Should Long TV Shows Stop Raising Their Stakes?

I’m relatively new to the idea of comfort shows. When I was younger, I never really watched anything over and over. Usually it was music that accompanied me endlessly. I definitely had several comfort albums for any given situation.

In recent years, my comfort show has become whatever I happen to be watching when I need comfort. Since I tend to end up on the couch a couple of days every month dealing with horrible cramps, it helps to have something I can turn to that’s comfortable and familiar. Especially if it doesn’t require a lot of effort to get into.

Lately, my comfort shows have been crime shows. I can’t say exactly why, but there is something about them that tends to draw me. Possibly the fact that they all follow pretty much the same formula so I know what to expect. And on days when I don’t feel well, I can simply turn off my brain and allow them to wash over me.

My journey started with Castle. I picked that one because my grandmother liked it. And after she died, it seemed like a way to connect with her retroactively. From there I moved on to Criminal Minds, another name I was familiar with. Then I moved on to shows like Lucifer and Bones.

Each show drew and held my attention for different reasons. But at the end of the day they all have something in common that has nothing to do with the fact that they’re crime shows.

They all hit a point where they stopped being the comfy, cozy show I was looking forward to and started to frustrate me.

Nothing Stays the Same

As a writer, I’m no stranger to the raising of stakes. The longer a story goes on, the more the tension needs to ramp up. And in order for that tension to feel real and be taken seriously, sometimes there has to be serious consequences for the situations your characters face.

This is simply how storytelling works.

So I, in theory, understand that the longer a TV show goes on, the more radical the plots are going to become. What starts out as a weekly problem to be solved eventually becomes a personal crisis for the main characters. In Castle, this started as a background story that the characters would revisit every now and then to remind the audience that there was a consistent thread running through the show.

But it eventually it became a conspiracy theory so convoluted, my brain had to do backflips just to accept it.

Lucifer hit upon this same problem somewhere in its third season. In an attempt to ratchet up the tension between the two main love interests, the writers introduced a side character that the female MC agreed to marry pretty much out of nowhere to solve a problem that really didn’t warrant that kind of drama.

The show even lampshaded the fact that it had grown stupidly complicated by having Lucifer make a comment along the lines of, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just go back to when everything was just the normal solving of crimes?”

(My answer was yes, by the way.)

I stuck with Lucifer and it got better in its fourth season. Only to completely dive off the rails again in its final season. But it highlights my ultimate feelings about the tendency of long-running TV shows to endlessly ramp up.

I really wish they wouldn’t.

How Much is Too Much?

One of my most recent comfort shows is still ongoing. It is 911, a show about a group of first responders in LA. The show spawned a spinoff, 911 Lonestar, which has come to an end. There is also another in-universe kind of spinoff called Doctor Odyssey, which is basically 911 on a cruise ship.

I like 911 because it started out as being mostly about our dedicated group of first responders attempting to assist people with problems they couldn’t otherwise handle on their own. Most of the early emergencies were car accidents but there was also the occasional fire and other accident that you could imagine potentially happening in the real world.

Most of the time the danger was to the people they were attempting to save. Only during the big season finales and openers did the danger apply directly to our heroes.

But time changes all things. It’s obvious that the writers feel like, in order for the show to continue to have impact, the first responders need to be in near constant danger of dying.

I happen to disagree. Especially since, in order to ramp up the tension, the plot lines have become increasingly difficult to take seriously or believe as plausible. The little details the show seemed so keen on in the early days get pushed to the background in order to accommodate the outcome the writers are hoping for.

You might say that the show has strayed from its mission statement. Or changed its mission statement to match the drama it wants to produce.

But this isn’t what I signed up for. I wouldn’t necessarily call the initial seasons of the show entirely cozy. Yet I wish I could go back and recapture that cozier version of the show because I liked it more.

Do We Always Need More?

In recent years, cozy has become sort of its own genre. I’ve noticed a lot of novels even label themselves as low stakes now in their descriptions. Because sometimes you don’t want your favorite character to be in near-constant peril. Sometimes you just want to check in on what’s going on in their life and see what they do when their life isn’t on the line.

I talk a lot about story crafting on this blog. And it’s true that every story needs action and tension in order to hold the reader’s attention. But a lot of people mistake the need for action as action movie action. As in, if things aren’t exploding it’s not interesting enough.

I recently started watching Gilmore Girls. There are no gasoline explosions in that show. Just emotional explosions. That kind of action is okay too. In fact, sometimes people prefer it.

This tendency of my comfort crime shows to warp into unbelievable territory is probably an argument in favor of the fact that all things should eventually end. If the story you’re writing has to be so ridiculous that you’re ignoring real world science in order to sell it (I’m looking at you Criminal Minds), then you probably should take a step back.

But maybe in the case of serial stories like crime shows, the show doesn’t need to end. Maybe it just needs to go back to roots, remember its original intention, and recapture what it was at the start. After all, why would I be disappointed to watch the show I originally signed up to watch?

Am I going to stop watching some of these shows because they’ve strayed from the aspects I enjoyed about them? Probably not. At least not as long as they continue to entertain me on some level. But that won’t stop me from wishing they’d go back to their glory days.