What series/book/story that you feel improved the most over time?

[Kitten Champion]

Perhaps, like ST:TNG, it had a rocky start and later grew into something significantly better with fresh writers and direction.

Maybe the writer simply got better at the craft, as I've seen with a lot of web-comics where the beginning is directionless and generic but the later chapters phase into greater depth and exciting plot-lines.

Or maybe the more tedious work at the beginning sets the stage for a far richer text later down the line, and in retrospect it worked out in a way you might've dismissed at first without seeing how it fit together.

Basically that, a series you might've been disenchanted with at first only to revisit and be pleasantly surprised with how it eventually turned out, decided to stick with hoping it would get better and it actually did, or just one you liked/loved at first but just kept upping its quality to be all the better.

[tomandtish]

As I commented on in the other thread, a lot of tv shows got better, but sooner or later they get worse again, The sweet spot is usually around seasons 2-4. Very rare that they consistently get better right to the very end.

Dresden Files seems to keep getting better (IMHO).

[Knaight]

There's definitely certain mediums particularly prone to this - TV shows, webcomics, serial fiction, etc. This particularly applies to the first published attempts of talented but inexperienced artists.

In that vein, I submit Schlock Mercenary. There's the vast improvement in the art, the vast improvement in the jokes, and yes, the vast improvement in the narrative structure. There is a case to be made that there's some recent decay in quality, but I'm interpreting this question as start to peak anyways, where the "peak" needs to have at least some length to it.

[Kitten Champion]

You rarely do get television shows - at least American television shows - where they know when to end. Or rather, to have a conclusion based off of an artistic assessment of "this is where the narrative should end" rather than "we'll keep going until we're cancelled" and a lot of "we don't know we're going to be cancelled so we've got a non-ending ending".

One that I liked was Person of Interest. Which I had dismissed early on for feeling like a generic action show with a Minority Report twist, but I was encouraged to go back to it and found myself enjoying the increasingly deeper elements and fairly sharp writing. While it had a few questionable episodes near the end - as most shows do - the over-arching plot of the series was explored in a variety of interesting ways which gave the audience more credit than a lot of genre television does, and the conclusion was ultimately pretty satisfactory.

[Tvtyrant]

R. A. Salvatore's stuff felt this way to me. The 1000 Orcs is identical to his early stuff except much better written, with real personalities for the bad guys and threats that feel threatning.

Early on in Icewind Dale there was a part where Drizzle attacks a group of giants alone and wins, then goes on to kill a high ranking demon. In 1000 Orca he gets badly injured by 100 Orcs and a single giant, and 1000 Orcs is seen as a major threat to local populations.

[hamishspence]

I'd say OOTS, while always good, has also improved significantly since the first book.

[Celestia]

There's definitely certain mediums particularly prone to this - TV shows, webcomics, serial fiction, etc. This particularly applies to the first published attempts of talented but inexperienced artists.
I second that. Many of the webcomics I've read have fallen into this category, especially because many of them know how to end it. I think the best example I can think of is Sister Claire. I first found the comic years ago when it had only been around a few months. Those early pages bored me enough that I quickly forgot the comic even existed. When I stumbled upon it again and read through it, I was moved to tears more times than I can count. I now consider it the greatest thing I have ever read. Though, the beginning is still kinda boring.

[BeerMug Paladin]

I don't read that many webcomics these days, but I have the same general experience of most of them improving over time. I suspect a majority of them are begun by amateurs still early in practicing the craft and as they continue, their experience translates into better quality all-around.

[Cespenar]

There are many different patterns for this, but usually projects with just a few people at the helm tend to have more sketchy beginnings, but then quickly may evolve into their more polished version.

Webcomics are usually the prime examples for this. It's less common for high budget TV series, since they have to start strong in order to get everyone on board really quick.

Very few series can go long and not peter out along the way, though. And for a good reason, since any plot structure needs an end eventually.

[Eldan]

That's also a budget difference. Many webcomics are someone's first public project, though some of the more famous ones have established artists (Girl Genius comes to mind.) TV series hire people who have worked on other TV projects.

[Ibrinar]

Discworld because the first were weaker than most. Dresden Files was weaker at the start too.

