The perverse incentives of TV shows

Nodus Tollens:

n. the realisation that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore—that although you thought you were following the arc of the story, you keep finding yourself immersed in passages you don’t understand, that don’t even seem to belong in the same genre…

Many great TV shows go downhill. They reach that state of “Nodus Tollens”. Depending on how willing you are to invest in such things, this can feel anywhere from annoying to depressing; at times, even a betrayal. There is something cruel about causing an audience to care and taking that for granted. For better or worse, we entwine a part of our emotional lives with the characters in stories, we ride alongside them vicariously and grasp them as conduits for inspiration, escape, and many things in between.

By this point we’ve all been burned by shows we love descending rapidly in quality. The reason for this is fairly obvious: the incentive structure for a successful show is for it to continue. But how can we solve this problem? Writing, directing, acting, sound engineering, editing… these aren’t jobs where regular work is a given. If you latch onto a good thing you want it to last. If you’re an actor in your first hit role, or a writer finally finding your way to a story that captivates audiences, letting that go is hard. It’s not just hard in fact, it’s financially undesirable too. The networks or platforms hosting the show will feel exactly the same way. Dragging a show out is often still fundamentally profitable. Cynically leveraging the good will built up on foundations of compelling characters and meaningful storylines to offset the diminishing returns of each passing season is a tried and tested formula at this point.

The price of artistic integrity

I’ve been wondering whether there’s a way to reward people for stopping a show when it has reached the end of its natural narrative? Perhaps a residual payment for shows that stand the test of time? Maybe it could be more cultural, where a lack of artistic integrity is more stigmatised. Or, we could pay for TV shows like we pay for movies. Calculations could be made based on the average numbers of viewers a “good” show would get, and how much they’d need to make a profit, then the price of an individual episode (or season) could be calculated. If a show maintains its quality, then word of mouth and online reviews will draw people to it, and they can pay for it. You can pay for the entire season upfront, or go one episode at a time if you’re in doubt. As you can see, nothing seems practical. No incentive structure currently seems possible to fix this problem.

Possibly we could start more slowly. Imagine scrolling through Netflix shows and in addition to the description, number of seasons and reviews, it could also have a section that says: “most viewers recommend stopping after season X”. A while back my stepbrother told me I should watch a particular show and stop after season two. I followed his advice and it was great. Clearly the story of the show had come to its natural end. After season two, Netflix picked up the show and commissioned more seasons. I’m sure they’re excellent, I’ve heard they are worth watching, but to me it’s a two season story, that was the stop for my particular train.

My last post ended with an interactive question so I’ll do the same here: How would you fix this issue?