Monsters – or can a TV series go on too long?

Last week Being Human series 4 ended on BBC3 and Dexter series 6 started on FX and I asked myself can any long running TV series really keep fresh?

Of course there have been and are long running TV series but generally they tend to be soaps or soap like dramas like Coronation Street on ITV or Casualty on BBC1 and these are popular and successful programmes, although not my personal cup of tea anymore I watched them and others like them in the past. Likewise I watched the hugely successful US imports like CSI and House – for a while. But in my opinion they got stale several series back. I don’t bother with them anymore.

The trouble with any successful TV programme is that those that commission and broadcast them want to milk that success for all its worth and care not if the standard falls as long as people keep watching. And of course if a series keeps going long enough it becomes a habit to watch for some people, which is why soaps generally do so well.

I was surprised when a new series of Being Human was commissioned. At the end of series 3 arguably the main character, the vampire Mitchell, was killed off and although the future was uncertain for the remaining characters as well as an introduction to a new threat, the Old Ones, I couldn’t see where the story was going to go next. This however was quickly answered in the opening episodes of series 4, killing off the next major character, the werewolf, George, leaving only one of the original cast, the ghost, Annie, and this was swiftly followed by replacements for the characters, Hal, the vampire and Tom, the werewolf (who had featured in series 3) and the story line of George and Nina’s baby, Eve, who may or may not be the saviour of humankind in the face of the vampire hoards.

This story line, with its prophesy element, reminded me of the excellent Buffy the Vampire Slayer (a programme that ran for 7 series by the way). There was also a bit of Blade going on with the vamps trying to take over the world. But as ever at the heart of Being Human was the struggle of the characters to live in the human world while being outsiders, monsters even. Annie has to become mother to Eve; Tom still has to find his way without his werewolf father McNair and Hal, who is an Old One, who has fight the urge to drink blood and kill by being OCD. Practicalities have to be dealt with while hiding their true nature and fighting off threats from their own kind.

But how long can a series run of one underlying theme?

Dexter is a very different kind of monster and as series 6 begins everyone’s favourite serial killer is also still learning to live in the human world. His issues are similar to the characters in Being Human; he has to hide what he really is, live in a world he is not really a part of but he has to also sate his ‘dark passenger’, that part of him that has to kill.

Of course Dexter has an advantage over Being Human; it’s also a cop-show. There’s a race between Dexter and his colleagues in Miami homicide to catch a killer. And his colleagues give another dimension to the story line in each series outside of Dexter’s world. Even so can we keep going along with Dexter in his seemingly unending task to learn how to live in the world? There has to be an ending sometime before we tire of his world view.

I believe the reason that Being Human and Dexter are successful is because the characters speak to us about our own isolation, our own difficulties sometimes in connecting with those around us, of living in the world where other people can seem unfathomable, different from us. I just hope these programmes end on a high and not dragged out till no one cares about the monsters anymore.