NO SECOND SERIES!

The shows that would have been better with less

This has been a bit of a rant of mine for a long time: that we, as a society, should become more comfortable with shows that only have one series.

We should stop agitating for second seasons of shows that have a completely closed narrative. If a show wraps everything up in its first season, nobody should attempt to re-open it. I’m telling you. So many recent shows have ruined themselves with a second series.

I put this down to the Identikit Factor. We get so much Gruel TV that if we ever see something a bit more exciting - an unusual protagonist, a new set-up, brilliant female characters - anything that’s set somewhere new, like the Calder Valley - we all get a bit beyond ourselves and start demanding MORE of the SAME!

But MORE of the SAME is the exact problem. We don’t want MORE of the SAME. We should want MORE of NEW STUFF. So today, I’m going to tell you why we are WRONG to do this, why we should all be THOROUGHLY ASHAMED, and I’m going to list some of the shows that NEVER should have got a SECOND SERIES.

Lost (don’t know where you can watch this, sorry)

Let’s get this one out of the way early on. It never should have got a second series. The first was revolutionary, ground breaking. Nobody had ever used a narrative structure like it before. It used episodic AND long-arc structure all at once, in a format that broke open each characters’ backstory, contrasting this with their struggle to survive on Mystery Island after a plane crash.

Like Twin Peaks (which I also think should never have got a second series, please don’t unsubscribe) EVERYBODY HAD A SECRET, and you can’t beat that for giving a story juice. It had a large and diverse cast (so many secrets!)

The character who was an international terrorist / high-level criminal!
The character who was a rock star trying to beat their drug habit!
The character who’d always been a bit of a loser until the plane crash!

These secrets, along with the episodic/long-arc story telling, were what made Lost amazing. For one series. And then there was an episode where the characters find an office in a cave, and start doing what essentially amounts to tedious data entry. I’m not watching a show about people doing work! I go to work ALL DAY!

Shows about office work are only good if they’re The Office or Severance, which brings me neatly onto…

Severance (Apple TV)

Put your hand up if you hate going to work every day! Boy, do I have the show for you. This show is not far off being a novelisation of Bullshit Jobs by David Graebner.

In the show, the characters - who have voluntarily been ‘severed’, which means their work-selves know nothing about their personal-selves, and vice versa - work every day in an underground, windowless office where they use their computers to group ‘the numbers’ together, a pointless-seeming task which has nebulous value. If they group enough numbers, they can get corporation-branded items like new erasers, finger-traps, or even a waffle party. You never really find out what the corporation is or what it does, or why the numbers have to be grouped. This lack of information, which forms an exploration of the drudgery and pointlessness of work, is part of what makes this show so amazing (first series only.)

At the start of the first series, this group of employees are joined by a new starter, Helly, who is horrified to be there. She wants to leave straight away, which she tries to do by: trying to sneak messages out of the building to her outer self (not allowed), trying to run out of the building (not allowed) and trying to leave before the end of the work day (also not allowed). As a narrative device, this is an absolute cracker. We get to experience the world through the eyes of a newcomer, whilst also being intrigued about her story, and what has brought her there.

We, the viewers, follow along with Helly, and her boss, Mark, learning more about their motivations for becoming ‘severed’, and their own personal lives. The first season works its way towards a heist-cum-bit of wildcat industrial action, the climax of which forms the crux and apec of the first season. Crucial information about Helly’s outdoor self is revealed, in a dramatic turn of events that makes you shout “NO WAY!” at the telly.

And then, we come to the second series.

The problem with the second series is that so much of the first series rested heavily on viewer curiosity about Mark and Helly’s outdoor lives, to the point that when we already know this information, the second series becomes essentially rudderless. There’s nowhere for it to go. We’re no longer following the group as they plan their heist, because they’ve already done it. We’re not interested in finding out Helly or Mark’s backstory, because we already know it. And perhaps least forgiveably of all, the second series has two of my least favourite things: bottle episodes. One of them is set at a workplace team-building retreat (I don’t want to go on one of those, I hate them, so I DEFINITELY don’t want to watch one on telly) and the other features Evil Boss Lady going to her childhood home for slightly spurious and narratively unimportant reasons. By this point, the show has started hammering on its own nose in a way from which it can never recover. Even the show’s compelling weirdness, which was so witty and deft in the first series, has become a parody of itself. Yes, you want to watch them go to the Corporate Goat Farm, but you are also a bit over the Corporate Goat Farm, even if it does have the lady from Game of Thrones in it.

By the time you’re watching Mark’s wife getting experimented on for the third or fourth episode, Severance has reached Lost levels of incomprehensibility: you don’t know what’s behind what’s going on, you know you’re probably never going to find out, and you’ve lost interest because they should have stopped at the end of series one.

And honestly, if they had - stopped at the end of the first series - Severance could have been a completely untouchable piece of TV, and probably in time would have become a classic.

