What’s your favorite TV show with a built-in ending as part of the premise! Thanks so much to OnlyCrits for sponsoring this video! Visit www.onlycrits.com/supergeekmike and use the promo code SUPERGEEK at checkout to save 12% off of your order! www.onlycrits.com/supergeekmike
I think an important video to make going along with your analogy would be how to improvise a finale when your "show gets canceled" and you thought you had more time
I think you're not giving Last Airbender's plot structure enough credit. Yeah, the *pacing* is slow for a tabletop game, but the basic idea is pretty solid actually. You have the big goal: defeat the Firelord, and to do that, you need to master the remaining three elements. And for the first one you have to go all the way to the other side of the map. Along the way, you have adventures where you can do world-building, reveal and deal with backstory, advance the plot, or just have wacky hijinks. Listen and respond to your players to figure out the exact proportions, but the basic idea is pretty solid.
Agreed. I've never run the official Powered by the Apocalypse game they came out with (though I've read it and heard good things from those who have played/run it), but I will always content that the Last Airbender is the most accurate to how a D&D style campaign should feel session to session of any show I've ever seen.
Yeah the premise is pretty much ideal for an episodic D&D campaign. A really great balance of hijinks to story and character development, plus interesting characters. Add in a great BBEG who you know you're going to face at one point and (somewhat) clear objectives to accomplish before you face them. Narratively, that's really all you want for a D&D campaign.
The Stargate series are probably my favorite sci-fi franchise. I love others like Firefly, Battlestar Galatica, and Farscape but I saw SG-1 when I was young and something about it has always struck a chord in me so it has a special place in my heart always.
The Owl House and Carmen Sandiego are fascinating examples of getting an ending but not the ones they'd clearly planned. Both shows wrap things up pretty neatly, yet you've still got all these threads hanging where they were going to go if they hadn't each been denied a full finale season.
I’m so mad that Owl House got the ax… I feel like Disney saying “we want episodic shows and not serialized storytelling because it’s too complex for kids” is so f******* stupid…. 1.) I’m willing to bet adults made a moderate/large % of the audience and 2.) kids are WAY smarter than boomer execs give them credit for… pretty sure children are smarter than the median voter
Oh man, I did really like finale of The Owl House but seeing the montage they did that was obviously a taste of a bunch of the episodes they didn't get to do in the human world hurt me.
@@joshdavid9256it’s been a while since I’ve watched it so I forgot their names but the main girl and the green haired girlfriend were sooooo cute together…. It really is a shame
I think it’s super important for a table to really discuss what they are looking for and to do regular check-ins beyond just a session 0. A lot of the online DMing advice is to have big open-ended sandbox campaigns with player-driven storylines. However, both the table that I DM and the table that I play don’t like that style. We find that we end up spinning our wheels and not knowing what to do. So, instead, we do moderate-sized (20-30 session) narrative-driven campaigns with clear end-goals
Secret option: a show has a killer first season, gets a mediocre follow up in season 2 and is then cancelled. See: The OA, Altered Carbon, probably others but those I am most salty about lol
I've never been pushed a video so early in its life. There were just 83 views at time of writing, and 3 comments. So here is a little something to feed the system.
Story invention was also something that dragged along in charmed. Its actually impressive they managed to continue after dealing with the literal source of all evil... but it still went on too long.
20:55 That's what I'm doing. We don't meet that often to play ongoing campain. So my players are part of secret organization of a city council of Urep and every session is a new mission. It can be retrieving magical item, solving murder mystery, train robbery, tactical breach rescueing hostages, bodyguarding, etc..... I have one ongoing theath but I don't think my players noticed it.
Alf ended with what was supposed to be a cliffhanger episode in which the titular character gets caught by government agents--but then the show was never renewed, and so Alf's capture and presumed dissection became the grim ending of the series.
Star Trek Voyager is a great example of a show with a series-long end goal (getting back home), that they were able to play off with random sci-fi nonsense episodes as well as some that progressed that primary objective. It's really the only time Star Trek used that model of story structuring, and it worked pretty well. They established the goal in the very first episode, and it happily existed as just an underlying tension that was more or less pressing depending on the episode, but it was ALWAYS there.
There was a show called "Sanctuary" that had the premise of alternate evolution still occurring within the world (like people who could collapse their skeleton to fit into incredibly small places, werewolves, Big Foot, vampires). It was a SyFy show back in the day. Heavy green screen but with some great actors (Christopher Heyerdahl is in it and I have always enjoyed him). The last episode included a large group of Abnormals (what they were called) rising up to fight a war against the injustices against them. The last shot was of their force marching... and the show was cancelled. Another show, similar premise, was called Alphas. Again, people who have heightened abilities but these were a little more grounded. No vampires but someone that can control their adrenaline to push their body. Someone else who can cause microseizures in someone else's brain to make them susceptible to suggestion. Stuff like that. Alphas ended up a group of Alphas rising up to fight against the injustices done against them. Last shot was of their force marching... and the show was cancelled. I'm not salty about either of them. At all.
man! Alphas was stabbed in the back hard. That last season was baller. Also, if i recall corectly, the final shot was basically all of new york city being activated as alphas.
a good cautionary tale is also Twin Peaks. The investigation of "Who killed Laura Palmer?" was active, moving forward in nearly every episode, while acting as a scaffold for countless other stories both connected and independent from that... and then the network forced them to answer the question of the investigation partway through Season 2. The show lost its sense of purpose for most of the rest of Season 2 before regaining its footing on a wider mystery in time to finish out the season but too late to avoid cancellation
Hannibal (NBC) is such a rare gem in this respect. I know they were ready and willing to start gearing up for season 4 when they got canceled, but they still managed to bring the story to an EXTREMELY satisfying end. I know people who hated the end or who felt neutral about it, but even among people who hated it, I don't know anyone who felt like it was rushed, out of character, or tonally "off". They managed to fulfill every necessary plot thread and leave enough loose ends and escape routes that, if some other network had made an offer, they could have picked up with season 4---without cheapening the catharsis of the s3 finale :)
I don't know if it's a shame or irrelevant, but I feel like Twin Peaks never got a proper conclusion, but still feels like a satisfying cliffhanger ending.
I’m always worried about the balance between making the villain threatening and working towards their goal while still giving the party time to breathe and feel like they can do a few side quests, without letting them think “do whatever, the final boss battle will happen whenever you go to this location.
Tell your players that after a certain number of sessions (a living world), the BBEG will take a step toward their goal. Don't tell them how many steps are needed or how many sessions take place; you can make this fluid. Personally, I make each time frame shorter. Leave the choice to them; if they want to speed run the BBEG, let them; if they want to explore other things, let them. Once the counter hits zero, end the session by saying they all get a feeling that the forces of evil, etc., have moved a step closer to their dominance or something related to your BBEG, I had one that was an earthquake dragon being released, and each time a chain broke, they felt earthquakes, getting stronger with each chain break. At this point, the counter starts again, and the players now need to rethink their goals. On the back end, if what was supposed to be a two-session side encounter turns into four, add two to the timer, and never count character arc stories against the timer unless they specifically are meant to move the plot along. You can also roll dice to determine the session amount and the number of steps needed if you want some randomness.
When I was a preteen, I was obsessed with the show Moonlight (starring Alex O'Loughlin in 2008). This show was one of my first introductions to vampire plots, and I'm still obsessed to this day! We only got one season, and I still haven't gotten over it in over 15 years!
Wooo so excited. I’ve just been thinking about writing possible “endings” for your own pc. It gives the DM a good understanding of the character/campaign you want to play
In a few weeks, I'm going to start running an "Everyday Heroes" (basically the 5e version of D20 Modern) game, and my idea is a kind of Mission:Impossible/X-Files campaign. There probably won't be a major through-line plot, but more along the lines of "solve the supernatural mystery of the week" kind of thing.
