How To Lose Your Viewers In 5 Easy Steps

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1. Sell you show on sex and titillation and then radically change that in the second season.
Before the show even started we heard about the contracts that required full frontal nudity and genital contact. This created buzz about the show and then in the first season we had plenty to talk about about, from well endowed cowboys to the orgy scene. The second season is almost devoid of nudity. Now I can already here you saying that you shouldn’t need sex to sell a show and I agree, there are many excellent shows that don’t rely on nudity but if you are going to sell your show that way and suddenly change it in the second season you have to realize that you are going to lose viewers.

2. Have a main characters quest succeed only because of mass incompetence.
Oh the response team with their Keystone Cop level of competence, disdain for air power, and lack of basic pattern recognition. Delores only succeeds in invading the mesa and destroying the cradle because she faces a beginner mode level of resistance. This kind of reliance on the opposition not being good at their job just takes you out of the story. The response team is full of faceless and seemingly endless generic red shirts who don’t seem to even acknowledge the fact that dozens of them have been killed. I keep thinking of Aliens with Private Hudson shouting “game over man, game over”

3. Throw in new characters for emotional beats when we have no investment in them.
We see the MIB’s wife only for one episode and are supposed to become invested in her plight. Oh poor woman who is forced to live a life of wealth and privilege. Her awful husband whom to all appearances in the real world is a philanthropist and treats her with care and respect, even covering for her when she is making a fool of herself. Oh he has a dark side and acts like an ass at the park. Well the only option must be suicide not say divorce or just leaving him. We don’t understand her decision because we don’t know her and therefore don’t care.

4. Give characters powers and then use them only when the script requires.
Delores can resurrect her followers but often does not, Maeve can control other hosts sometimes but doesn’t all the time even when it would be helpful. This is too much like the walking dead where sometimes zombies are slow and other times they are fast depending on what the writers think will create tension.

5, Add in plenty of James Bond last minute escapes.
Whether it is Hale’s last minute stays of execution or MIB killing the response team just as the are scanning Emily, these last minute escapes are just lazy writing to create artificial tension. Even if MIB was going to kill the response team, why not wait till they scan Emily? These are just cheap tricks to create mystery.

You know I have been listening to your podcasts from the beginning of the show. No one where I work talks about WW so you guys are my water cooler and make the experience of watching even more fulfilling . I went back and listened to the first season podcasts and it was like we were on a journey together. This second season though you have had to spend more and more time defending the show. Even good shows will have critics but I think it is fair to say that the loss of viewers is in some cases is because of self inflicted wounds.

Randy Lee

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