Riverdale, Jane the Virgin, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. I kind of want to doodle the CW's logo in my diary and draw hearts all around it all of the time.

I am rapidly getting tired of the CW's superhero shows, though. (Or at least Arrow and the Flash, which are the only ones I watch.) I feel like they've gotten themselves into a rut that they don't care to get out of, which is a damn shame, since they started so well.

Riverdale is totally my main squeeze, though. And next season it might belong in this thread, because I read something that said the show would be introducing "supernatural elements" (though I have no idea what that would look like).

iZombie is back Tuesday!

I'm wondering if shows have a limited lifetime for being interesting - if they run for a while and then the writers run out of ideas or decide they have to do something "original" or "serious" and totally change the dynamic of it.

I'm wondering if shows have a limited lifetime for being interesting

I think high concept shows definitely do, or at least it's more of a challenge to keep them going over the long term. Once the big Thing introduced in the premiere is solved, the characters need a Next Thing which is almost never as strong a concept as the first one. (You can see it even in shows that stay good, like BtVS S4+. You can't be working to solve the problem of "high school is hell" anymore if you graduate/blow up the school!)

My annoyance is that the Next Thing has to be bigger and bigger. "The world's going to end! Yay, we stopped it! Oh, no, the world's going to end again, but this time bigger!" There has to be a way to have a smaller crisis and still be interesting. "The city's going to be destroyed! Yeah, but it's not the world, is it? Hey, the people in that city care!"

Especially if you blow up the school twice?

Part of the problem in BtVS may have been that the "high school is hell" theme only works for 3-4 seasons at most. Everyone attends high school, so it's relatively easy to keep a cohesive cast together. But then the characters have to graduate, and it's hard to keep a coherent theme going.

After graduation, in a realistic world, the group would have gone their separate ways -- maybe Buffy still goes to UC-Sunnydale, but Willow goes off to Stanford or someplace even farther away. Cordelia finds a social contact -- hers or her father's -- to take pity on her and give her something to keep her going. Maybe Xander joins the Navy, and Oz and the band go to L.A. to seek a recording deal. At that point, keeping the group together feels more and more artificial.

My annoyance is that the Next Thing has to be bigger and bigger.

See also, the Harry Dresden books.

You could do a story about how individual tragedies get overwhelmed by big events, but that might be too grim for popcorn TV.