I'm all for focused shows - The Good Place is a nice example of one that didn't overstay its welcome - but there are a lot of great shows that wouldn't survive the "canceled after the first season unless metric x is met" climate.
Star Trek: The Next Generation serves as a good example; the first season was rough. Didn't hit its stride until the second, when Riker grew the beard.
I'm watching TNG again for the first time in about 20 years and I just have to say, that show aged _extremely_ well.
I think the thing I like most about it, is that it treats its audience with respect. The rough plot of every episode can be followed by almost everyone but they don't dumb down the dialog or keep repeating the main plot points over and over like modern TV. There is almost never any filler and each episode unfolds rather than simply leading the viewer from scene to scene.
Breaking Bad and The Americans are two other shows that would have been cancelled just looking at the viewership. Bob Oedenkirk mentioned in a recent interview that Breaking Bad didn't become a phenomenon until the 3rd or 4th season.
Ironically, the only reason it was able to become a phenomenon was that people were able to watch the earlier seasons on Netflix to catch up to the current season.
Television shows whose seasons are one-and-done (or two-and-done) are pretty common in the UK. I always preferred that model, because the shows are tightly plotted from beginning to end with a complete story arc and no loose ends. Another model that works is the anthology model.
And also not having a billion episodes. The older UK standard was 6 episodes per series and so it felt like the script was also very tight, every line had to matter.
I think this trend is why they've gone all-in on sex-on-the-beach shows and true crime docuseries. One season can easily be self-contained, and if the viewer gets another, it's just a nice bonus.
Which is disappointing, because there is stuff out there like Wonderfalls - the writers from the beginning understood the premise was so weird that they wrote the first season as self-contained, just in case it was canceled. And it was. And because of how they wrote it, it still works as a one-off thing to watch even now.
A quirk of human psychology is that we value ongoing storylines as if they were finished storylines. When we watch a Lost or read a Song Of Ice And Fire, we relate the twists and turns to finished stories we already know - or even to real life. We take it as a given that the plot thread spun in episode 3 will, somewhere, have a satisfying conclusion. The method that put the gun on the wall must satisfy physical and logical laws. So we become invested.
As a result, writers are incentivised to write convoluted, twisting, mysterious threads.
I don't think this is much deeper than modern media abusing a strong expectation set-up by past media. The short-term mysteries are only as interesting as the audiences expectation that they will be resolved in an interesting way. We are trusting the narrator not to let us down. But of course it is much simpler to create mystery than to resolve it, and whenever the resolution is bad that trust gets chipped away. I think this trust is a limited resource and it feels like too many modern stories are chipping away at it. At least thats the case for me. I've become jaded about this kind of breach of trust. The shows hope that I am not attentive enough and keep around my positive memories of the mystery after observing the awful resolution. No. I go out of my way to taint past memories and call the experience bad overall.
I’m not sure if it’s psychology or not, but it sure is annoying. Especially when you then get big name creators berating fans for expecting a creator to follow through with their implied promises. “[ … ] doesn’t owe you anything.”