I was going to post Deadwood as well ! The TV movie is good but it feels more like a celebration of the show rather than a proper conclusion. With the unfortunate progressive decline in health of the show's creator it felt like a way to say 'goodbye' to the characters that the 3rd season did not. Having said that - the 3rd season ending while abrubt, felt appropriate. "Life goes on. Sometimes the bad guys win and don't get their comeuppance"
I just DM'd my first game recently and am trying to figure out if I want to flesh out some ideas for a world that's been bouncing around my head for years. I really think this series will help me once I start to get up and running on campaign prep.
What a Hilarious video, I just started a Genesys game where the PCs are individuals aboard a ship that was flug across the universe and now they hope to get home somehow
Not so much TV series, but the longest running campaign I was a part of was in the Dresden Files RPG, each of us were playing characters that were pretty deep into the supernatural world and our GM used the books' events as a basis with our story running parallel to Harry's and even intersecting at times (as I was playing a White Court Vampire during the events White Night while another was playing a practitioner at the same times kind'a made it a necessity). While our campaign was happening at the same times as Harry's in the same city (for the most part) and we interacted with canon characters from time to time it was more that it set the pace than outright railroaded our stories as we each had our own adversaries and obstacles that cropped up in a similar manner to the books.
The algorithm is weird sometimes. (All the time?) About a week ago i was checking to see if My name is Earl was on peacock. Not seeing it i pulled up a compilation of the list on RUclips, then watched a few reviews. Now it seems like all of the channels I watch consistently referenced my name is Earl this month.
Soap is the show whose cancellation cliffhanger always sticks with me. It was a sitcom that was a parody of soap operas, with an absolutely banger cast including Billy Crystal and several stars of other sitcoms in the 80s. I watched it in reruns on Comedy Central as a kid, and was *bereft* when its last episode ends with three or four major characters facing “certain death” (including one in front of a firing squad!) 😅
I guess as a player, what I'm looking for in a campaign structure is... dang it, Matt Mercer Effect but Critical Role. Campaign 1 particularly, which had a few clearly defined "season" arcs while still giving time for episodic adventures and character exploration. Campaign 2 meanwhile I liken to a sandbox, which gradually developed an ongoing story once the players made clear which leads they were most invested in. And Campaign 3... definitely feels like it was made with a specific end in mind but by the time it got it didn't feel like a fitting resolution to the character arcs that developed on the way, How I Met Your Mother-style. In terms of show approaches I like, I think the Monk format is strong: it's less of an over-arching mystery and more "we'll make an episodic show but when we do the finale THAT's what it'll be". I've personally found recurring villains in murder mysteries really hard to enjoy, since the whole draw of the genre is seeing mysteries solved and the murderers caught, so having one who keeps getting away, ESPECIALLY if the show keeps pulling contrivances out of its ass to save its "super cool bad guy" (BONES, but it happened to a couple of Murdoch Mysteries recurring threats too) ... yeah. Bonus points if the audience doesn't think the villain is as cool as the writers clearly assume they do. (At least in a D&D campaign, it's easy to gauge player reactions and cut a villain's story short of that's what they want) One aspect that you didn't discuss was the reverse of being unexpectedly cancelled: the show thinks its over and does a big wrap-up... and then they get renewed. Apparently this happened with Seinfeld's second season, but the main example I know of is another kids' cartoon: My Little Pony Friendship is Magic. Season 3's finale was supposed to be the end, according to its writers, but the show was so popular it ended up running for 9. Sometimes a show can make this work by making the "end point" feel more like a beginning (for this example, Season 3 ended with the protag transforming and accepting a new responsibility in the world), while others get awkward as they clearly "untie the loose ends" or forget they happened. (Episode 52 of the Sonic X anime is SO blatantly supposed to be the finale it hurts, then they got a third season) Couples getting together are often a victim of this, as god forbid a show actually write a stable couple where one isn't dead or kidnapped.
In my opinion, one of the best genres/mediums to look at for some potential story structure lessons or advice for TTRPGs is Shonen battle manga/anime; they're almost all designed to go on for a long time and often (but not always) with a clear end-goal; but the big thing that they share with TTRPGs that _no other_ narrative medium does is that they are almost _all_ long stories driven not primarily by _plot_ progress (or even standard character arcs, although most of them have _do_ both of those), but by progress in _character power_ and _competence._ To me, this opened up a lot of really useful insight, and is one of the biggest factors missing from most other long-form storytelling sources when trying to derive inspiration for RPG campaigns. There are the obvious Tournament and Training arcs (the latter of which, I think, should actually be way more common in TTRPGs; there's a _ton_ of potential there that's not been tapped into very much), but there are a lot of other types of story sequence that take advantage of the importance of power levels in really fun ways. In particular, objective-based non-direct-combat tournaments (like the Hunter Exam, the Chuunin Exam, many of the U.A. Training Exercises, and the entirety of Tower of God) are common occurrences in a lot of battle manga that translate _really_ well to TTRPGs; and there are also some really good arcs across the genre that specifically take advantage of having the main characters know for sure that they are _not_ yet powerful enough to take on the villains through combat, but still have important stuff to do, and so must basically try to accomplish their goals while using 'RP' and 'utility' skills to avoid combat (a couple great ones that come to mind are Krillin and Gohan trying to gather the Dragonballs on Namek without provoking Vegeta or Freiza's guys too much; or all the stuff with the Phantom Troupe at the Auction in Hunter X Hunter).
Haven’t even finished the video yet but just dropping a comment for the algorithm. Love your work Mike! Always makes my day whenever I see you uploaded.
I've got something similar to this in a campaign I'm running! It's based off of the golden age arc of Berserk and not all my players have read it but they know something awful is going to happen, because it takes place 2 years before the mainline campaign to explain the backstory of one of the players (who is not Guts based, don't worry). They're one of the few survivors of a once prestigious mercenary band who's been vague about their past so far, meanwhile all the players are LIVING their backstory.
Another show that chose to end, Succession They could have continued it even after the finale and the end goal of who keeps the company, god knows the characters were left in very interesting positions But the story was done, the show was finished, and boy am I happy with how it ended.
Talking about episodic shows with long running plots I was reminded of Burn Notice, the first few season handle the long form story great, keeping it to a b or c plot of each episode, but it only works for so long. As for shows with a rushed ending Star Trek Enterprise has a terrible series finale as they try to wrap things up.
I agree with you, but I do think the production issues Babylon 5 faced make it a good example for GMs to learn from about how to structure a narrative that's easy to improvise within while still maintaining a sense of consistency. For example, it's because of Babylon 5 that my important villains always have a lieutenant or partner or estranged child or something who can fill the antagonist role if the party manages to take down the planned villain early.
I'm curious if you've ever watched Babylon 5. It had a 5 season overall arc, with smaller sub arcs throughout. I've used it as a model to varying degrees of success myself, depending on a lot of things (I'm the forever GM, so I sometimes get distracted with new game ideas because I don't get enough of a break to not burn out on my current campaign, but that's a me thing) Now, granted B5's other strength was that JMS had "outs" for every character if the actor needed to/decided to leave, and on the down side, it had to deal with the canceled/uncanceled dance that turned season's 4 and 5 into a bit of a mess (and loosing his notes for season 5 at a convention) but I honestly think that almost makes it more suitable for a model for TTRPGs, because Life will strike and make changes that have nothing to do with the game's storyline.