Memory, Sorrow and Thorn when rereading the first part when he hangs out in the castle just drags on far too long.


Hmm I always have a hard time recalling stories based on a criteria, i know there are quite a few that fit but can't recall them on command. Maybe I will remember more later.

[2D8HP]

Thanks for asking @Kitten Champion!

I'll just quote myself from the other thread (and pull out the cogent part):


:confused: I'm trying to think of a series where I don't find the later installments less entertaining than the first, um....

....Aliens was as good as Alien.

The Road Warrior was better than Mad Max.

The Empire Strikes Back was as good as Star Wars.

Goldfinger was better than both Doctor No and From Russia With Love.

Stormbringer was better than The Dreaming City.

The Tower of the Elephant was better than The Phoenix in the Sword.

The subsequent seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation were better than the first.

The last season of Enterprise was the best.

The Terry Pratchett novels without Rincewind (and especially Two Flower) were better.

And Rocket to Russia was a better album than Ramones, and Leave Home,


.....otherwise I can't think of any works that don't lose something compared to the earlier installments.

Change is usually bad for me, other people find things improving?

A thread saying what series get better interests me!

[Kitten Champion]

Is there a movie series that lasted over two entries that didn't see a discernible drop in quality? ""Everyone knows that the third movie is always the worst." as Jean Grey put it in X-Men Apocalypse, which went on to prove her right as the third movie of the new First Class timeline.

I was surprised how much I liked Star Trek Beyond with it being the last - and potential franchise-killer funnily enough - of the nuTrek movies that I had written off from the sequel as a glossy Trek reference blender with stagnant characters and insipid writers. Which, I think is the only time the last in a trilogy is the only one I really liked...

No, Thor: Ragnarok too, I loved that movie. Especially for soft-rebooting Thor from a sub-franchise and character that I didn't particularly have any strong feelings about to one I'd genuinely like to see more of.

[Darth Credence]

I would go with South Park as the best answer to this. The first few seasons were funny, but they really were pretty much just toilet humor. They have evolved into some pretty good commentary on the world at large while also becoming much funnier.

I can kind of put the LotR movies in this. I think Fellowship was, ultimately, a not very good movie. The Two Towers was a great movie. I didn't like Return of the King as much as Two Towers, but it was certainly better than Fellowship, and it did win the Oscar.

The Fast and the Furious might be there, but I haven't seen all of them. I had once watched part of the first, and wrote it off as a car themed Point Break. My family dragged me to Fast Five (the one with the bank vault), and I loved it. I loved it enough to go back and watch the first ones. They were not good. I've heard mixed things about the rest, so I just stopped with the fifth one being the highlight of the series.

[The Fury]

For me, Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood. FMA: B started out decent, but it didn't feel like anything special until later in the series. I've said many times in actual conversation is that the show's main strength is presenting itself as something far simpler than it actually is. Looking at the early episodes, you wouldn't think that this is a show about a long-spanning conspiracy with complex and compelling characters.

Just as an example, the straightforward nature of the earlier episodes made it easy to dismiss background details that were actually pretty clever foreshadowing. Such as an early episode showing a map of Amestris, which is basically a big circle. At the time, I just dismissed it as a lazy fantasy map, but was it relevant? Hoo-boy, was it ever!

[Mordar]

Thanks for asking @Kitten Champion!

I'll just quote myself from the other thread (and pull out the cogent part):



....Aliens was as good as Alien.

The Road Warrior was better than Mad Max.

[I]The Tower of the Elephant was better than The Phoenix in the Sword.

The subsequent seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation were better than the first.



Aliens and Road Warrior were the apexes of those series', though...and subsequent entries were (at times) significantly worse.

Phoenix and Tower are both great, but I don't think Tower is necessarily better, even if it does have a Lovecraft touch.

Dead bang with ST:TNG though, and others.


Is there a movie series that lasted over two entries that didn't see a discernible drop in quality? ""Everyone knows that the third movie is always the worst." as Jean Grey put it in X-Men Apocalypse, which went on to prove her right as the third movie of the new First Class timeline.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Army of Darkness. Return of the King (probably shouldn't count). Ninja III the hot-ninja-domination.

Well, at least the first three are legitimate.

- M

[Legato Endless]

For films, a strangely perfect franchise example would be Mission Impossible.

