Discussion ToughActToFollow / LiveActionTV

Chainsawing the following for inconsistency/not fitting the definition:

• There's the infamous "Seinfeld Curse" that allegedly prevents any of Seinfeld's four main cast members from achieving future success:
  • Jason Alexander had two failed sitcoms, Listen Up and Bob Patterson. Despite this, he has continued to have a successful career on stage since the 1980s.
  • A bigger victim is Michael Richards (Kramer), who basically retired from acting after The Michael Richards Show failed to catch on in 2000 because the main character was turned into a cheap Kramer clone thanks to Executive Meddling and Richards almost completely destroyed his reputation in 2006 when he hurled racial slurs at a heckler during his stand-up act. In the 12 years since The Michael Richards Show, Richards has only returned to acting for a voice part in the Jerry Seinfeld written Bee Movie and an appearance as himself on co-creator Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm.
  • With Julia Louis-Dreyfus having won a total of 4 Emmys in the 15+ years since Seinfeld's conclusion on two different shows that have each lasted for multiple seasons—not to mention headlining Nicole Holofcener's well-received film Enough Said opposite James Gandolfini—it's agreed upon that Julia more than shattered the curse.
  • Jerry Seinfeld himself largely sidestepped this, returning to stand-up and only doing the occasional one-off voice acting job.
  • Co-creator Larry David subverted this when his film Sour Grapes bombed critically and commercially but his second series Curb Your Enthusiasm became a hit in its own right.

If the examples admit that more than half of the listed entries have either not experienced or done just as well as the original work, it's not really a "curse", is it?

And I'm loathe to call this trope "subverted", when literally any show that is just as popular/well-regarded as the original work (thereby avoiding a Sophomore Slump, which is a common thing) would fall into this.

• A similar fate has affected the actors of Friends after the show ended:
  • The female actors have got it good: Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox have to this day successful careers on Hollywood and TV respectively, with Lisa Kudrow having more limited success.
  • Of the male actors, only David Schwimmer had any success for more than ten years following the series finale (and that for voicing a talking giraffe), Matthew Perry had a string of failed shows (Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Mr Sunshine and Go On), and Matt Le Blanc retired from acting after the spin-off Joey (mainly to concentrate on his daughter).
  • This was until LeBlanc got a hit with Episodes, in which he was thrice nominated for an Emmy award. Later on, Perry and Schwimmer got hits of their own (the 2015 version of The Odd Couple and American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson respectively). LeBlanc then scored another hit when he was tapped as co-presenter on Top Gear after the departure of the three original presenters and will become the main presenter of the next series after the departure of Chris Evans.

Same goes for this. The entries suggest it's a "curse", then admit that it hasn't really affected any of the actresses, and the actors (while some had failures) either returned to form quickly or voluntarily left the industry. Nowhere near universal enough to consider it a "curse".

• Jenji Kohan, creator of Weeds, subverted this big time. Her next series was the Netflix prison dramedy Orange Is the New Black, which became much more popular than Weeds ever was with both critics and audiences. Time will tell if she falls into this trope for that series.

Not a subversion if someone creates a work that's just as popular as their previous show. That happens all the time.

• Dan Schneider has made some of Nickelodeon's most well-known and popular successes, like Drake & Josh, Zoey 101 and iCarly. His 2010 creation, Victorious, on the other hand, has been panned by quite a few fans of the former works—especially iCarly considering the shows ran alongside each other for a while—for not being what they were. The fact that the show was constantly promoted by the iCarly cast doesn't help either. While most fans of Dan's past work liked it, even part of those fans felt that the second season was significantly lower quality than the first, but the third season rattled the line between being better than ever and even worse. The show ultimately met its untimely end after the third season's filming. The show did win Favorite TV Show at the 2013 Kids Choice Awards, however, which was the second year in running, so it didn't end on a completely bad note.
• Sam & Cat, which is what Victorious was reportedly canned for, has been received worse than the former. It did win at the 2014 Kids' Choice Awards, which made sense being it was the only Nick show nominated compared to the Victorious/iCarly wars of years' past, and was riding on Ariana Grande's huge popularity.

Example can't decide if the work was better-received or not by its viewing audience, but it seems to be leaning towards the former. Should be reworked.

• The Oprah Winfrey Show enjoyed reverence, and ended partly because Oprah felt that she couldn't top herself. However, Oprah's television network is struggling.

Needs additional clarification. Was the writer trying to compare the performance of a single show to that of an entire network? If that's the case, it's likely fairer to compare her show with the primetime specials she's created after the fact, which have largely been ratings juggernauts.