Funnily enough, I've often had the opposite problem in the campaigns I've been in - everything is bent towards making progress towards a single, overarching narrative goal, reducing the room that the characters and the world have to breathe. It's hardly total - the DMs among our group have been thoughtful and invested and do take care to interweave our characters' personal stories throughout the main plot - but the overwhelming, time-dependent stakes of Saving The Princess or Preventing The End of The World mean that that gets focused on at the expense of downtime or side quests that might explore those things more organically. To take an example: my poor artificer was a maker of weapons and had aspirations of item enchanting but didn't get to make a single weapon or magic item before the very last session of the campaign because the party was always travelling from place to place to fulfil the main objective and didn't have secure access to a proper forge for enough downtime to do anything. Fortunately we're decent communicators and we're taking our most recent campaign in a more unstructured, player-driven direction, so I'm hoping that this time the pace will be a little more sedate!
You didn't mention The Good Place. Really clear seasonal arcs and a really satisfying conclusion at the end of the series. You also didn't mention Doctor Who or Rick and Morty (they sprang to mind as I was listening to you) I kinda like how Rick and Morty explicitly breaks the fourth wall and explains their ever-changing attitude toward episodic adventures and the main, ongoing, lore-heavy series narratives.
I haven't run anything very long term since my "good ol' days" back in the 90s. I'd say that back then, I tended to run stuff in a format more like classic Dr Who. Several weeks on a story, especially something like the Key To Time season. Spend several weeks on a story, with a bunch of NPCs, mysteries, etc., then come to a conclusion that includes some kind of "progression," and then the PCs move on to the next arc. Maybe a new character would join, or an older character would cycle out, but the overall group continued. I guess that's sort of like the series with each season having a story, like Veronica Mars.
Justified was a show that got to choose their end date. At the end of S4 the showrunners were told they can have 3 more seasons, and they replied "we only want 2". They tied off all the loose ends by the end of S6 and gave each main character a satisfying payoff.
An example you didn't list is Star Wars: The Clone Wars. It ends with Order 66 and the Revenge of the Sith. There's still enough wiggle room that we don't know exactly how things will end for some of the characters. If you've got a regular group a prequel campaign, where the players play as doomed characters, could work. EXU: Calamity we got to watch the Apocalypse happen, but it was in a City we hadnt seen before. We knew the general, but not the specific
Bayalon 5 is show with a built in ending that I like. It was pitched as a 5 season show back in the 1990's now a full 30 years ago. The premise is that two Eldar s Alien species about to go war and drag everyone into there war. The story is told with problem of the week with a b plot that advance the story, with a few episodes dedicated to advancing the plot. The show's story was wrapped in 4 season because they didn't know if they were going to get a season 5. But they did so they had to fill season 5. While the production values look a little date the show is still good. The story is amazing.
Man, I'm struggling really hard to come up with a show I liked with a built-in ending that never got closure... Oh! Stargate Voyager... I mean Universe. Somewhat related to you bringing up Stargate SG-1 having to shift gears when the original villains are no longer satisfying, I absolutely love the arc of the SG-1 vs. Goa'uld war: The good guys start out at a huge disadvantage against basically unstoppable bad guys, and because of the immense character flaws of the bad guys, the good guys rather quickly narrow the gap to the degree that defeating the bad guys becomes trivial, and then new bad guys and new situations need to arise.
The show I loved with a long term goal that was the "end" of the show was Samurai Jack. In Samurai Jack, he fails to defeat the Evil Aku and is thrown thousands of years into the future where a stronger Aku rules everything. He has two goals that can end the series: 1 find a time travel source to go back in time and finish off the weaker past Aku and stop this horrible future, or 2 Defeat this current Stronger Aku saving this future and then Time Travel back to stop the Weaker Aku. Most episodes follow one of two ideas: Jack comes across people who are suffering under Aku's evil and protects them, or tries to find a source of Time Travel but is stopped at the last moment by saving people instead of time travelling or by Aku stopping him from reaching it. And then we finally got a 5 episode finale 13 years after the show ended.
Firefox of course. But a show our house gets frustrated over was TerraNova. The time travelling dinosaur series. Only had one season. The entire tail end of the season was just possible story options, but no decisive actions. Almost like the show runners didn't want to make decisions. Then it was cancelled.
Carnivàle is hands-down my favourite show from the early 00s, cancelled after two of a projected six seasons. I held out hope for a revival for more than a decade.
I think Buffy was the best structured. There was an over-all series plot (the end of the world), with each season having it's own over arching plot that ultimately served the series plot, with almost every episode making its way to the end of the season plot, BUT it wasn't so serialized that the episodes couldn't stand on their own, as well. I think that's the best way to do any game.
The Animals of Farthing Wood is probably my favourite show with a built in ending. Which, ok, firstly, based on a book, but 'group of woodland animals forced out of their home by humans concreting over it for a housing project' has only one possible ending - Them finding a new home (Well, technically two, but even by the standards of The Animals of Farthing Wood and Watership Down 'they fail' would be a bummer for a kids show). And S1 ends with them finding a new home (and then subsequent seasons adapt future books in the series. S2 adapting IIRC three different books. And is a lot more serialized (although S1 is more serialized than most of the shows you pointed to with the finding their way home hook, likely because it's adapted from a novel and... While the novel it's adapted from is fairly episodic, episodic novels tend to be more serialized in their overall structures than a season of episodic television) Interestingly, there is a TTRPG that is heavily based on TAoFW, and incorporates that show's defined ending into itself - Briar and Bramble. And there are two endings baked into the game's rules - Either your community of woodland animals forced out of their home by humans with fire and axes find a new home (defined when the group fills out the map they're filling out as they play - a single sheet of paper), or the community dissolves along the way: There's a 'you lose' countdown built into the game's structure, while the rules allow for the game to continue after a TPK (since the idea is if your character dies you elevate a background NPC from the community into a PC - Although PC death does a number on the community clock so I'm not sure how likely the community would be to withstand a TPK)
You could have a Tier 1 story, Tier 2 story, Tier 3 story, and Tier 4 story, like 4 seasons of a TV series. For me, I think I would prefer to run games that way. I feel a little overwhelmed by the lengthy narratives of the 5e hardcover D&D adventures and their like. I'd like to have sub-campaigns or mini campaigns or something, each playing out more like a Faghrd and the Gray Mouser novella instead of a single campaign dedicated to defeating the BBEG over 15 levels of experience.
What happens in my head with even a tangential mention of Quantum Leap: "Theorizing that one could time travel within his own lifetime, Dr. Sam Beckett stepped into the Quantum Leap Excellerator....and vanished. He aeoke to find himself trapped in the past, facing mirror images that were not his own, and driven by an unknown force to change history for the better. His only guide on this journey is Al, an observer from his own time who appears in the form of a hologram that only Sam can see and hear. And so, Doctor Beckett finds himself leaping from life to life, striving to put right what once went wrong, and hoping, each time, that his next leap.....will be the leap home." And yes, I typed all that out from a 40-year-old memory. 😂😂😂 NO one my age remembers Quantum Leap! Such an underrated show.
Infinity train built up a story about the villain of season one, then it got cancelled and later completely deleted from the host. Now we can only pirate the story we got.
I'm still soooo upset that The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance ended where it did. I wanted to see the Garthim Wars! I wanted to see how it caught up with the movie's timeline, or if it ever diverged. Goes to show that even prequel series can leave an unresolved tension when they end suddenly and unexpectedly.
For me, the show that never got its ending was Angel. Iirc they had pushed for 1 extra season to wrap up the story that they were setting up with Season 5, and the studio promised it to them, but cancelled that promise after most of Season 5 had finished production, so they had to hastily rewrite the final episode.
