This was a comment somewhere else, I wanted to make my own thread on it. One of these spoiler tags has a long rant.
I think Stranger Things S1 is pretty good. After S1, you can stop at any time you're no longer feeling it and not be missing out on anything.
S2 spoilers
most people didn't like S2 but I thought it was awesome, and agree there was a tiny drop of quality.
S3 spoilers
IMO S3 is where a serious quality drop starts. In addition to a general quality dip, the monster from S2 comes back but there is at least a twist so it's not as bad of a rehash as Star Wars episode 7 felt like. Also the Soviets built a secret military lab under a mall, they should have hired some people to rework that part of the plot.
S4 spoilers
S4 has a lot of cool stuff going on it, but it's all over the place in very silly ways. It has a lot of quality issues.
The lore was ambiguous about what the Mind Flayer (S2) was. The absolutely worst part is when the lore in S4 established that the Mind Flayer was not in fact, some cool mysterious eldritch god (you know, something strange), but actually just some 40 year old asshole LARPing as a spider using magic dust who also has super powers for literally no fucking reason at all. If you can ignore the lore downgrade, the season's big bad (Vecna) is 50% okay and 50% wtf when did this become a Marvel movie?. The only thing they had to do to unfuck the lore was say "Vecna (some random asshole who has powers for no reason) and the Mind Flayer (eldritch shadow god thing) are working together (for literally any reason who cares)". FFS who cares about some random asshole LARPing as a spider? That's the fucking stupidest shit ever!!! First they're like "As a child, Vecna was obsessed with spiders." Then you're like oh okay, that explains why he's working with this shadow monster who definitely does not look like a spider but close enough for someone whose weirdly obsessed with spiders to be interested. Because if someone was that obsessed with actual spiders, they'd LARP as something that looks a lot more like an actual fucking spider.
Then everything is good to go, until they quickly pull a fast one on you, like they forgot at the last second that someone was going to ask "yeah that's cool and all, BTW what does all this Vecna stuff have to do with S2/S3?" and then they do a quick lame exposition dump explaining that the upside down was just Vecna thinking about darkness and shit found some magic dust and used it to LARP as a spider (WHICH DOES NOT ACTUALLY LOOK LIKE A SPIDER HOLY RETCON BATMAN), and it's extremely obvious this is a desperate attempt to retcon away the "sry kid, we were making it up as we go because netflix demanded with make more than one season" with "wow it was Vecna the whole time!!!"
Then everybody gaslights you that this was planned from the beginning despite originally the show was planned to be an anthology (and S1 plays well as a complete self-contained show).
I got burned on that shit back in the early 2000s with the Battlestar Galactica remake which, despite being fun as fuck, clearly did not have any form of planning no matter how much the creators said so
TV production needs a fundamental overhaul. Because of the fact it's impossible to know how long a series can go, writers either overestimate how many seasons they'll get and end up leaving on a cliffhanger, or underestimate and pack everything into one season and then coast on fumes until cancellation. Even on the rare occasions when the creators have a specific end point and plan for it, like Supernatural, the Powers That Be at the studio always force it to go either too long or too short
At the very least I feel like it would help if you had to give a one season notice before cancellation. So say season 2 of a show is bad and it’s being cancelled, season 3 is still guaranteed so they’ll have a season to wrap things up.
This would help
I just kicked off a new show called 30 Coins and had never heard of it. Went to look it up and learned it's been cancelled already after 2 seasons, so now I get to go in knowing I'll never see the conclusion. Shit sucks
This was me when I stumbled across Firefly, years after it had been canceled.
I refuse to watch anything that has pretenses of being a big epic interconnected story unless I am confident it stands a chance of actually finishing what it started.
Reading too. Several book series I've started reading that will never end because the author just decided to fuck off and abandon it
distant GRRM cackling while doing yet another spin-off