The Sophomore Slump

A few shows are great right out of the gate—critical and ratings successes in their first season. Reviewers love them, fans love them, and they are trumpeted throughout the land as The Way to Do Television. Then they hit their second season, and all of a sudden, things take a turn for the worse.

There’s a dip in quality. Fans are up in arms, talking about the Wonder of the previous season and how it’s all gone wrong. Critics shake their heads disappointedly. And everyone starts mentioning the “sophomore slump.”

A lot of shows have gone through it: Lost, Heroes, Glee. And the bigger hits they are, the harder they can fall. Either way, there are several reasons (some legitimate, some less so), that shows can go through the sophomore slump.

1) Time Crunch: Creators can spend a lot of time planning the first season of their TV show—odds are, it won’t get on the air before being decently planned out. However, after it begins airing, all they have for planning time is the hiatus between seasons, which can lead to some very compressed creative decision-making. Veronica Mars wasn’t a ratings hit, but it was a critical darling. But after season one, the creator had a few months to put together a second-season mystery, as compared to the long time he had spent crafting the first season (originally as a novel). As a result, fans and critics complained that the pacing was off for the second season, and the mystery seemed a little less coherent as compared to the show’s original season.

2) New characters: Shows don’t want to do the same thing over and over again, so a lot of times they’ll bring in new blood for the second season. However, viewers are already attached to the original characters, and they’re not always thrilled to find new faces taking up the screen time they believe should be going to their old favorites. Rules for new characters: Make them interesting, integrate them into the plot, don’t overwhelm the viewer with them… and again, please, make them interesting. Heroes is one of the main perpetrators of this (though it is not alone). Heroes is an interesting case, however. It was very much a large ensemble show, and really couldn’t take the glut of new characters the second season threw at the audience—it barely had enough screentime for all of its original regulars. However, Heroes was originally designed to have a new cast of heroes each season; fans got attached to the original cast, the network got attached to the fans, and they tried to combine the two concepts. It didn’t work.

3) New storylines: Many arc-driven shows will complete a main arc in one season. This is logical, especially for the first season, because shows can’t count on being renewed while they’re only in planning stages. Audiences can be fickle. However, this means that they now need to begin a second arc for their second season, and audiences and critics won’t always take well to the new storylines. Lost had some trouble getting viewers to adjust to The Others storyline (which suffered both from being a new storyline and surrounding new characters). It also risks a shift in tone, which can alienate the audience.

4) First impressions/Hype: And then there’s the unavoidable one. Sometimes people can get attached to a show and how it was in the beginning, and any change (good or bad) is wrong. Even if new characters and storylines are pitch-perfect, they are not the same, and therefore viewers disapprove. A show’s own hype can also lead to problematic backlash—even if the show is on par in terms of quality, it’s not as good as it was supposed to be, or not as good as people remember it being. In this day and age, things can go stale very quickly, and aspects of quality television are unfortunately no exception to that rule.