Honestly? It’s not a TV show, it’s actually the first Live Play I watched and is what got me into DnD… Heroes and Halfwits from Rooster Teeth… I guess they didn’t have the views necessary to keep it going, but it was such a fascinating show
Talking about shows that were cut off too soon, for me it's Alphas. It was a show on the Scifi channel in 2011 ran for two seasons, about basically a small government agency of people with superhuman abilities investigating cases of other superhumans popping up. It had a very low key X-men feel to it and I was just incredibly impressed with the writing and characters. Season two ended on a absolutely savage cliffhanger and then the show disappeared.
This is by no means a great show, and I can see why it only got one season...but sweet lords when Fox canceled John Doe after the season one finale, which ended on this massive cliffhanger, I was so angry. I just wanted to know what the hell happened. I would have taken a freaking blog post at that point. Fox was my arch nemises growing up. So many shows canceled just as I got invested.
I keep coming back to my own DnD game in the comments here, but it seems to always be relevant. My game is centered around a school for heroes (and villains) in a world built around late-stage capitalism gone wrong (as though it were possible to go right). The end goal of this campaign is present from the beginning: Deal with your tuition so you can get your hero's license by graduation. Every session between has been a dungeon of the week variety with the only linkage being what my players do to try to grab more monetary rewards and me crossing off a week from the calendar. They only have five years to acquire the gold needed for the bursar. It's been fun and I'm waiting for my players to realize that paying off the tuition might not be the best goal to have. That way I can justify moving toward more anti-establishment plots that strike my personal punk rock fantasy, but we'll get there. Pretty much all of my players lean left on the political spectrum so it's more a matter of when than if.
just, putting my voice out there, but, i always skip the bits involving the 'algorithm wizard' it just, genuinely feels meh at best. im sorry if others are enjoying it, but *im* really not
So, this show did get an ending, because they did find out they were going to be canceled in the middle of season two, but I'm going to say Disney's The Owl House. I will always be curious what they would've done if they've gotten all the seasons they wanted. There's so much potential in that show! Why Disney why!
Okay the best example of Cleveland show that had a set ending or at least the Creator said they knew on episode 1 how they were going to end the show is dinosaurs. The new the yeah they were going to tell if a fun family sitcom about a group of dinosaurs. However they said that the dinosaurs died so that's got to be the way we're going to end the show. However one show that again was a sitcom but the ending was terrible again because they left it on a cliffhanger and the cliffhanger they left on actually made the show Saturday and actually kind of scary was mork & Mindy. I think of the show mork & Mindy were chased by a rogue character that wants to steal Mork's job. But it was pretty clear when the show ended that the creators actually had an idea for another season where mork & Mindy would be hopping around different periods in history. But again the show was canceled and we got an absolutely horrible ending because it is on a cliffhanger. Because it ended on a cliffhanger and made it look like mork & Mindy were killed by cannibals
The Quantum Leap ending annoyed me so much. To this day I still get a bit peeved about it. I would have preferred a scene where he decided to keep going over that stupid sentence on a black screen. So unsatisfying.
Admittedly, I do have a couple "filler" episodes of The Last Airbender that I do skip, but most of them are just because the episode right after is a real banger. Like yes, admittedly I do skip Avatar Day. I saw it once and its still a good episode, but give me Toph, damnit!
I haven’t seen it for ages, but I feel like Power Rangers has a pretty good structure. Monster of the Week episodes but overarching villains and background plots
Infinty Train. It was an anthology series, but there were massive mysteries in the show that we'll never get resolved. The best live action show to tell their story and leave is The Good Place. I know it's far more serialized than what we're talking about here, but it's just the perfect example of it. I have a love-hate relationship with that show, but Once Upon a Time has an excellent, half season arc structure, that might be pretty useful for a campaign, and I've never thought about that before. Also, I'm gonna unsub just so Oddwick can stay lol
OK, making this a seperate comment because it's an entirely seperate thought, but while American tv shows apparently never used to be allowed to end when the story was over, unless there was a sequal show lined up (TNG leading into Voyager), that isn't true globally. A lot of UK television shows end specifically because the writer wants to move on, having said everything they wanted to say. They're sometimes... Encouraged... to make more (to the point that Only Fools and Horses creator and sole writer John Sullivan advised One Foot In The Grave crator and sole writer, David Renwick to _actively kill off_ the protagonist of that sit com, Victor Meldrew, if he was serious about never wanting to write it again because otherwise with how successful it was the BBC would likely keep coming back requesting occasional Christmas specials as they'd done with Only Fools), but... Serialised novel adaptations such as Pride and Prejudice wouldn't be possible without show creators being allowed to end the show when the show's done, while Quatermass got sequel series there's no impression they kept going with that because the show wasn't allowed to die, not all successful (or at least noteworthy) serials that weren't adapted from novels got sequels - A For Andromeda and The Singing Detective both spring to mind there), and outside of 'the creator coming back occasionally for specials no matter which direction that relationship was in' there's always been shows that just stop because the creator decides it should end there.
As of right now, RWBY's finale is up in the air after Rooster Teeth shut down and maybe revival, but that doesn't mean that RWBY has enough financial support to get us Vol 10 to finally end the series properly. (Also, anyone who says it got bad after Vol 3 didn't stay passed that because Vol 6 picked back up and Vol 8 was incredible. And Vol 9 was NOT "filler".)
Did you not hear the “this isn’t an invitation for joke answers for a show you didn’t like the ending of” part? Or do you think Critical Role was canceled and didn’t get to finish the way their _(apparently)_ scripted story?
"It almost feels like there's some sort of overwhelming system that's been designed to try to make us only view women as objects." In the shows that cater to pre-dominantly men, perhaps. Such as the ones that you listed. But if you had shows that catered to women sensibilities then you would find that this is flipped. There men have traits that are desirable for women and that women who are watching it want. Ergo, they are seen as objects of desire.
What’s your favorite TV show with a built-in ending as part of the premise!
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The Good Place or Ted Lasso, hands down.
Babylon 5
Gravity Falls
I think an important video to make going along with your analogy would be how to improvise a finale when your "show gets canceled" and you thought you had more time
Ah, Avatar the Last Airbender, the show that tricked thousands of players into thinking they wanted to play a Way of the 4 Elements Monk
Ha ye that's a horrible translation of the idea
I think you're not giving Last Airbender's plot structure enough credit.
Yeah, the *pacing* is slow for a tabletop game, but the basic idea is pretty solid actually. You have the big goal: defeat the Firelord, and to do that, you need to master the remaining three elements. And for the first one you have to go all the way to the other side of the map. Along the way, you have adventures where you can do world-building, reveal and deal with backstory, advance the plot, or just have wacky hijinks. Listen and respond to your players to figure out the exact proportions, but the basic idea is pretty solid.
Agreed. I've never run the official Powered by the Apocalypse game they came out with (though I've read it and heard good things from those who have played/run it), but I will always content that the Last Airbender is the most accurate to how a D&D style campaign should feel session to session of any show I've ever seen.
Yeah the premise is pretty much ideal for an episodic D&D campaign. A really great balance of hijinks to story and character development, plus interesting characters. Add in a great BBEG who you know you're going to face at one point and (somewhat) clear objectives to accomplish before you face them. Narratively, that's really all you want for a D&D campaign.
The Stargate series are probably my favorite sci-fi franchise. I love others like Firefly, Battlestar Galatica, and Farscape but I saw SG-1 when I was young and something about it has always struck a chord in me so it has a special place in my heart always.