The first film is a fairly disposable action spy romp with one memorable wire work scene. The second is everything you hate about John Woo movies. The third is a vaguely more palatable retread of the first.

Ghost Protocol is actually modestly entertaining, and Rogue Nation is genuinely diverting. Fallout switches the formula up as a direct sequel, and maintains the general quality of its predecessor with some even better stunts.

For superhero films, Logan's franchise comes to mind. Origins is one of the worst big budget superhero films ever, the first sequel is average, the final film is exceptional. Presumably the series had to stop there or Logan 4 would have been the peak of the genre and leave us nothing to look forward to.

[Celestia]

Is there a movie series that lasted over two entries that didn't see a discernible drop in quality? ""Everyone knows that the third movie is always the worst." as Jean Grey put it in X-Men Apocalypse, which went on to prove her right as the third movie of the new First Class timeline.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Army of Darkness. Return of the King (probably shouldn't count). Ninja III the hot-ninja-domination.

Well, at least the first three are legitimate.

- M
Add to that:

Back to the Future 3, Ocean's 13, Ghostbusters reboot (controversial opinion, I know), Captain America: Civil War, Equestria Girls: Legend of Everfree (technically the fourth one, but whatever), Re-Animator 3 (when they finally stopped giving any f***s)

[GrayDeath]

The Dresden Files Books.

Book 1 and 2 are mediocre Books, good at best at times.

Starting from Book 3 onward it keeps getting better and better (with some smaller dents liek White Nights in between), to a (personal Taste of course) High Point at Changes and Cold Days respectively.

[Kyrell1978]

R. A. Salvatore's stuff felt this way to me. The 1000 Orcs is identical to his early stuff except much better written, with real personalities for the bad guys and threats that feel threatning.

Early on in Icewind Dale there was a part where Drizzle attacks a group of giants alone and wins, then goes on to kill a high ranking demon. In 1000 Orca he gets badly injured by 100 Orcs and a single giant, and 1000 Orcs is seen as a major threat to local populations.

I agree with this completely. He was also much better with the small details about the world itself in his later writing rather than just concentrating on the battle scenes.

[Aotrs Commander]

Enterprise and Voyager. (I think season four of Enterprise is some of the best Trek, period, myself.)

Marvel's UK Transformer comic run (for the most part), especially the UK-specific bits which did a lot more character work (albeit they had to be in black and white). Grimlock's Autobot Code make me crack up to this day.

Reboot (obviously not counting that catastrophic Guardians excrement).

[The Fury]

Aliens and Road Warrior were the apexes of those series', though...and subsequent entries were (at times) significantly worse.


I feel like I should mention Fury Road. I loved Fury Road, I wouldn't say that it was better or worse than Road Warrior, though it was definitely different and I liked Road Warrior for different reasons.

Road Warrior had subtle expository touches that offered a little bit of characterization to the mooks in Humongous's gang as well as Humongous himself. Fury Road did this as well, but also didn't shy away from making its villains more monstrous. Again, I'm not going to call one approach better or worse, but it's a difference.

[Aedilred]

Fawlty Towers. The first episode was pretty average. Then it improved dramatically, finished on a high and nobody has ever (to my knowledge) yet sullied its legacy by resurrecting or rebooting it.

Blackadder also improved significantly from a start that was entertaining but nothing particularly special to become one of the great all-time sitcoms and didn't outstay its welcome, initially at least. Of course, that did suffer from a misguided one-off special ten years later.

But as tomandtish says, I think it's actually almost the norm for TV shows to improve at first, then go off because the creators (or the network) don't know where to stop. This is perhaps a little less common than it used to be, because simultaneous releases and experience with long-form storytelling has led to slightly more network faith in letting creators have their way from the start. But in classic serialised TV, especially in the US, it's extremely common. A show starts off cautiously and takes a while to find its feet, develop its characters and earn the faith to get some creative freedom. Then once it's established as successful, nobody wants to kill it off, the writers run out of ideas or leave, and it lurches on in perpetual decline until someone finally puts it out of its misery.

Because of the way UK shows have traditionally been commissioned, it's been less of a thing here historically, although the distinction between the UK and US markets are being increasingly eroded.

