On Mrs Maisel and the Desperate Housewives Problem

[danieldwilliam]

 

When Desperate Housewives started it had a problem, Mary Alice Young had died in mysterious circumstances and her friends had to work out whether there had been foul play or not and, if so, by whom.

And that took a couple of seasons and created another problem, that there was a populat television programme that was too popular to allow to finish.

And so it became a soap opera of sorts. Which was fine, but not the same as a murder mystery, and it required changes to the various characters, the introduction of new characters and so on and so forth.

And I'm looking at Mrs Maisel wondering what happens when she solves her problem. At the moment her problem is that she is gifted comedian in a sexist industry and trying to reconcile her relationships with parents, (ex)-husband, and community and her desire for a success in her career. At some point she needs to solve those. Either she is as gifted as implied by her manager's faith in her and Lenny Bruce's interest in her, or she is not. If not, then she solves her problem by faililng. If she is, at some point she has an opportunity to be successful (which requires her to re-align expectations of her but gives her the resources to do so) or she is permanently thwarted and fails. She can loop around being thwarted a few times but eventually she has to succeed, or fail or decide she doesn't want to pursue a career in stand-up comedy.

At which point the problem is solved and Mrs Maisel is now a character in a soap opera.

Comments

[notasupervillain]

I have so much respect for Calvin and Hobbes, whose creator said that it was time to end it, and then stopped. It's a kind of courage that's far too rare in creators. And there's so many shows that kept going after their good plot was done. Prison Break. BSG. Orphan Black.

When you've told your story, you have to let go.

[danieldwilliam]

That's a notable example of someone doing it right.

[andrewducker]

Yup. I've seen several shows which broke themselves horribly because the funding lasted longer than the story.

I _loved_ the first 3/4 of the TV series Revenge, but they were too successful, got renewed, and so had to throw out all of the character consistency in order to allow what would have been a great one-season plot to continue on indefinitely.

There are shows which worked really well - Avatar: TLA did three seasons that formed a coherent whole. Buffy did each season as a stand-alone, so they could end the show at the end of any season.
But most become soap opera or die early.