The Owl House and Carmen Sandiego are fascinating examples of getting an ending but not the ones they'd clearly planned. Both shows wrap things up pretty neatly, yet you've still got all these threads hanging where they were going to go if they hadn't each been denied a full finale season.
I’m so mad that Owl House got the ax… I feel like Disney saying “we want episodic shows and not serialized storytelling because it’s too complex for kids” is so f******* stupid…. 1.) I’m willing to bet adults made a moderate/large % of the audience and 2.) kids are WAY smarter than boomer execs give them credit for… pretty sure children are smarter than the median voter
Oh man, I did really like finale of The Owl House but seeing the montage they did that was obviously a taste of a bunch of the episodes they didn't get to do in the human world hurt me.
@@joshdavid9256it’s been a while since I’ve watched it so I forgot their names but the main girl and the green haired girlfriend were sooooo cute together…. It really is a shame
I think it’s super important for a table to really discuss what they are looking for and to do regular check-ins beyond just a session 0. A lot of the online DMing advice is to have big open-ended sandbox campaigns with player-driven storylines. However, both the table that I DM and the table that I play don’t like that style. We find that we end up spinning our wheels and not knowing what to do. So, instead, we do moderate-sized (20-30 session) narrative-driven campaigns with clear end-goals
I will keep saying that every DM should ask every Player how they want their Character to die. Then plan on that ending to happen....eventually.
I would argue C3 is kind of like this, with some amount of player variance so im excited to see the mystified about it in 3 years or so
After 2 years he's at 70 episodes in C1. I would give it five years at least.
@@lukasl3440and C1 is the shortest of the campaigns so it’s definitely gonna take longer with the others
Secret option: a show has a killer first season, gets a mediocre follow up in season 2 and is then cancelled. See: The OA, Altered Carbon, probably others but those I am most salty about lol
I've never been pushed a video so early in its life. There were just 83 views at time of writing, and 3 comments. So here is a little something to feed the system.
Behold the power of the arcane…. Wizards can do wonderful, magical things
Story invention was also something that dragged along in charmed. Its actually impressive they managed to continue after dealing with the literal source of all evil... but it still went on too long.
20:55 That's what I'm doing. We don't meet that often to play ongoing campain.
So my players are part of secret organization of a city council of Urep and every session is a new mission.
It can be retrieving magical item, solving murder mystery, train robbery, tactical breach rescueing hostages, bodyguarding, etc.....
I have one ongoing theath but I don't think my players noticed it.
Love that premise!
Alf ended with what was supposed to be a cliffhanger episode in which the titular character gets caught by government agents--but then the show was never renewed, and so Alf's capture and presumed dissection became the grim ending of the series.
Star Trek Voyager is a great example of a show with a series-long end goal (getting back home), that they were able to play off with random sci-fi nonsense episodes as well as some that progressed that primary objective. It's really the only time Star Trek used that model of story structuring, and it worked pretty well. They established the goal in the very first episode, and it happily existed as just an underlying tension that was more or less pressing depending on the episode, but it was ALWAYS there.
There was a show called "Sanctuary" that had the premise of alternate evolution still occurring within the world (like people who could collapse their skeleton to fit into incredibly small places, werewolves, Big Foot, vampires). It was a SyFy show back in the day. Heavy green screen but with some great actors (Christopher Heyerdahl is in it and I have always enjoyed him).
The last episode included a large group of Abnormals (what they were called) rising up to fight a war against the injustices against them. The last shot was of their force marching... and the show was cancelled.
Another show, similar premise, was called Alphas. Again, people who have heightened abilities but these were a little more grounded. No vampires but someone that can control their adrenaline to push their body. Someone else who can cause microseizures in someone else's brain to make them susceptible to suggestion. Stuff like that.
Alphas ended up a group of Alphas rising up to fight against the injustices done against them. Last shot was of their force marching... and the show was cancelled.
I'm not salty about either of them. At all.
man! Alphas was stabbed in the back hard. That last season was baller. Also, if i recall corectly, the final shot was basically all of new york city being activated as alphas.
a good cautionary tale is also Twin Peaks. The investigation of "Who killed Laura Palmer?" was active, moving forward in nearly every episode, while acting as a scaffold for countless other stories both connected and independent from that... and then the network forced them to answer the question of the investigation partway through Season 2. The show lost its sense of purpose for most of the rest of Season 2 before regaining its footing on a wider mystery in time to finish out the season but too late to avoid cancellation
Hannibal (NBC) is such a rare gem in this respect. I know they were ready and willing to start gearing up for season 4 when they got canceled, but they still managed to bring the story to an EXTREMELY satisfying end. I know people who hated the end or who felt neutral about it, but even among people who hated it, I don't know anyone who felt like it was rushed, out of character, or tonally "off". They managed to fulfill every necessary plot thread and leave enough loose ends and escape routes that, if some other network had made an offer, they could have picked up with season 4---without cheapening the catharsis of the s3 finale :)
I don't know if it's a shame or irrelevant, but I feel like Twin Peaks never got a proper conclusion, but still feels like a satisfying cliffhanger ending.
I’m always worried about the balance between making the villain threatening and working towards their goal while still giving the party time to breathe and feel like they can do a few side quests, without letting them think “do whatever, the final boss battle will happen whenever you go to this location.
Tell your players that after a certain number of sessions (a living world), the BBEG will take a step toward their goal. Don't tell them how many steps are needed or how many sessions take place; you can make this fluid. Personally, I make each time frame shorter. Leave the choice to them; if they want to speed run the BBEG, let them; if they want to explore other things, let them. Once the counter hits zero, end the session by saying they all get a feeling that the forces of evil, etc., have moved a step closer to their dominance or something related to your BBEG, I had one that was an earthquake dragon being released, and each time a chain broke, they felt earthquakes, getting stronger with each chain break. At this point, the counter starts again, and the players now need to rethink their goals.
On the back end, if what was supposed to be a two-session side encounter turns into four, add two to the timer, and never count character arc stories against the timer unless they specifically are meant to move the plot along. You can also roll dice to determine the session amount and the number of steps needed if you want some randomness.
10:00 only 8 words come to mind with this… “Livin on the edge, fightin crime, spinnin webs…”
♥️♥️♥️
Now that is a concept I've never heard of before. This will be interesting (*grabs popcorn*)
When I was a preteen, I was obsessed with the show Moonlight (starring Alex O'Loughlin in 2008). This show was one of my first introductions to vampire plots, and I'm still obsessed to this day! We only got one season, and I still haven't gotten over it in over 15 years!
I thought Moonlight was a fever dream and that it didn't exist. I watched it also as a preteen/teen
@ Heyyyy! I've never met ANYONE who remembers Moonlight!! I also thought it was a fever dream until a google deep dive a few years ago!
Wooo so excited. I’ve just been thinking about writing possible “endings” for your own pc. It gives the DM a good understanding of the character/campaign you want to play
Pushing Daisies was a great whimsical shiw that got taken away from us too soon.
In a few weeks, I'm going to start running an "Everyday Heroes" (basically the 5e version of D20 Modern) game, and my idea is a kind of Mission:Impossible/X-Files campaign. There probably won't be a major through-line plot, but more along the lines of "solve the supernatural mystery of the week" kind of thing.
10:25 I write this having never gotten to see the years-later TV movie, but Deadwood comes to mind here.
I was going to post Deadwood as well ! The TV movie is good but it feels more like a celebration of the show rather than a proper conclusion. With the unfortunate progressive decline in health of the show's creator it felt like a way to say 'goodbye' to the characters that the 3rd season did not.
Having said that - the 3rd season ending while abrubt, felt appropriate. "Life goes on. Sometimes the bad guys win and don't get their comeuppance"
@telarr9164 Feels oddly prescient just lately...
