Last week, Fox announced that House’s eighth season will be the end of its run. While it’s sometimes hard to see a well-liked show get canceled, sometimes it’s long overdue.
Television is a curious medium, and it’s different from film. A filmmaker can create a big, self-contained story that doesn’t necessarily have to please the viewer. To paraphrase an interview with Community creator Dan Harmon on an episode of WTF with Marc Maron, you can make a film about cutting your dick with a razor and bring it to Sundance, people can boo and you can say that that’s the point—and you can be right. Film is often used to send a message rather than to keep enough viewers interested. In television, at the end of the day, the whole point of the content is to keep viewers coming back week-to-week; that’s arguably harder than making a high-caliber feature film.
Therefore, TV is inherently open-ended. A show’s creators never know how long (or perhaps more often, short) their run is going to be. Some shows flourish creatively but never find a large mainstream audience (I’m lookin’ at you, Arrested Development). Some shows are hits out of the gate and stay that way for years. But just as present are the shows that have seen their prime and now need to go quietly into the night.
House is a prime example of a former hit that has now dropped off creatively. Having once been a big fan of the show myself, I admit it’s hard to see. But at a certain point, we have to accept the drawbacks of the medium of TV. Sometimes shows that deserve to go on longer don’t get the chance, and sometimes shows are given way more time than they should have been given. This is the nature of an advertiser-based business. Unfortunately, if a show is making enough money for a network, they’re going to keep it on regardless of the amount of story (or lack thereof) there is left to tell. Shows like House, Showtime’s Dexter and countless others have had strong early seasons, only to devolve into weak TV that actually makes viewers doubt whether the show was ever good in the first place.
TV’s virtues can also be its drawbacks. Viewers build relationships with the shows they like, but those shows are constantly at risk of termination. These days, it’s becoming more commonplace for show-creators to set end dates for their show. Breaking Bad series creator Vince Gilligan has been adamant that the show’s fifth season be its last. While I’m sure some of Breaking Bad’s fan base wants the show to go on forever, true fans would never want to sacrifice quality for the sake of quantity.
