Into the Crevasse: When Good Shows Go Bad

There are three things that make a good television show: plot, characters, and time. The plot must be engaging and make the audience believe in what happens. The characters must be distinct and change over time. The show needs enough time to develop, but not too much that it eventually drags the show…into the crevasse.

A great case study is CBS’s How I Met Your Mother. When the show began in 2005, both the plot and characters were interesting and unique. Ted, the main character, reconstructs the story of how he met his wife (and many other women) to his children in the year 2029. His stories nearly always include his four closest friends: Marshall and Lily, his best friends from college, Barney, an insecure womanizer, and Robin, his ex-girlfriend and eventual roommate. The audience has the pleasure of watching these characters interact and develop—until the fourth season.

After Ted is left at the altar in season four, his character loses his trademark optimism about love and romance which he never rediscovers. Marshall and Lily turn into a very typical married sitcom couple, their personalities turning into a personality. Robin becomes less and less of an independent woman and increasingly ditzy.  The only exception is Barney, who has been carrying the show with his patriarchal pursuits (his search and discovery of his father and his revelations of wanting a family of his own).

As the character arches decline, so does the plot. Ted’s search for his wife ceases to be a focal point and the show becomes comprised of sub-par quips that are irrelevant to the show’s premise.

How could this happen? The final factor: time. A good television show not only has a vision of how the plot will unfold, it has a timeline. This is where many once promising shows go bad. In the case of How I Met Your Mother, it has simply gone on for too long. The demand for more has outweighed the material the show had prepared, enabling the writing to go off on tangents and create extraneous subplots. At this point, does anyone even care who the mother is? I sure don’t.

It is always a shame to watch honestly good shows become too big for their own plots. That is not to say that it is impossible to turn around and climb out of the crevasse (30 Rock mentioned a latter), but once inside it’s difficult to come back. With a season and a half to go (let’s hope it stops after season eight), How I Met Your Mother has some wiggle room to get back to its roots, but as stated previously, only time will tell.