jesse get their powers, but the show does what it can to avoid letting them rise as heroes in order to keep Barry relevant, introduces new Rogues who are never developed or made real use of, and has Caitlin develop ice powers and make her begin to become Killer Frost, but it never explained why her developing powers is exactly a bad thing, with her changing her mind between being murderously desperate to remove her powers to being murderously desperate to remain empowered, with a split personality later developing in a poor attempt to explain that. This continues into future seasons with the exact origin of Killer Frost getting rebooted multiple times, while subsequent big-bads continue the trend of having mysterious plans that are never revealed, only to be suddenly changed out of nowhere when they do.
• Insu, the Queen Mother: A common complaint is that the series is so damn long (sixty episodes with a runtime of 50+ minutes each!), the episodes are so slow-moving (one Viki commenter pointed out it's more like a history lecture than a series), and there are so many characters and subplots that only the most determined viewers will persevere to the end.

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