Happy Valley (iPlayer / Netflix)

What made this show amazing (first season only) was the perfect confluence of Sarah Lancashire, in a brilliant portrayal of the kind of woman you find all over West Yorkshire: a woman who’s Seen A Few Things, is fed up of it all, is frighteningly, begrudgingly capable (she’s a woman who earns her living doing frontline shift-work whilst also looking after an extremely naughty primary school child, when she’s of Grandma age, and she doesn’t like it, but circumstances call for it, and who else is going to do it?) In common with other West Yorkshire women of this type, she’s not somebody you’d want to piss off (see also: shift work, extremely naughty primary school age child, Grandma age.) She’s got beef with Tommy Lee Royce that’s deeply connected to the loss of her daughter. As in, she blames him for her death.

The first series of this show was driven by the grudge that twined the two characters together: the capable, tough copper Catherine, and no-good, anti-social, dangerously criminal Tommy, played brilliantly by James Norton. (side note: you’d never know it from hearing them do pitch-perfect Calder Valley West Yorkshire accents in this, which is also one of the things I enjoyed about this, but James Norton is from Yorkshire, But Posh, and Sarah Lancashire has also got quite a posh voice IRL.) It had everything: murders, Hebden Bridge, a kidnap, a suspect and slightly dodgy property developer who is somehow mixed up in it all, and a climax that took place on a canal boat on the Calder Valley Navigation. (SPOILER ALERT!) It makes brilliant use of the landscape and feeling of desolation in this remote part of Yorkshire, whilst using the interpersonal and crimey drama to keep you compelled.

As with Severance, the first series of it was unlike anything we’d ever seen before. (can I just say: this is more of the sort of thing audiences want. We want more new and unexpected stuff. Let’s have more of that, instead of additional series of stuff we’ve already seen.)

And then, probably because of the completely unanimous outpouring of love for the first series, the BBC made the mistake of commissioning a second.

The problem was, the first series wrapped everything up. There was no driving force or immediate peril in the same way in the second series. Tommy Lee Royce wasn’t about to be going out doing any more murders, because he was locked up in Wakefield nick. All we had in the second series was Sarah Lancashire essentially doing a tribute act to herself all the way through, and a squeaky-voiced creepy gerbil of a woman who kept visiting Tommy Lee Royce in prison and trying to touch his hands, like the sort of weirdo pervert who writes love letters to serial killers. I mean, it just wasn’t good. Watching the second series of this was like watching somebody trying to row their way around Pugney’s Boating Lake when they’ve dropped one of their oars, and they keep going around in circles. It’s interesting for a bit, and then it makes you wonder how much longer you have to keep watching for before you can decently go to the pub. No good. (Sorry.)

The Bear

This show is the televisual equivalent of drinking six espressos and then going on a rollercoaster. I’ve honestly never been so stressed watching a TV show in my life. Watching this in the evenings to wind down was a bit like being dropped into the local wildlife park out of hours to do a bit of amateur lion-taming. If I’m honest, yes I did want to know what happened, but I was also quite a bit relieved when it finished.

You can’t honestly say this show isn’t good. It is. Like Happy Valley, it’s got all of the ingredients of an exciting Brand New Show: family secrets and drama (the main thread of the story is that a chef takes over his dead brother’s failing restaurant, and also inherits his absolute liability of a cousin as an employee in the process) amazing brand-new faces, including Ayo Edebiri; a killer soundtrack that wouldn’t have been out of place in a punk rock club in the early noughties; and a nice lil side-story in the form of an aspiring pastry chef who’s trying to watch the Bachelorette with his room mate, but his room mate keeps watching episodes ahead of him, like a complete scumbag.

What kept driving this story on was the struggle to get the restaurant open and running long enough to turn a profit, and the mystery of where all of his brother’s money had disappeared to; at the end of the first series, the question about the money is answered, the first season is over, and THANK GOD, the stress is over and you can go on to do something more relaxing, like being the untrained assistant in a knife-throwing act.

Unforgiveably, the second series of this show has a long Bottle Episode. I know that other people, who are more wrong than me, enjoyed the bottle episode in this show. As outlined above, I hate bottle episodes. For me, a bottle episode is a sure sign the show has lost its way narratively, but they still had to produce the number of episodes they’re tied to in the contract. And in my completely correct opinion, the bottle episode in the second series of The Bear was the most supremely Bottle-y of all Bottle Episodes, in a way that was so completely narratively pointless and annoying, that I switched it off halfway through and went out into the street and chased a few cats around, just to get rid of the negative energy. Please note that no cats were harmed when I did this, as I live in a cul-de-sac, and am quite a slow runner. (If you’re wondering what a Bottle Episode is, it’s the most pointless thing ever to happen to narrative television. A Bottle Episode is a completely ‘standalone’ episode that adds nothing to the overall narrative of a series. You could skip the Bottle Episode when watching the series, and you wouldn’t lose anything. They’re basically the dictionary definition of ‘pointless’.)

I stopped watching The Bear halfway through the Bottle Episode, and never restarted. In additional Related Crimes, this show won an Emmy for ‘Best Comedy’ even though it isn’t a comedy, and hasn’t got any funny bits. This is making it sound like I hate The Bear, which I don’t. I think it’s good. Until the end of the First Season.

Bad Sisters

Hit ‘Subscribe Now’ to read the final part of this newsletter - about the Apple TV show Bad Sisters, why it’s so great, and why it should have never gone onto a second series.