@@Major_Lag Indeed...
Gargoyles. The show just ends with no complete ending.
Your videos are very insightful and I’m very grateful we get to hear your thoughts!
I just DM'd my first game recently and am trying to figure out if I want to flesh out some ideas for a world that's been bouncing around my head for years. I really think this series will help me once I start to get up and running on campaign prep.
What a Hilarious video, I just started a Genesys game where the PCs are individuals aboard a ship that was flug across the universe and now they hope to get home somehow
Not so much TV series, but the longest running campaign I was a part of was in the Dresden Files RPG, each of us were playing characters that were pretty deep into the supernatural world and our GM used the books' events as a basis with our story running parallel to Harry's and even intersecting at times (as I was playing a White Court Vampire during the events White Night while another was playing a practitioner at the same times kind'a made it a necessity).
While our campaign was happening at the same times as Harry's in the same city (for the most part) and we interacted with canon characters from time to time it was more that it set the pace than outright railroaded our stories as we each had our own adversaries and obstacles that cropped up in a similar manner to the books.
The algorithm is weird sometimes. (All the time?)
About a week ago i was checking to see if My name is Earl was on peacock. Not seeing it i pulled up a compilation of the list on RUclips, then watched a few reviews.
Now it seems like all of the channels I watch consistently referenced my name is Earl this month.
Soap is the show whose cancellation cliffhanger always sticks with me. It was a sitcom that was a parody of soap operas, with an absolutely banger cast including Billy Crystal and several stars of other sitcoms in the 80s. I watched it in reruns on Comedy Central as a kid, and was *bereft* when its last episode ends with three or four major characters facing “certain death” (including one in front of a firing squad!) 😅
I guess as a player, what I'm looking for in a campaign structure is... dang it, Matt Mercer Effect but Critical Role. Campaign 1 particularly, which had a few clearly defined "season" arcs while still giving time for episodic adventures and character exploration. Campaign 2 meanwhile I liken to a sandbox, which gradually developed an ongoing story once the players made clear which leads they were most invested in. And Campaign 3... definitely feels like it was made with a specific end in mind but by the time it got it didn't feel like a fitting resolution to the character arcs that developed on the way, How I Met Your Mother-style.
In terms of show approaches I like, I think the Monk format is strong: it's less of an over-arching mystery and more "we'll make an episodic show but when we do the finale THAT's what it'll be". I've personally found recurring villains in murder mysteries really hard to enjoy, since the whole draw of the genre is seeing mysteries solved and the murderers caught, so having one who keeps getting away, ESPECIALLY if the show keeps pulling contrivances out of its ass to save its "super cool bad guy" (BONES, but it happened to a couple of Murdoch Mysteries recurring threats too) ... yeah. Bonus points if the audience doesn't think the villain is as cool as the writers clearly assume they do. (At least in a D&D campaign, it's easy to gauge player reactions and cut a villain's story short of that's what they want)
One aspect that you didn't discuss was the reverse of being unexpectedly cancelled: the show thinks its over and does a big wrap-up... and then they get renewed. Apparently this happened with Seinfeld's second season, but the main example I know of is another kids' cartoon: My Little Pony Friendship is Magic. Season 3's finale was supposed to be the end, according to its writers, but the show was so popular it ended up running for 9. Sometimes a show can make this work by making the "end point" feel more like a beginning (for this example, Season 3 ended with the protag transforming and accepting a new responsibility in the world), while others get awkward as they clearly "untie the loose ends" or forget they happened. (Episode 52 of the Sonic X anime is SO blatantly supposed to be the finale it hurts, then they got a third season) Couples getting together are often a victim of this, as god forbid a show actually write a stable couple where one isn't dead or kidnapped.
In my opinion, one of the best genres/mediums to look at for some potential story structure lessons or advice for TTRPGs is Shonen battle manga/anime; they're almost all designed to go on for a long time and often (but not always) with a clear end-goal; but the big thing that they share with TTRPGs that _no other_ narrative medium does is that they are almost _all_ long stories driven not primarily by _plot_ progress (or even standard character arcs, although most of them have _do_ both of those), but by progress in _character power_ and _competence._ To me, this opened up a lot of really useful insight, and is one of the biggest factors missing from most other long-form storytelling sources when trying to derive inspiration for RPG campaigns.
There are the obvious Tournament and Training arcs (the latter of which, I think, should actually be way more common in TTRPGs; there's a _ton_ of potential there that's not been tapped into very much), but there are a lot of other types of story sequence that take advantage of the importance of power levels in really fun ways. In particular, objective-based non-direct-combat tournaments (like the Hunter Exam, the Chuunin Exam, many of the U.A. Training Exercises, and the entirety of Tower of God) are common occurrences in a lot of battle manga that translate _really_ well to TTRPGs; and there are also some really good arcs across the genre that specifically take advantage of having the main characters know for sure that they are _not_ yet powerful enough to take on the villains through combat, but still have important stuff to do, and so must basically try to accomplish their goals while using 'RP' and 'utility' skills to avoid combat (a couple great ones that come to mind are Krillin and Gohan trying to gather the Dragonballs on Namek without provoking Vegeta or Freiza's guys too much; or all the stuff with the Phantom Troupe at the Auction in Hunter X Hunter).
Haven’t even finished the video yet but just dropping a comment for the algorithm. Love your work Mike! Always makes my day whenever I see you uploaded.
I've got something similar to this in a campaign I'm running! It's based off of the golden age arc of Berserk and not all my players have read it but they know something awful is going to happen, because it takes place 2 years before the mainline campaign to explain the backstory of one of the players (who is not Guts based, don't worry). They're one of the few survivors of a once prestigious mercenary band who's been vague about their past so far, meanwhile all the players are LIVING their backstory.
Another show that chose to end, Succession
They could have continued it even after the finale and the end goal of who keeps the company, god knows the characters were left in very interesting positions
But the story was done, the show was finished, and boy am I happy with how it ended.
Talking about episodic shows with long running plots I was reminded of Burn Notice, the first few season handle the long form story great, keeping it to a b or c plot of each episode, but it only works for so long. As for shows with a rushed ending Star Trek Enterprise has a terrible series finale as they try to wrap things up.
I would have really liked to see Babylon 5 get the 5 seasons from the get-go rather than have to rush season 4 and then get surprised with a season 5.
I agree with you, but I do think the production issues Babylon 5 faced make it a good example for GMs to learn from about how to structure a narrative that's easy to improvise within while still maintaining a sense of consistency. For example, it's because of Babylon 5 that my important villains always have a lieutenant or partner or estranged child or something who can fill the antagonist role if the party manages to take down the planned villain early.
Where's that commenter that always says "This is a good channel. I like Mike."??? Did I somehow get here before them?
I'm curious if you've ever watched Babylon 5. It had a 5 season overall arc, with smaller sub arcs throughout. I've used it as a model to varying degrees of success myself, depending on a lot of things (I'm the forever GM, so I sometimes get distracted with new game ideas because I don't get enough of a break to not burn out on my current campaign, but that's a me thing)
Now, granted B5's other strength was that JMS had "outs" for every character if the actor needed to/decided to leave, and on the down side, it had to deal with the canceled/uncanceled dance that turned season's 4 and 5 into a bit of a mess (and loosing his notes for season 5 at a convention) but I honestly think that almost makes it more suitable for a model for TTRPGs, because Life will strike and make changes that have nothing to do with the game's storyline.
I will never get over Firefly. The show was ahead of it's time.
