Third Season Jinx?

The third season of a TV show can be a perilous moment in its attempt to stay relevant and hit the all-important 100 episode threshold, which allows syndication and a long-term revenue stream. Moonlighting started to go downhill in the third season, never fully recovering before being cancelled in the fifth. Cheers had to completely revamp the show after Diane left for a failed movie career. And there are a host of other shows that either died in that third season or never fully recovered from the difficulty of maintaining momentum, particularly if there is a requited or unrequited love affair between the two main characters (if the former, how do you replace the erotic and romantic tension, if the latter, how do you keep people from growing weary of the constant near misses and false starts).

Two quality shows have recently embarked on their third season, Homeland and Scandal, and both appear to be suffering from the third season curse. With Homeland, the problem is separating the two main characters and finding a way to restore the tension that made the show so compelling in the wake of a major, still unexplained terror attack. It seems the show was ripe for a riveting third season where Saul (Mandy Patinkin) and Carrie (Claire Danes) pushed to find the real terrorists behind the season two finale and Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) attempted to escape a worldwide search of his capture. Instead, we are a few episodes in with Carrie spending most of her time in a mental ward and Nicholas somehow trapped in a Venezuelan criminal network that has taken over an abandoned high rise. The latter story, played out last week, felt constructed from a recent New Yorker story I read without any rhythm or reason beyond showing how brutal the South American criminals are. The former lacks sufficient suspense to keep it going. And the general tenor of the show has been so ratcheted down that is feels almost soporific, with Brody’s once fascinating daughter now a suicide-attempt-survivor on the run with her boyfriend.

With Scandal, the problem might be the opposite – how to maintain a soap opera storyline about a high-priced crisis manager and President, who with some help stole an election and continue an on-again, off-again affair, without pushing the suspension of disbelief beyond the bounds of reasonable doubt. Maybe that is too much to ask with a show that has already included the aforementioned stolen election, an assassination attempt, a shadow government organization that trains killers and sometimes locks them up in holes in the ground for months, a President who admits to an extramarital affair among other rather major peccadilloes  several near death experiences and a main character who would have to do enough cocaine to kill a horse to act and think at the frenetic pace she maintains throughout most of the first two plus seasons. Scandal has always been a guilty pleasure for me, found while I was stuck in bed sick a year or so ago, and then watched ever since in spurts. While the character development is compelling at times and the constantly rising suspense and numerous subplots make the show riveting, it is starting to feel like too much this season -- Days of our Lives meets Days of Thunder meets Three Days of the Condor.

Maybe both shows will recover in time to save themselves, or at least maintain some semblance of quality, but it is clear that the third season of any show is the moment it marks its destiny and these two could be moving toward the trash heap that covers most of the dial or to the trash heap of television history itself.