What are some of the most obvious examples of TV series past and present where the writers were clearly just making it up as they went?
Lost
I find it interesting how people talk about Abrams's Mystery Box as a choice for a writing technique, despite the fact it's objectively shit. I can forgiving it in D&D sometimes, but in a professional story, it's ridiculous.
Lost is the ultimate answer to this question
Arrrrrgh ya beat me to it by mere moments
Battlestar Galactica the recent one. No unifying plotline, just a series of SHOCKING REVEALS every episode. Got super tedious toward the end.
I watched old Battlestar Galactica decades ago. I couldn't get into new battlestar galactica because it just seemed to want to shock and surprise me like a soap opera rather than tell me a story like a sci-fi show. Thank you for confirming my suspicions before I invested hours and hours trying to enjoy it.
There is one episode... "33 minutes" I think. Stands alone. Some of the best TV ever made.
Victim of the writer's strike if I remember correctly. Same as Heroes season 2..
Yeah the miniseries and first two seasons were great, then the writers strike and it went downhill fast.
You know that excepting documentaries, they’re all made right? /s
I think you’re really asking which show really went off the rails or at least pooched the endings. If you’re looking for off the rails my favourite crazy story has to be Dallas deciding that an entire season was a dream by having Pam wake up to find Bobby Ewing in the god-damn shower.
X Files was the first one where it was getting weirder and weirder, and everybody was asking what was going on, and the show finally came out to say that they never really had a story line. They never really planned one, and then the show caught on really big, and people got really invested in it, and expected a story arc, and they admitted they didn't have one. It became the beginning of the end for the show.
As a weird comparison, How I met Your Mother did a good job with this. I don't blame X-Files for not having a plan necessarily when pitching it, and I get that TV is complicated because who knows if you'll be picked up, make it past one season, or how many you'll go for. But, HIMYM planned for that in giving the show "offramps" depending on how long it went, and it's pretty clear with the series length.
If cancelled at Season 1, Ted would have just ended up with Robin. Hooray, people feel good. If cancelled at Season 3, Ted would have ended up with Stella. Hooray, people feel good. If cancelled at Season 6, Ted would have ended up with Zoey probably. Least favorite but they were clearly building her up as a "just in case". Then they brought in Tracy for Season 8-9.
You don't need to know every detail, but you need to have a general path for your show, and X-Files... did not do that. It just kept meandering. The worst was that it kept adding more plot to the story, more stories, but then for writers you have to maintain those stories and that plot. You have to remember what happened to not contradict yourselves, and the only way to easily get around that is to.... add even zanier things. It just went off the rails.
Before X Files, most hour long dramas shows were just episodic, with a basic relationship between characters. If you wanted a long, multi-episode story arc, you wanted daily afternoon soap operas. Then in the 80s, they started doing shows like Dallas and Knot's Landing, which were essentially soap operas, but with a weekly schedule instead of daily.
So people started liking the idea of a running story arc accompanying their episodic shows. The problem with X Files is that they didn't realize this until they were too deep into it to fix it. The episodic shows were great, but the subplot with smoking man, all those guys meeting in the dark, the black goo, etc, all turned out to be just mindless, aimless meandering, with no concept of a cohesive story.
People thought they were caught up in this complex world that had been built, and it all turned out to be literally nothing. Very disappointing. I was so pissed about it, that stopped watching the show at that point.
There's a lot of really good examples of this from shows that kept going during the writer's strike in 2007. Heroes season 2 in particular felt like they were just winging it.
Heroes did not continue during the writers strike. To accommodate the reduced episode order to allow the season to be completed before the strike, major rewrites were made very quickly and 2/3 of the season was pushed back a year.
Ah you're right, my mistake. It was supposed to be 24 episodes but got cut down to 11
South park
By design in this case, as they were reacting to current events.
I agree. It's a strength of the series being able to react so quickly to current events.
I feel sad you had to point this out, these people it's only gonna get dumber.
.. all of them..
Making it up as you go along isn't inherently bad. Nine times in ten I prefer a story which is planned out but basically any medium that's open to additional seasons, novels, sequels, etc is capable of falling into this category.
It's only really a sin when the medium promises a long form mystery while doing this, hence the fact Lost is #1 here. Sherlock Holmes was written as episodic mystery and Arthur Conan Doyle clearly never planned future stories as he went and nobody minded. Togashi, the manga author for Hunter x Hunter stumbled into his most famous arc just because he'd made his metaphysic and societies up as he went and the stars aligned, leading to the Chimera Ant arc. The Simpsons rarely ever changes it's status quo between episodes, and therefore can be made up as it goes along, because it's going nowhere. Breaking Bad literally changed the ending of season one to not kill Jesse partly due to the writers strikes and subsequent shortening of the season, and Mike as a character exists because Bob Odenkirk was busy.
Any medium that decieves the audience, promising a well reasoned, long form mystery without any planning of what that mystery is, is bad. Perhaps you'll strike gold and have an epiphany as to how to bring the plot together perfectly, but that'll just be luck. Ultimately this is an expression of consumerism; baiting the expectations of art and narrative to deceive the audience for nothing more than engagement, and therefore money.