Expired: why shows shouldn’t push past their due date

By NATALIE LARIMER

We are all far too familiar with overextended shows that should have ended seasons before they finally stopped. For some shows, there is usually one episode that we can point to that should have been the last one (I’m referring to The Office: Season 6 Episode 14 should have been their last).

For others, there isn’t a definite stopping point, but the show definitely should have ended earlier than it did. Some are still chugging along (*cough* Supernatural *cough*) while others took the hint and got off air, like Friends did.

So, I’m going to take a look at some shows, both on air and off, and see if we can teach a lesson to showrunners in the future.

By far the most overextended show of all time has got to be Supernatural. It just got renewed for a fifteenth season.

That should be illegal. I watched it when I was in middle and high school (I was young and naïve, what can I say?) and then somewhere around the sixth or seventh season I decided to call it quits.

Why? Because any show where the protagonists keep dying and are then brought back to life should never run. There isn’t a plot anymore, and at best it is a glorified soap opera. To be frank, Supernatural should have ended after the fifth season like it was intended to in the first place.

Now, clearly, I have some pent-up anger about Supernatural, so to be fair, I’m going to analyze a show near and dear to my heart, Brooklyn Nine-Nine (B99).

As you may know, B99 got cancelled after the fifth season by Fox but was immediately picked up by NBC. The sixth season has been airing this year, and while I am thoroughly enjoying the episodes, I just can’t feel the normal B99 plot development anymore.

It feels like they are all filler episodes to set up for the next season, which they just got renewed for. I think the writers just need to work out how to get the same amount of content in as they did before, and to stop trying to make the show different from before just because they can. Same characters, same writers, same everything but network, and something is just off.

As I mentioned before, The Office has a clear episode in which it should have ended, and that was Season 6 Episode 14, The Banker, where a banker comes in and talks to Toby in HR to see if the company is in good shape for the buyer of Dunder Mifflin.

What makes this a perfect last episode is how they used old clips to make us nostalgic while also giving us closure during the sale process of the company. What The Office did wrong was continuing. As soon as Steve Carell left, it quickly and swiftly killed the show.

By no means am I calling myself an expert, and of course, I only picked shows that I am super familiar with and since I’m a really standard issue person, they’re really mainstream shows.

I can bet there are tons of excellent shows that just nosedived after a certain decision made in the writer’s room, like the decision made in the last ten minutes of How I Met Your Mother.

Hit me up on Twitter with the worst endings to your favorite shows ever and I’ll try and watch them so I can share your pain (@nat_larimer).