What multi season TV series had a good arc?

[andrewducker]

I'm primarily looking for series that had an arc plot which started at the beginning, crossed between seasons, and came to an ending which took in the whole run of the show and brought it to a coherent close, intended since the beginning, which made narrative sense and was emotionally satisfying.

I'm not asking for perfection here. Happy to include something like Babylon 5 (had an intended arc plot from the beginning, was derailed by the studio, and half of season 5 was a mess, but still worked overall, and had the ending it started out towards).

I'm just curious what other examples there are. Far more TV seems to consist of lots of exciting set-up, but with the writers later admitting they didn't actually know where they were going. I still enjoyed Battlestar Galactica, but it definitely suffered from this. Lost was the epitome of this, and nobody at all seems to have enjoyed its ending.

A better model for most TV seems to be a season arc. Where you've dealt with your Big Bad at the end of the season, but left things open for future ones. Buffy excelled at that.

In any case, the only things I can think of recently that fit this mould are the She-Ra reboot and Steven Universe. And going back fifteen years there's Avatar: The Last Airbender. All of which were animated kid's shows.

I hear Breaking Bad did pay off at the end, with what the creators had been aiming for since the beginning. What else did?

Comments

[danieldwilliam]

How I Met Your Mother had a ten year run working towards a more or less defined end point.

[momentsmusicaux]

Can it be adapted from books? Because The Expanse, if they adapt all the books.

[drplokta]

Game of Thrones comes close. At the very least, it was always their intention to fulfil your criteria.

[wildeabandon]

The Good Place?

Going back a while, The West Wing, and Six Feet Under.

I don't know if any of those actually was plotted from the beginning, but they were all satisfying in their resolution.

[i_kender]

I second Breaking Bad for sticking the landing, that show ended really well.

Shows with a narrative arc, thankfully, are much more common nowadays then even 10 or 20 years ago - TV studios used to hate them with a passion, because they relied on, you know, an audience sticking around for the long haul, rather than just stepping in and out for the 'story (or monster) of the week', and they messed up syndication/repeats. But it's still more common to have a season arc, rather than a multi-season or series arc.

And of course, another major complicating factor for TV showrunners is that they often don't know, when starting out with a new show, how long they will get to run for. It's down to ratings. It's hard to plan for your satisfying ending when you don't know if you have just one or two seasons to get it done, or 3, or 5, or 8... and you either have to stretch out the middle bits, or keep adding characters, plot points, segues and complications (this is partly what killed Lost's later seasons so much, although I can think of other examples, Battlestar Galactica, Heroes, The Sopranos etc...), or change direction entirely, and the show ends up going down a completely different road by its end. Like Angel or Farscape.

Having said all that, I will get round to listing a few examples that did do well with full arcs. Hopefully some of these may have been ones you've missed, and would be interested in checking out.

- Fringe
- Person of Interest
- The Americans (which I confess I haven't watched, but friends recommend strongly as a long-form show)
- and speaking of Avatar, I'm currently enjoying season 3 of The Dragon Prince from the same people, which has just been confirmed for a full run of 7 seasons.

That's all I've got off the top of my head. It is weird though, isn't it, how so many shows seem to be making it up as they go along? Even when they find a satisfying ending, a lot of the time I suspect they've pulled it into existence out of thin air rather than having it all planned out since Day One. But maybe that's just the nature of the medium, eh? Ratings, network execs, public screening polls... making it up on the fly.

(not to mention having writing teams or writers rooms, rather than a singular writer)

[nickbarlow]

You can make an argument that Breaking Bad isn't fitting with the original intent as the initial plan was for one of the core characters to die in the first season, but stayed alive because it was cut short because of the writers' strike. But that would be a quibble rather than a genuine objection, and I think any TV story of more than one season is going to end up with some course correction on the way.

It lost focus during the final season, but I think Orphan Black wrapped itself up well in the end. I'm not sure Michael Schur knew where The Good Place was going from the start, but from the start of S2 it's clearly ending towards an ending like that.

[gingicat]

I think that while Leverage and The Librarians mainly had season-based arcs, they absolutely developed each season from the previous season rather than being standalone.

It looks like Star Trek: Picard is intended that way, but I don't know if they'll get more seasons.

[ironymaiden]

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend had a planned arc and they stuck the landing.
Jane the Virgin also had a continuous arc and an endgame. Like The Good Place, it had numbered episodes.

