Listen to Kenny Rogers, storytellers.

[mrissa]

Know when to walk away. Know when to run.

I am a big fan of the TV show The Good Wife, and by “a big fan” I mean “a person who is behind by a full season at this point,” but that doesn’t make my enthusiasm less strong, it just means that I am physically incapable of watching broadcast and, eh, life. But I really do love this show. It’s one of the

Comments

[hobbitbabe]

I'm watching Season 7 in chunks about once a month. And, yes, it's time for them to finish. It is one of the very few shows which I found by myself, sampling premieres on a network website one autumn, and not reading anything about it or talking to my tv-connoisseur friends until I was already drawn in. (Flashpoint was another one like that - a Canadian police drama which was shown in the US as well).

In some ways it's realistic, showing people moving on and having troubles-but-different-troubles because they have changed and life has changed. But I think it must be really really hard to keep it the same kind of story, or a different kind of story equally compelling ... and that makes it a pretty good metaphor for middle age anyway.

[mrissa]

I love Flashpoint, but in some ways I'm glad that they're not dragging us through 12 seasons of Spike and Wordy getting increasingly stale. Much though Spike is THE BEST.

I think actually my complaint about Criminal Minds s10 is that they aren't having the same-but-different enough troubles. They're having more the rehash--and not kicking enough against the rehash. In middle age when people find themselves doing same-old, it frustrates them.

[mrissa]

PS Spike is not actually the best. He is only the best in Flashpoint.

[hobbitbabe]

Yes.

[sartorias]

I'll have to give Good Wife another try. I really liked the first couple seasons, but something in the third felt like retread city, and she began seeming more smug than determined.

[mrissa]

Oh yeah, I don't watch for Alicia. I watch for the characters not named Florick.

[sartorias]

I heard my favorite of all left the show, which I guess contributed.

[mrissa]

Knox Overstreet? Er, sorry, I mean Will Gardner? If so, that's true, but they handled it quite well.

[swan_tower]

And it is far better to be begged for more of your art than to be begged to stop.

Preach it.

As much as I feel for all the readers who are sad that I'm only writing five Memoirs, I would FAR rather wrap things up when people are still going "oh, but I want more!" than after they've wandered away. I have followed any number of series, in books or TV or movies, that were great for a while and then they weren't so great and then I was only in there because I wanted to see how the story ended but I'd really lost all attachment to how it got there. Sometimes they pull out of that death spiral (or at least pull up on it), but not always. I don't want to be the one at the helm of a ship like that, trying to figure out how to get the magic back. If I end a series and then later on go "wait, not really done," then that's fine; I'll do that, rather than hanging in there to see if I think up more stuff in time.

[mrissa]

Well, and think how much happier people are when there's more of something after decades. Giving it a good long think is sometimes even better.

[swan_tower]

I wrapped up the Onyx Court series where I did because I knew that, while I do still have more story to tell, it really needs some downtime before I attempt to tell it. I may get back there someday; I may not. We'll see. But nobody would have been well-served by me trying to crank it out right then.

I have also found myself pondering the comparison between this and series that go downhill because their writer went off in a direction the audience didn't care about. As a gut instinct thing, I feel like I can tell the difference between those two failure modes . . . but of course I am not a mind reader. So I don't really know whether the story got bad because the writer was desperately grasping for new material, or got excited about the "wrong" things.

[mrissa]

Mm. Well, and.

I think it's possible to overthink what the audience will and won't care about. I have heard one of the most august authors of a previous generation talk about how they "can't" tell the stories they want to tell because "nobody" wants to hear them, and the panel audience they were talking to moaned in frustration.

So it's a tough balance to strike. I would rather have had that person write what they were excited about, and in general I incline toward excited as a motivator.

And the counterexample seems to be "but what if the author gets excited about their characters picking out furniture," and I hold up the latest few atevi books to say: okay, I'm down with that, if you do it right.

[klwilliams]

It's also very telling that the Criminal Minds women appear on the far edge of the opening credits cast shot, and only after the four men appear together. What an excellent example of making characters second class.

[mrissa]

I wish I could say, oh, Karen, you're overinterpreting, that doesn't mean anything, it's an accident. But the way they've replaced Elle, Em, N, and O and tried to get rid of JJ--the way they didn't even want to recognize Garcia as a major character for the first season...well. Eloquent, isn't it.

[jenfullmoon]

I started watching the show because a friend of mine used to live in SoCal and she met some dude who was a friend of the actress who played Garcia IRL. Never met her, but it was twue wuv for her and me (both nerd girls) seeing Garcia on that show. I still really like the cast of it--Reid's nerdery is also adorable and I like everyone else too.

However, I will admit that the last few seasons have felt like they ran out of creepy serial killers and had to progressively make up worse and worse crap (like that episode with the human puppets), and the actual gore is harder and harder to watch. At this point I'm mostly on "watch it on Netflix and hit fast forward on the really creepy shit" mode, though I have caught the occasional episode this season and coincidentally, the ones I saw weren't bad. I like Aisha Tyler and I did enjoy the one where Reid and Audrey Plaza were squaring off. But since that stuff is kinda few and far between...that's why I don't watch too often any more.

[mrissa]

I am in late S10 because I'm watching on Netflix, and I really liked it that they gave Greg Hotchner a really embittered father-in-law who had never forgiven him for the death of Hotch's wife and now had Alzheimer's. And was not having any with Hotch's calm psychobabble speak. That was one of my favorite developments in a long time. I mean, it was horrible, but it was the kind of horrible they should do.