Like so many people, I was excited to wake up on Thursday to the first new episode of the second season of Serial, NPR’s podcast that tells an entire story over the course of a season. After the success of last year’s premiere – which attracted about 1.5 million listeners an episode, about the same as a modest cable success or an episode of The Daily Show – expectations are high for its second outing, especially as the show takes on the high-profile case of alleged military deserter Bowe Bergdahl.
This got me thinking about television analogies, how Serial is essentially an anthology series like American Horror Story, one with a new story and cast of characters each season but held together by the same creative mastermind, whether that’s Sarah Koenig or Ryan Murphy (have there ever been too more dissimilar people mentioned in the same sentence?).
Like the blockbuster podcast, the TV anthology series is a new genre and the second season is usually the make-or-break year. Recently we’ve seen shows like Fargo, already a critical darling, blossom in its second outing, whereas a similarly beloved show like True Detective tanked in its sophomore year. How can things be so uneven, and how can a show avoid a slump?
As Matt Zoller Seitz points out in an essay for New York magazine, the second season of a television show is really the proving ground for its success. Plenty of shows have stumbled after the hype of a huge first year wears off. Look at Desperate Housewives, which squandered its blockbuster ratings on an uneven and overly dark second season. While it recovered in the third and subsequent seasons, people never returned to check out the renewed quality. The Walking Dead had a similar problem, marooning their characters on a farm while audiences shambled away like a herd of zombies. AMC’s drama has improved as have its ratings, but not everything is as lucky.
Empire is in the throes of an uneven second season. It’s still the biggest ratings hit in TV Land, but it doesn’t have the must-watch buzz it had when it debuted early this year. While it’s still the madcap melodrama we fell in love with, the stories are slowing down and less is being packed into each episode, which makes for higher-quality storytelling, but it’s not always as compelling. This is the problem that many shows have: continuing to deliver on early promise, especially when everyone is watching their every casting decision, location shoot and trailer release.
As I mentioned above, this fate certainly befell True Detective. The first season was hardly over before the internet got the #TrueDetectiveSeason2 meme trending worldwide. No matter what series creator and writer Nic Pizzolatto came up with it was going to disappoint some people. It’s even harder with an anthology series like True Detective, where people didn’t have any favorite actors or characters to root for or connect with.
He eventually decided to focus on four famous actors (Rachel McAdams, Vince Vaughn, Colin Farrell and Taylor Kitsch) instead of two (infamously Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey) and moved the action from rural Louisiana to urban Los Angeles. The mess of the season, with its dreary tone, pretentious dialogue and a plot twistier than the poses at an advanced yoga convention, proved that lightning can’t always strike twice. Having such a high-profile failure questions the validity of the first season’s success. Was this thing really as great as we thought it was? Maybe not.
The good thing is that True Detective will most likely get another chance to prove itself and the low bar to new viewers might not damage the ratings for a third season if HBO decides to order it. American Horror Story, the longest-running anthology currently on the air, has benefited from the annual reboots after its especially poor fourth season, Freak Show. The current season, Hotel, which features Lady Gaga and a murderous vampire, is a lot better in terms of quality and coherent storytelling, so previously alienated viewers were welcomed back into the fold.
But we’re seeing the flip side to be true as well. Zoller Seitz points out that The Sopranos cemented its great reputation in its second season, as did The Wire, which changed focus away from the drug trade and put the dock workers’ union under its microscope instead. These years proved that the first season wasn’t a fluke and that viewers could depend on consistent quality.
Fargo is also in the middle of a great victory lap after winning both the Emmy and Golden Globe for its first season. Much like True Detective, it got an all-new cast and an all-new story. Unlike True Detective it decided to stay essentially in the same frozen midwestern milieu but traveled back in time to the 70s. It also attracted a couple of big stars like Kirsten Dunst, Jean Smart, Patrick Wilson and Ted Danson, who is taking a break from his giant CSI paycheck.
The saving grace for Fargo is that it has only sharpened its focus. The story of Peggy and Ed Blomquist (which comes to a close in Monday night’s finale) and how they get embroiled in a bloody gang war, really doubled down on the sort of simple people entering the dark world of crime stories that will presumably be its stock in trade. It’s also using a lot of the same camera techniques – wide shots of the desolate landscape, creative split screens, quick-moving action sequences – that it used the first time around. It’s forging an identity much in the way that any other series would, it’s just doing it with fresh faces.
That seems to be the key to having a successful second season in this genre, building upon strengths to create a template that can be repeated in perpetuity. American Horror Story’s second effort, Asylum, is considered by many critics to be its finest and it certainly took the premise of the first season, using allegory stolen from horror movies to tell a story around a central theme, and, of course, to make it as campy as a Liza Minnelli drag impersonator starring in a Pedro Almodóvar movie.
That’s what True Detective seemed to be missing. It veered away from the buddy cop aspect of the first iteration and didn’t use only one director for the entire second season. Messing with success is always a problem, but in this fickle world of TV viewing, one needs to cement that success.
But there is room for improvement for middling or promising shows that really take advantage of a renewal. FX’s The Americans turned a good show into a phenomenal show by tightening the storytelling and focusing as much on the family stories of two Russian spies living in the suburbs as it does on the intrigue of espionage.
Right now the most shocking resurrection on television is The Leftovers, HBO’s drama about the aftermath of a mysterious event where 3% of the world’s population inexplicably disappeared. The first season was super dour, almost drowning in its own tears and suffocating on its own depression. However, not unlike an anthology series, it gave itself a hard reboot in the follow-up and moved most of the main characters from Maplewood, New York, to Miracle, Texas, and the results have been like Jesus bringing Lazarus back from the dead (an analogy that will have special resonance if you’ve watched the season).
By focusing on hope and the characters’ attempts at understanding the world, The Leftovers, possibly the best example of magical realism ever broadcast, solidifyed its place in the pantheon of prestige television. That didn’t improve the ratings, however, but HBO just renewed it for a third and final season. Maybe we can get the crowds to rally for that one.
But, again, fans are going to be looking toward the second season while waiting for the third. If the first season of show is about building excitement and creating familiarity, the second season is proving what those Silicon Valley types call “scale”. If the formula for success isn’t repeatable, it’s worthless. The same goes for an app as it does for a show like American Crime, which returns to ABC in January to see if its tracking of the multifaceted impact of one crime was a fluke or a serial success. As the genre continues to grow, and we brace ourselves for another season of Serial, let’s hope they can learn from the mistakes and triumphs of those who have come before.