(I recommend both of these.)

[angelofthenorth]

I liked y Gwyll/ hinterland for its three season arc

[ljgeoff]

I'm liking Mindhunter (netflix) if that's something you'd like. I also second The Expanse. Just started watching Star Trek Discovery and liking it (I watch TV very slowly and am only on season1, ep 3); was kinda meh about Picard, but to be fair, it was very trekky, and maybe I'm just into more nuanced scripts these days.

[kmusser]

I'll add another animated series to your list, the Trollhunters/3Below/Wizards Tales of Arcadia on Netflix - not complete yet, but the final season drops next month and it appears to following the intended arc envisioned from the beginning. Definitely recommended.

[matgb]

To an extent, Stargate SG1 managed this, twice, sorta, because the first arc was meant to end the show then it got recomissioned so they had to create a new threat, which they also covered quite well.

Atlantis got an ending, but it wasn't the original plan because it got cancelled in favour of Universe, which bombed because it wasn't a Stargate show so no one watched it :-(

Fringe did good, but that's been mentioned already.

Also? I lost my copy of that icon in a move years back, have yoinked it back, it's animated slightly too fast but it still works.

[jack]

I've asked this before and got similar amount of replies. I'm generally grateful we've got as many as we do, the number of shows strong across multiple seasons is not that large to begin with.

Although I feel like more shows could plan for this, something like, have a fairly self-contained season 1, but have a hook that can introduce a larger threat in S2 if S1 ends looking promising. And then if they get a S2, plan a S2/S3/S4 arc with a general outline of "S2: face subsiduary threat, S3: gather strength and clear up side threats; S4: build to big climax"

[heron61]

The Good Place managed this remarkably well, and Killjoys did a reasonable job of this. My favorite almost case for this is still Fringe - Seasons 2 & 3 were one of the single best unified plot arcs I've ever seen, and most of Season 4 kept this up, but the show failed badly with the end of Season 4 and all of Season 5.

[calimac]

I haven't watched more than bits and pieces of any of these shows (except Orphan Black, which I have very mixed feelings about), but the premise question reminds me of some cruddy show of which I watched only the premiere some years ago. It hooks up two characters as partners in crimefighting and then says there's some supernatural prophecy which says they'll partner in this for seven years, and I was thinking, "Seven years? That's about the average lifespan of a successful TV drama. What a coincidence!"

[hellofriendsiminthedark]

Jane the Virgin! To be fair, it followed the premise of another telenovela (Juana la Virgen), but the way the series concluded after 5 seasons was very much tied up in how it began and presented itself from episode 1. The entire show is one very very long buildup to the finale, with lots of twists and turns along the way.

[soon_lee]

Avatar: The Last Airbender.

(In particular the Zuko character arc.)

[jducoeur]

Two time-travel examples:

Continuum is my favorite time-travel story ever, and it worked hard to make logical sense. (It mostly succeeded.) On long-term arc, let's put it this way -- in the middle of season 2, I concluded "There is only one way this story can possibly end that actually works both logically and as a story", and sure enough: the final scene was almost precisely what I expected it to be. The fact that that was possible speaks to how well-designed the arc was.

I know that many details got adjusted along the way: it actually ran 3.5 seasons, but from the pacing I figured they probably intended 7, and have heard rumors that they had planned 10. Towards the end it is notably rushed, similar to B5 season 4 (there is one storyline that I think was intended to cover an entire season, that wound up turning into ten minutes of exposition). But the story works: the core arc does get resolved in a satisfying way, and it all hangs together decently well.

Similarly, I just finished Dark on Netflix. This is an insanely intricate time-travel story, perhaps an order of magnitude moreso than Continuum. Again, I'm fairly sure that it got cut short: from the pacing of Season 3, I'm pretty sure that they had intended 5 total. And it gets somewhat mystical towards the end. But it's pretty clear that it was tightly planned from the beginning, with lots of stuff that doesn't even make sense until a season or two later, and sticks a decently solid (if rushed) ending. Not as strong a recommendation as Continuum, but still fascinating, if often a tad bleak.

[matgb]

Was reminded of this by a joke I saw on Twitter. Tenko

Starts with capture of Singapore and internment of civilians, moves on to them getting to know each other, ends with liberation and return to Singapore

Haven't watched it for decades, but people speak very highly of it, and not just Doctor Who fans of a Certain Age