[Yora]

This turns out to be a genuinely hard question. There are plenty of movie or game series that start with a good one that is followed by a great one, but after that comes half a dozen more that are each more terrible than the last.

The only case I can think of where a series started bad and continuously got better is Star Trek: The Next Generation. In hindsight I think it never got really great, but it's still a very steep consistent improvement.

Maybe also Avatar, The Last Airbender. It got better over time but started already quite solid and it only had three seasons. Which might not count because they followed this up with a continuation series that wasn't as great. But if that doesn't count then Star Trek shouldn't either...

Oh, and there are the Witcher games. Each one better than the last.

I think the key is really knowing where to stop. You either die Deep Space Nine or see yourself become Discovery.

[Kitten Champion]

This turns out to be a genuinely hard question. There are plenty of movie or game series that start with a good one that is followed by a great one, but after that comes half a dozen more that are each more terrible than the last.

Games are in a weird place, because their nature is way more tied to their medium's progress than movies, television, or literature. Sure, technology has changed cinema/television in a variety of ways from the way it's created to how its distributed but it's essentially been the same experience for the audience for generations. Passively absorbing what's displayed on a screen with fairly hardened conventions of how stories are told.

With games, well, something like the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise has been this wild bucking horse or highs and heavy plummets into the deep and dirty muck, a lot of which is due to not really figuring out how the core aspects of the game can work across generations of hardware for 20+ years. From 2D to 3D, to implementing motion controls, to a never-ending stream of direction pivots with the basic game design and oft confused mechanics. All with some degree of chasing popular trends from other games, and having to look like Sonic - a character and world design formulated for a 16-bit generation - with ever-increasingly complex visual processors. Most importantly, SEGA kept making Sonic games regardless of whether or not they had the time to actually finish them, which broadly hurt their quality along with franchise's reputation as it became inundated with titles you'd see tossed into the Used bin and sold for peanuts months later. There are good Sonic games past the Genesis, but it doesn't really congeal into a continual process of improvement.

Games that succeed as a series over time put the effort and time into polishing each entry, as to meet a baseline level of quality, like Metal Gear has - until pretty recently - succeeded in developing across generations of gaming. As has something like Mario which has mostly quite strong games because Nintendo wants them to be suggestive of their console's experience.

That, or they simplify themselves so the evolution of technology doesn't stymie them. Like Pokemon - even with the ones I don't particularly like - does have this core RPG monster-raising/fighting experience that maintains its appeal from all the way back to the original Gameboy and the mechanics behind it have mostly just gotten cleaner over time. Persona is another series which found a style which is pretty technically undemanding but works well. Or you could look at the Telltale games overall success. This is why a lot of Indie games can become notably successful, because they start with simple by necessity and work out how to make that fun. So there's less of a room for failure which a much larger and more ambitious title can fall into, and they have time and directed focus to make that game rather than meeting a publisher's timeline.

[Jay R]

The Harry Potter books grew up as Harry did.

[Serpentine]

Tamora Pierce.
After reading through (nearly) everything she's written, and then going back and reading them again from the start, you can see her flaws as a writer in her first books, and you can see her getting better as she writes more.
And in addition to simply getting better with practice, as she got more popular and experienced, and as society in general changed a little - and also, apparently, with the success of the Harry Potter books, which were exceptionally large for YA novels at the time - she's gotten more freedom from her editors and more boldly ambitious. It means that she's able to write bigger, more involved books, and she's able to include various themes she wasn't allowed to in her early books (e.g. same-sex relationships).

I'd be interested to see what it'd look like if she did a rewrite of her earliest works, like Stephen King did with The Gunslinger.

[Knaight]

And in addition to simply getting better with practice, as she got more popular and experienced, and as society in general changed a little - and also, apparently, with the success of the Harry Potter books, which were exceptionally large for YA novels at the time - she's gotten more freedom from her editors and more boldly ambitious.

It's more that she's gotten more freedom from her publishers and their contracts. Tamora Pierce clearly still listens to her editors, which neatly avoids a trap a lot of successful authors fall into.

[Saintheart]

The Witcher - the game series, I've yet to read enough of the novels to judge.

Witcher 3 was, simply put, the best videogame ever made.

[Eldan]

Ooh, good point. