Board Thread:False Info and Speculative Discussion/@comment-4753851-20140909163244/@comment-13965604-20140912013011

DManCO wrote: There was an issue of bloat. Teen Wolf does not produce as many episodes as, for example, a Star Trek series. Thus there is less room for a story arc and sub-plots. True Blood ran into this same problem. You had creators who really liked creating new characters, but they already had over-sized casts. This meant that you either had to race through a story arc, giving each character less overall development, or you dragged things out because you tried to give your huge cast reasonable amounts of screentime. You could try to tighten this up by grouping characters togethers, so that they were often in the same scenes, but even then it was rough because the seasons are short (12 episodes each).

This is why, for example, fans of Danny were so annoyed at Jeff bringing in more and more new characters in successive seasons, while leaving an existing fan favorite under-developed.

It was very much the case with Cora, who was an utter waste. Because she was really backfilling for Erica, we never saw a significant reunion between her, Derek and Peter, all of whom thought the others were dead. Instead she just kind of pops up. Derek and Peter accept her being alive without missing a beat. She is an even grumpier, female, Derek for a while, then she vanishes inexplicably at the end of the (half-)season! What was the point?

The villain bloat is the same issue. How many do you really need per season when the seasons are so short? The Alpha Pack was never really developed. Other than Worfing Derek and being vaguely menacing to Scott they were an ambiguous problem because you also had Jennifer the Darach, a surprise separate villain. And with the villains out to kill each other, everybody else is only involved because of the need for damage control.

I think their problem is that they have too many ideas, and can't seem to narrow things down to just a few focused ones rather than veering wildly all over the place trying to explore them all. This is why I dread all these other supernaturals they are bringing into the show.

I agree with this, but to be fair to True Blood, they were based on books that brought in all those extra characters.