Some nice, smooth, consistent quality. Better Call Saul was in my opinion pretty consistent. Single season anime is almost always consistent, like My Dress-Up Darling or Terror in Resonance.
Not dragging on longer than the series needs to seems to be a key point.
The Expanse seemed to be pretty even throughout its six season run. Maybe the only real "ding" is the fourth season where most of Jame's crew is on a planet.
Firefly. I'm not sure if there was enough gas in that show's tank to have kept it on this list or if the plug getting pulled at 14 episodes did it a favor for us fan's collective opinion of it.
Though I'd imagine that "space opera" is easier to keep the story/plot quality pretty even as writers can always just switch to a different set of characters to avoid having to deal with writing their way out of plot corners.
The Expanse was good but it's a damn shame it didn't get three more seasons to cover the final book trilogy. It omitted some of the most amazing setpiece points.
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Specifically Bobby fighting the capital ship in just her power armor then riding the nuke to kill it Dr. Strangelove style
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Oh yeah, there'd be some pretty good space fight set pieces. But trying to visually conceptualize all the Proto-molecule Builders and "Whatever the fuck extra dimensional critters they pissed off" probably would have been too difficult to do in a way to make everybody happy.
Also, what was it... like a 30 year time jump for the last chunk of books? That would have been a miserable thing to put all the main cast through for another 3~5 seasons.
It was a 10 year time jump so here's hoping we get a reboot in a few years and also it was cancelled because the guy that played Alex the pilot turned out to be a sex pest.
Nevermind you're right it was a 30 year time jump I just accepted it as the sort of future tech they had could explain away the fact Holden and friends would all be old and decrepit by that time in universe.
outside of shows that are intentionally anthologies, that sounds to me like OP's fear of shows not only dragging on longer than they need to, but also endlessly dragging the viewer nowhere forever.
Yeah... I've definitely grown to enjoy shows that know they have to end and know what that ending is going to be instead of just dragging the corpses of all the characters through eternity.
I get wanting to watch a show forever, getting attached to characters and their antics (looking at you Red Dwarf) but its okay to let the characters and their stories fade into the sunset as it were.
True, and the same applies to the book that was adapted into that particular season. Cibola Burn is by far the weakest book, but then it's followed by Nemesis Games, which is by far the best one. I do think, however, that The Expanse starts off very slow, and it only picks up the pace after the Donnager, three or four episodes in.
Surely the biggest ding in The Expanse was the Rocinante pilot getting fired for sex pestery?
Would have been a bigger ding if they kept the sex pest around, no?
Also, I'm fine separating the plot stuff from the actor's who are being shitty human beings.
Yeah, at least they did the right thing there, but for me personally seeing that guy is a stain on the series, even though the allegations came out later. I can't really watch anything that had Kevin Spacey in it either.
Oh yeah... it definitely negatively colored a lot of the "touching scenes" that this character has throughout the series.