urbanriot Mind you, I wouldn’t have debated you if you had written “I don’t think many shows today can maintain consistent quality beyond 4 seasons or so” and i’d agree with that, primarily because of the issue that plagues Rick & Morty - original showrunner ousted, guest writer of the week, etc.. It’s all showbiz BS these days.
That’s not exactly what I meant. To me Rick and Morty isn’t really a pure Sci-fi show. Most of its plots and a lot of its jokes play off popular movies (usually sci-fi) and tropes.
For example, they did an episode a couple seasons back that sort of mocked the typical heist plot line (“Rick Sanchez you of a bitch, I’m in”). So that movie trope is done. They’ve done a lot of those. They can’t repeat it. Eventually, you’re going to run out of content, or start playing off really obscure stuff.
urbanriot Edit: It’s funny, thinking more about this, not only did shows ‘back in the old days’ go for 7 - 8 seasons, they also had like 20 episodes per season. These days shows can barely manage 4 seasons of 10 episodes per season.
The 20+ episodes a year was very often a complaint. Too many episodes to write, too much filler. For example, the writer’s of Lost really hated that.
As for comedy, you think of a lot of sit-coms that went for 5+ years, and a lot of them were pretty bad, especially when you revisit them. Lazy jokes, and relying on catch-phrases. Nostalgia fill in a lot of the gaps there.
As for the sci-fi shows, I can’t really say. I didn’t watch too many. I would suspect a lot of them had a lot of weak episodes, and a few standouts that made up for it. And for shows that told a continually story, I would think that carrying an interesting plot over a series of episodes helps fill in the quality gaps.
But, I do think that the amount of content we have now plays a part. Just making up numbers to illustrate the point, but if you’ve only got 10-20 TV shows those writing jobs are going to go to the best writers. Now you’ve got hundreds of shows, there just isn’t going to be enough high end talent for all those jobs (similar arguments are made for various professional sports leagues constantly expanding).