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To: MayflowerMadam
Spinoffs make business sense because they offer a built in initial audience and a better shot at ratings good enough for renewal. That advantage though has a problem attached in that the spinoff may be so constrained by the prior show that it lacks newness and quickly becomes stale.

Do not mourn too much the termination of Longmire after six seasons. That is a success in the TV business and long enough to earn its main actors years of residuals. With a few exceptions, series TV shows have a lifespan of five to seven years, after which they exhaust their premise and lose audience interest and ratings. Even with a top notch staff of writers and free-lancers, it is hard to come up with seven years -- 154 episodes -- of a TV show without repeating old plots and dialog.

In addition to lingering plot lines, my major gripe against Longmire is that, like many detective shows these days, it developed a coziness with its major characters and had politically correct comments and plot points. The best detective and crime shows though are consistently based on sharp-edged plots that have the protagonist isolated and struggling with bad people, indifferent good people, and unreliable friends and allies. Get away from that too much and you end up with something that conveys no more sense of menace and human rottenness than an cartoon featuring the Scoobie gang.

107 posted on 11/20/2017 2:11:46 PM PST by Rockingham
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To: Rockingham

I was surprised that there was an equal balance, with whites and Indians both having some good and some bad folk. In a typical series in this PC world, the Indians would’ve been the victims about 100% of the time.


108 posted on 11/20/2017 2:17:26 PM PST by MayflowerMadam ( "Freedom is not free; Free men are not equal, and Equal men are not free". Richard Berkeley Cotten)
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