My Five Year Rule

Blog Post #2

Originally published: July 7, 2006 6:52 PM




I totally, totally, totally agree with this paragraph:

Lost producer Damon Lindelof states "We'd love to end the show after four years, five years tops and do a movie." Obviously, they're trying to avoid the The X Files fiasco in which a cool concept went downhill after its big screen debut and overstayed its welcome by three years or so."

Personally I don't think ANY show should be on more than five years...six tops. Every show, no matter how great it is, just runs out of steam around that time and becomes irrelevant. I truly hope they stick by this and don't succumb to network pressure to do another year and then another year and so forth.

Case in point Friends which ran nine seasons, was to end after about season seven, but NBC wanted more years and even gave each of the six stars one million dollars an episode to continue. The Cool Black Calculator--$1 Million X 24 episodes X 6 actors= $144 Million for the actors alone. Not to mention the other production costs.

Think about it. Can you think of ANY show that was really good after five years? And I'm talking about once a show hits its stride which some shows don't do until their second or third season.

I understand that the networks are a business and they are in it for the money, but when they demand more seasons on a show for purely financial reasons, the creative process suffers and ultimately it's the audience that loses.