• Brit comedian Tony Hancock apparently sunk into a deep depression after his famous Blood Donor sketch. Most people couldn't understand why this could be, given how brilliant the sketch had been, but it was apparently because Hancock believed he would never ever top it.
  • It didn't help that he'd been the passenger in a car involved in a road traffic accident that same week. The reminder of his mortality seems to have had a very bad effect on him, in particular, it probably contributed to his decision to split from writers Galton & Simpson, which in retrospect is recognised as a bad move.

If the example admits that real-life circumstances may have influenced the creator's decision (particularly when it's speculative over whether the creator may have been mentally affected and thus didn't want to create further), it's not an example of this. TATF is when something is seen by the public as largely being inferior/not as good as the work that preceded it. Speculative rationalization over the creator's mental state and them choosing/not choosing to do something is not this.

• Joss Whedon was gold when it came to TV series in the '90s and 2000s. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a cultural phenomenon and its spin-off Angel lasted five seasons. Firefly was prematurely cancelled due to getting Screwed by the Network and developed a strong enough fanbase to get a concluding movie released as Serenity. His next project, also on the same network that cancelled Firefly, was Dollhouse. That one was incredibly divisive and met with lukewarm reactions. Five seasons were planned but it was cancelled after only two, and there are very few fans calling for continuations or spin-offs like the former three.

Is this actually an example of this, or just stealth whining considering that Whedon moved to a very lucrative film career running stuff like The Avengers and its sequel? And even within that context, Dollhouse has its fans, and managed to run twice as long as its predecessor.

• Star Trek: The Next Generation managed to step out of the shadow of its parent series, though not without birthing pains. George Takei once compared the cast to "young children putting on their parents' clothes and trying to act like grown-ups." It took roughly two years for the show to find its footing and differentiate itself from TOS. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine managed to forge its own path at around the time TNG concluded. However, Voyager and Enterprise are typically overshadowed by comparison, mostly due to producers recycling scripts from TNG's heyday.
  Darren Mooney: While Deep Space Nine would end up an evolutionary dead-end for the franchise, the seven seasons of Voyager and the first two seasons of Star Trek: Enterprise would find the franchise trapped within a phantom version of 1994 that seemed to last forever.
  • Paradoxically, the premise of ENT was too big of a shift from past Star Trek shows. Enterprise found itself more often than not in a kill-or-be-killed struggle with a hostile alien species, and it seems this drove away many stalwart Trek fans. The only characters that didn't seem to have Multiple Personality Disorder were T'Pol and Phlox, and between them, only Phlox had serious acting chops. The Xindi arc had no payoff. After the detached episodes of seasons 1 and 2, and the constipated story in season 3, the fourth season was a second pilot in all but name; all those course corrections and retcons resulted in a fairly shallow adventure, in which Crewman Daniels does all the heavy lifting while Captain Archer and company never quite have a handle on what's going on.

Between the complaining about Enterprise and the inconsistency about exactly when/if the franchise lost the luster from its glory days, this sounds more like Seasonal Rot than TATF (particularly when the example admits that TNG is just as well-regarded (if not moreso) than the original series. Likewise, the example doesn't give a reason for why Voyager is this besides saying it recycled scripts from the former series (which doesn't explain anything). May need to be reworked.

• Hitfix contributors Drew McWeeny and Roth Cornet posit in this video that Game of Thrones is doing this for all of High Fantasy as a genre. The series' success at creating a fully realized, detailed world means that a lot of viewers will compare any fantasy movie they see to it. Additionally, Game of Thrones' high budget means that now budget is no longer an issue when comparing TV to film. Even though it's still on the air, many people also think that the show will also cast a shadow over the likes of HBO as a whole, showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, author George R.R. Martin, and all of the actors involved.

As Benioff and Weiss haven't actually produced anything since GOT ended, and the full impact of its final season not fully being known/understood yet, it's probably better to give this some and a later rewrite.

• This also applies to its actors as well, most notably Bryan Cranston. After an appearance in Godzilla, he went back to drama. His 2015 film Trumbo got good reviews and earned Cranston his first Oscar nomination, but was not hugely successful, if solely because of Walter White's shadow looming above him.

Besides being film-specific, Trumbo was designed as a limited-release film (had a budget of $10 million, was released for the festival circuit and limited-release afterwards and made about $14 million), and even if it were applicable to this page, I haven't found any information that suggests that the perception of the Walter White character and Cranston's performance is to blame for the film's performance.