Long Runners

what? we're over?


The show Supernatural is ending its run at season 15, which starts up sometime this year.

It's a really impressive length of time for a live action TV show - but when I heard about the finale, I had the same sort of vague surprise - the same feeling I get whenever the Simpsons shows up in the news:

"wait…that show's still on the air?"

This is not to diss the Simpsons…or Supernatural. Actually after hearing the news about The monster-hunting Winchester brothers heading to the finish line, I went in and watched a couple of episodes and found the main cast was still doing a great job, and the production looked and felt the way I thought the series should. I remember thinking they were going off the rails when they began introducing more CGI into the mix; everything started looking and feeling wrong. I may have left the show shortly after that.

But the few new shows I watched looked great, and had the same tone that it did at its best.

I noticed the magic, monsters, and artifact names were getting really strange and obscure. It worked, but it must be difficult to keep doing new (or somewhat new) things after so much time and so many episodes.

Webcomics are a different animal of course; there are probably comics out there that have been running for over ten years that are still nowhere near even the middle of the story (Bottomless Waitress has been going about six years and are still on the same day as when the series started - I'm sure there are comics with more years behind them that are still in the same couple hours, story-wise. That's the nature of webcomic time, even if the page count is big).

What are you favorite long runners, on TV, in print, or in webcomics? Are there some that can go on forever? Some that should have ended by now?

okay, I gotta go - so long!

-Banes