Funnily enough, I've often had the opposite problem in the campaigns I've been in - everything is bent towards making progress towards a single, overarching narrative goal, reducing the room that the characters and the world have to breathe. It's hardly total - the DMs among our group have been thoughtful and invested and do take care to interweave our characters' personal stories throughout the main plot - but the overwhelming, time-dependent stakes of Saving The Princess or Preventing The End of The World mean that that gets focused on at the expense of downtime or side quests that might explore those things more organically.
To take an example: my poor artificer was a maker of weapons and had aspirations of item enchanting but didn't get to make a single weapon or magic item before the very last session of the campaign because the party was always travelling from place to place to fulfil the main objective and didn't have secure access to a proper forge for enough downtime to do anything.
Fortunately we're decent communicators and we're taking our most recent campaign in a more unstructured, player-driven direction, so I'm hoping that this time the pace will be a little more sedate!
You didn't mention The Good Place. Really clear seasonal arcs and a really satisfying conclusion at the end of the series.
You also didn't mention Doctor Who or Rick and Morty (they sprang to mind as I was listening to you)
I kinda like how Rick and Morty explicitly breaks the fourth wall and explains their ever-changing attitude toward episodic adventures and the main, ongoing, lore-heavy series narratives.
supergeekmike upload.. im a happy them today..
I haven't run anything very long term since my "good ol' days" back in the 90s. I'd say that back then, I tended to run stuff in a format more like classic Dr Who. Several weeks on a story, especially something like the Key To Time season. Spend several weeks on a story, with a bunch of NPCs, mysteries, etc., then come to a conclusion that includes some kind of "progression," and then the PCs move on to the next arc. Maybe a new character would join, or an older character would cycle out, but the overall group continued. I guess that's sort of like the series with each season having a story, like Veronica Mars.
We're gonna be seeing Oddwick for a while aren't we..? Ugh.
Justified was a show that got to choose their end date. At the end of S4 the showrunners were told they can have 3 more seasons, and they replied "we only want 2". They tied off all the loose ends by the end of S6 and gave each main character a satisfying payoff.
An example you didn't list is Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
It ends with Order 66 and the Revenge of the Sith. There's still enough wiggle room that we don't know exactly how things will end for some of the characters.
If you've got a regular group a prequel campaign, where the players play as doomed characters, could work.
EXU: Calamity we got to watch the Apocalypse happen, but it was in a City we hadnt seen before. We knew the general, but not the specific
Forever was such a bummer (gone after 1 season on a very cool cliffhanger) and Blacklist moved the goal post so often that I lost track.
my name is earl mention,,
I *need* that Avatar video yesterday
Bayalon 5 is show with a built in ending that I like. It was pitched as a 5 season show back in the 1990's now a full 30 years ago.
The premise is that two Eldar s
Alien species about to go war and drag everyone into there war. The story is told with problem of the week with a b plot that advance the story, with a few episodes dedicated to advancing the plot.
The show's story was wrapped in 4 season because they didn't know if they were going to get a season 5. But they did so they had to fill season 5.
While the production values look a little date the show is still good. The story is amazing.
Man, I'm struggling really hard to come up with a show I liked with a built-in ending that never got closure... Oh! Stargate Voyager... I mean Universe.
Somewhat related to you bringing up Stargate SG-1 having to shift gears when the original villains are no longer satisfying, I absolutely love the arc of the SG-1 vs. Goa'uld war: The good guys start out at a huge disadvantage against basically unstoppable bad guys, and because of the immense character flaws of the bad guys, the good guys rather quickly narrow the gap to the degree that defeating the bad guys becomes trivial, and then new bad guys and new situations need to arise.
Another very good video. Thanks!
The show I loved with a long term goal that was the "end" of the show was Samurai Jack. In Samurai Jack, he fails to defeat the Evil Aku and is thrown thousands of years into the future where a stronger Aku rules everything. He has two goals that can end the series: 1 find a time travel source to go back in time and finish off the weaker past Aku and stop this horrible future, or 2 Defeat this current Stronger Aku saving this future and then Time Travel back to stop the Weaker Aku. Most episodes follow one of two ideas: Jack comes across people who are suffering under Aku's evil and protects them, or tries to find a source of Time Travel but is stopped at the last moment by saving people instead of time travelling or by Aku stopping him from reaching it. And then we finally got a 5 episode finale 13 years after the show ended.
Appearently the algorytm links your channel very well ,as it literally said *no views*
Are you teaching a serial killer Al Gore how to Water Canon? What’s an Al Gory T.M. ? Jkjk
Firefox of course.
But a show our house gets frustrated over was TerraNova. The time travelling dinosaur series. Only had one season. The entire tail end of the season was just possible story options, but no decisive actions. Almost like the show runners didn't want to make decisions. Then it was cancelled.
Carnivàle is hands-down my favourite show from the early 00s, cancelled after two of a projected six seasons. I held out hope for a revival for more than a decade.
The Finder. And after watching it several times, I think it ended the right way anyway.
SGM: LOST managed to make it through the writer's strike unscathed!
Rousseau: 😐
I think Buffy was the best structured. There was an over-all series plot (the end of the world), with each season having it's own over arching plot that ultimately served the series plot, with almost every episode making its way to the end of the season plot, BUT it wasn't so serialized that the episodes couldn't stand on their own, as well. I think that's the best way to do any game.
The Animals of Farthing Wood is probably my favourite show with a built in ending. Which, ok, firstly, based on a book, but 'group of woodland animals forced out of their home by humans concreting over it for a housing project' has only one possible ending - Them finding a new home (Well, technically two, but even by the standards of The Animals of Farthing Wood and Watership Down 'they fail' would be a bummer for a kids show). And S1 ends with them finding a new home (and then subsequent seasons adapt future books in the series. S2 adapting IIRC three different books. And is a lot more serialized (although S1 is more serialized than most of the shows you pointed to with the finding their way home hook, likely because it's adapted from a novel and... While the novel it's adapted from is fairly episodic, episodic novels tend to be more serialized in their overall structures than a season of episodic television)
Interestingly, there is a TTRPG that is heavily based on TAoFW, and incorporates that show's defined ending into itself - Briar and Bramble. And there are two endings baked into the game's rules - Either your community of woodland animals forced out of their home by humans with fire and axes find a new home (defined when the group fills out the map they're filling out as they play - a single sheet of paper), or the community dissolves along the way: There's a 'you lose' countdown built into the game's structure, while the rules allow for the game to continue after a TPK (since the idea is if your character dies you elevate a background NPC from the community into a PC - Although PC death does a number on the community clock so I'm not sure how likely the community would be to withstand a TPK)
You could have a Tier 1 story, Tier 2 story, Tier 3 story, and Tier 4 story, like 4 seasons of a TV series. For me, I think I would prefer to run games that way. I feel a little overwhelmed by the lengthy narratives of the 5e hardcover D&D adventures and their like. I'd like to have sub-campaigns or mini campaigns or something, each playing out more like a Faghrd and the Gray Mouser novella instead of a single campaign dedicated to defeating the BBEG over 15 levels of experience.
What happens in my head with even a tangential mention of Quantum Leap:
"Theorizing that one could time travel within his own lifetime, Dr. Sam Beckett stepped into the Quantum Leap Excellerator....and vanished.
He aeoke to find himself trapped in the past, facing mirror images that were not his own, and driven by an unknown force to change history for the better. His only guide on this journey is Al, an observer from his own time who appears in the form of a hologram that only Sam can see and hear. And so, Doctor Beckett finds himself leaping from life to life, striving to put right what once went wrong, and hoping, each time, that his next leap.....will be the leap home."
And yes, I typed all that out from a 40-year-old memory. 😂😂😂 NO one my age remembers Quantum Leap! Such an underrated show.
