Why I Don't Like TV

I don't like TV.  Yeah, I watch some once in a while.  There are a few shows I enjoy.  I watch anime sometimes, and there are some animes I enjoy.  I have noticed, though, that I tend to get bored of a show or anime after a while.  I started watching Warehouse 13 some years ago, and I really enjoyed it.  I got most of the way through season 3 before I sort of burned out.  I enjoyed Heroes through the first season, but I just couldn't get into the second season.  One of the first animes I watched was Rurouni Kenshin.  It is a very good anime, but eventually I just ran out of steam.   I just finished the second season of Stranger Things.  I'll probably watch the third when it comes out, but I feel less motivation to watch the third than I felt for the second when I finished the first season.  There are some shows I have watched where this does not happen.  Most of them are anime.  The unique thing is that they are all also short.  Some are just a series with five to ten episodes.  Some have a few seasons, but not more than three.  I never get bored of these, and I can ever rewatch them without feeling like things are getting old.  I don't like TV.  I don't watch it much.  When I do like a show, I find I prefer ones that resolve and end within only a few seasons or less.

Let's talk about video games briefly.  Video games are starting to have some of the same problems that TV does.  I read an article a few months ago that pointed out that in nearly all video games with sequels, the hero is actually fighting a losing battle.  The Diablo series is a great example.  In the first game, Diablo has just entered the material world.  He is hiding beneath a small town.  He orchestrated the murder of a bunch of the residents of the town, and there are not a lot of people left.  For the most part though, things have settled down.  The people are grieving their lost friends and family, a witch moved into a shack on the outskirts, but she is only helpful and sympathetic.  Diablo and his minions are all contained below ground.  The hero delves into the caves beneath the old church, slaying Diablo's minions and growing in power until he ultimately kills Diablo.  Diablo's soul is inexplicably contained in a crystal, that the hero even more inexplicably shoves into his forehead.  Diablo is contained, but everything is fine, until...  Enter Diablo 2.  More demons have entered the world, and now they are not content to stay below ground.  They have killed a ton of people, and they are now occupying some critical points in the world.  The old hero is missing, and the player now plays a new hero that basically starts over from scratch.  As the hero progresses through the various acts, he finds himself chasing just behind the "wanderer" who is the original hero in disguise.  It turns out the original hero is now fighting a battle of the wills against Diablo, who is trying to escape the crystal to take over the hero's body.  And, Diablo ultimately succeeds.  So, the hero of the original game actually loses in Diablo 2.  In the main game, the new hero goes on to kill Diablo, after taking down a bunch of other demons.  Then comes the expansion.  The expansion adds one more boss.  This boss corrupts the stone that is the foundation of the world, and the game ends when the stone is destroyed by an angel to protect the world.  By the end of Diablo 2, the original hero has been corrupted and possessed by Diablo, and then killed by the new hero, and the world is left without its foundation.  At least all the major demons are gone, right?  Nope.  Then comes Diablo 3.  Diablo 3 raises the stakes again.  The relationship with the second hero is unclear, but what is clear is that despite the second hero killing all of the demons, things are somehow still getting worse.  A new town has been built near the old one from the original game, but it is now set upon by undead.  Many people have died trying to save the farmers living outside the town.  Like Diablo 2, the third hero progresses from place to place, trying to save the people and the world from stuff that is even worse than the stuff in Diablo 2.  Things have clearly not gotten better.  The destruction of the World Stone has had catastrophic consequences, and the world has gotten far worse.  The game culminates with the resurrection of Diablo (in a soul crushing scene, where Diablo takes over the body of a character the player has come to love), and the third hero has to kill him yet again, but not before Diablo almost destroys heaven itself.  Oh, and I forgot to mention, it turns out most of the angels either dislike or actively hate humans.  And that leads me to the expansion, where one of those angels turns bad and becomes a bigger threat to the world than Diablo ever was (much like the demon in the expansion to Diablo 2...).  Many more people killed, another city in flames, and the third hero eventually takes the guy down, but not before there are piles and piles of bodies.  In short, Diablo is not a story about a hero overcoming evil.  It is a story about a world being brought to its knees by evil, despite the best efforts of three extremely powerful heroes.

Alright, back to TV.  Let's talk about Superman.  Superman is the story of a guy who is always one step behind the bad guys.  He falls into every trap they set, and barely manages to escape, over and over and over and over...  Batman is about a guy who is trying to save a city that is a lost cause.  Every time he takes down a major criminal, he just makes room for another one, and the police department is too inept to keep them from escaping, which means crime just gets worse and worse until the whole city is a battle ground for major criminals, where Batman occasionally gets in their way.  Heroes was really bad.  The Heroes ultimately catch one bad guy in season one, while the one bad guy kills off a lot of very powerful heroes.  I mean, yeah, the heroes get the guy in the end, but if you tally up the losses for each side, it is very clear the heroes are not the winners.  And it goes on.  Rurouni Kenshin fights progressively bigger and badder criminals and crime syndicates, who terrorize the town or some of its citizens for most of each season.  I watched The Flash with my wife recently, and it is more of the same.  Everyone is happy, and then you get this hero.  And now all sorts of criminals are coming out of the woodwork, terrorizing the town to try to take the hero out.  Every time the hero overcomes a challenge a new one pops up that does way more damage than the previous ones, and half the time the new enemy was created in the process of taking down the previous one.  Take a look at Star City in the first season of Arrow.  It is not perfect, but it is this fairly nice place.  A few seasons later, it is this dark, smog filled city with a huge welt where part of the city was destroyed and never repaired, and things don't get better.  Each episode and each season can end with a triumph, but things are always worse at the end then they were are the beginning.  The fact is the heroes are not winning!  The individual bad guys might be losing, but evil is winning.

Now, the exceptions.  The exceptions are unique, because they end.  Because there is no "next season" coming, the story writers don't have to make things worse so that the hero will have something to fight.  The danger and destruction does not have to escalate with each season.  Steins;Gate is an excellent anime.  It is fairly short.  At first the show escalates, but as it nears its end, the world, which has gotten significantly worse, actually gets better, until everything is fixed.  Angel Beats is the same.  Things escalate to a climax, and then the situation resolves and it ends much better than it started.  In fact, there are a lot of short animes that are either a single short series or a few seasons, that follow this pattern.  Accel World even leaves the viewer hanging, but at the end things are much better than they were in the beginning, and one can imagine things continuing to go on like that.  The Fate franchise is made up of a bunch of separate series like this.  I find these shows immensely satisfying, because the good guys actually win, and the world is a better place when they end.  Most shows are not like that.  They are season after season of the hero winning the battles but losing the war.  Sometimes I feel like sitcoms are better than some of these more action oriented shows, because at least each season does not leave the world in worse shambles than the last (unfortunately, sitcoms have their own problems, for example their plots and the writing in general tends to go downhill fairly quickly after the first season or two).

Anyhow, I would like to see more complete story shows.  After a few seasons, the drama of these long term shows just starts to get to me.  I don't like stories that go on forever where the hero is losing the war.  I understand that if the show is to go on, the hero needs something to fight, but that's the thing.  The show doesn't have to go on.  Imagine a world where most shows end after 4 seasons, making room for something new.  Admittedly, I would miss things like the old Doctor Who.  There are some shows, mostly older ones, that manage to go on for season after season without this sense of constant loss and regression, but most fail.  If we had more shorter series, there would be far more interesting shows to watch, and hopefully the limited length would encourage writers to focus more on quality.  In general, TV would be better this way.