Infinity train built up a story about the villain of season one, then it got cancelled and later completely deleted from the host. Now we can only pirate the story we got.
Oh my beloved Mindhunter, a 3rd season would’ve been so so good 😔
I'm still soooo upset that The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance ended where it did. I wanted to see the Garthim Wars! I wanted to see how it caught up with the movie's timeline, or if it ever diverged. Goes to show that even prequel series can leave an unresolved tension when they end suddenly and unexpectedly.
For me, the show that never got its ending was Angel. Iirc they had pushed for 1 extra season to wrap up the story that they were setting up with Season 5, and the studio promised it to them, but cancelled that promise after most of Season 5 had finished production, so they had to hastily rewrite the final episode.
I like the images on your screens.
🙂
Babylon 5! Maybe one of the first tv novels planned for five seasons. Even filmed their final episode just in case it got cancelled before its time.
Hello Mike! Love your content😊
I enjoyed Drive! Was sad it went away so quickly!
Honestly? It’s not a TV show, it’s actually the first Live Play I watched and is what got me into DnD… Heroes and Halfwits from Rooster Teeth… I guess they didn’t have the views necessary to keep it going, but it was such a fascinating show
HBO’s Westworld never getting finished is a damn travesty
Talking about shows that were cut off too soon, for me it's Alphas. It was a show on the Scifi channel in 2011 ran for two seasons, about basically a small government agency of people with superhuman abilities investigating cases of other superhumans popping up. It had a very low key X-men feel to it and I was just incredibly impressed with the writing and characters. Season two ended on a absolutely savage cliffhanger and then the show disappeared.
This is by no means a great show, and I can see why it only got one season...but sweet lords when Fox canceled John Doe after the season one finale, which ended on this massive cliffhanger, I was so angry. I just wanted to know what the hell happened. I would have taken a freaking blog post at that point. Fox was my arch nemises growing up. So many shows canceled just as I got invested.
This is a good channel. I like Mike.
I keep coming back to my own DnD game in the comments here, but it seems to always be relevant.
My game is centered around a school for heroes (and villains) in a world built around late-stage capitalism gone wrong (as though it were possible to go right). The end goal of this campaign is present from the beginning: Deal with your tuition so you can get your hero's license by graduation. Every session between has been a dungeon of the week variety with the only linkage being what my players do to try to grab more monetary rewards and me crossing off a week from the calendar. They only have five years to acquire the gold needed for the bursar.
It's been fun and I'm waiting for my players to realize that paying off the tuition might not be the best goal to have. That way I can justify moving toward more anti-establishment plots that strike my personal punk rock fantasy, but we'll get there. Pretty much all of my players lean left on the political spectrum so it's more a matter of when than if.
just, putting my voice out there, but, i always skip the bits involving the 'algorithm wizard' it just, genuinely feels meh at best. im sorry if others are enjoying it, but *im* really not
Infinity Train is a show I'd really like to have seen more from
Okay, so is the next video about Damsels in Distress or Fridging?
So, this show did get an ending, because they did find out they were going to be canceled in the middle of season two, but I'm going to say Disney's The Owl House. I will always be curious what they would've done if they've gotten all the seasons they wanted. There's so much potential in that show! Why Disney why!
Okay the best example of Cleveland show that had a set ending or at least the Creator said they knew on episode 1 how they were going to end the show is dinosaurs. The new the yeah they were going to tell if a fun family sitcom about a group of dinosaurs. However they said that the dinosaurs died so that's got to be the way we're going to end the show.
However one show that again was a sitcom but the ending was terrible again because they left it on a cliffhanger and the cliffhanger they left on actually made the show Saturday and actually kind of scary was mork & Mindy. I think of the show mork & Mindy were chased by a rogue character that wants to steal Mork's job. But it was pretty clear when the show ended that the creators actually had an idea for another season where mork & Mindy would be hopping around different periods in history. But again the show was canceled and we got an absolutely horrible ending because it is on a cliffhanger. Because it ended on a cliffhanger and made it look like mork & Mindy were killed by cannibals
Stargate mentioned. Deploying comment to provide engagement.
The Quantum Leap ending annoyed me so much. To this day I still get a bit peeved about it. I would have preferred a scene where he decided to keep going over that stupid sentence on a black screen. So unsatisfying.
I the middle of my back swing.
Comments are good for the RUclips algorithm!
Admittedly, I do have a couple "filler" episodes of The Last Airbender that I do skip, but most of them are just because the episode right after is a real banger. Like yes, admittedly I do skip Avatar Day. I saw it once and its still a good episode, but give me Toph, damnit!
I haven’t seen it for ages, but I feel like Power Rangers has a pretty good structure. Monster of the Week episodes but overarching villains and background plots
Infinty Train. It was an anthology series, but there were massive mysteries in the show that we'll never get resolved.
The best live action show to tell their story and leave is The Good Place. I know it's far more serialized than what we're talking about here, but it's just the perfect example of it.
I have a love-hate relationship with that show, but Once Upon a Time has an excellent, half season arc structure, that might be pretty useful for a campaign, and I've never thought about that before.
Also, I'm gonna unsub just so Oddwick can stay lol
Oh boy. Haven't heard anyone mention heroes in a long time. That was such a shame
The second you reach 100,000 subscribers is the second I unsubscribe just so we can keep Oddwick a little longer.
I think I might end up missing Oddwick, his voice is kinda charming. It's a shame he's going to go away at some time.
OK, making this a seperate comment because it's an entirely seperate thought, but while American tv shows apparently never used to be allowed to end when the story was over, unless there was a sequal show lined up (TNG leading into Voyager), that isn't true globally. A lot of UK television shows end specifically because the writer wants to move on, having said everything they wanted to say. They're sometimes... Encouraged... to make more (to the point that Only Fools and Horses creator and sole writer John Sullivan advised One Foot In The Grave crator and sole writer, David Renwick to _actively kill off_ the protagonist of that sit com, Victor Meldrew, if he was serious about never wanting to write it again because otherwise with how successful it was the BBC would likely keep coming back requesting occasional Christmas specials as they'd done with Only Fools), but... Serialised novel adaptations such as Pride and Prejudice wouldn't be possible without show creators being allowed to end the show when the show's done, while Quatermass got sequel series there's no impression they kept going with that because the show wasn't allowed to die, not all successful (or at least noteworthy) serials that weren't adapted from novels got sequels - A For Andromeda and The Singing Detective both spring to mind there), and outside of 'the creator coming back occasionally for specials no matter which direction that relationship was in' there's always been shows that just stop because the creator decides it should end there.
As of right now, RWBY's finale is up in the air after Rooster Teeth shut down and maybe revival, but that doesn't mean that RWBY has enough financial support to get us Vol 10 to finally end the series properly.
(Also, anyone who says it got bad after Vol 3 didn't stay passed that because Vol 6 picked back up and Vol 8 was incredible. And Vol 9 was NOT "filler".)
Critical role campaign 3
Did you not hear the “this isn’t an invitation for joke answers for a show you didn’t like the ending of” part? Or do you think Critical Role was canceled and didn’t get to finish the way their _(apparently)_ scripted story?
I assumed they meant C3 feels like a story with an ending in mind, since a few others have said the same in the comments
Someone else remembers Drive! I loved the show, even if it was terrible.
Haha that’s exactly how I feel about it!
"It almost feels like there's some sort of overwhelming system that's been designed to try to make us only view women as objects." In the shows that cater to pre-dominantly men, perhaps. Such as the ones that you listed. But if you had shows that catered to women sensibilities then you would find that this is flipped. There men have traits that are desirable for women and that women who are watching it want. Ergo, they are seen as objects of desire.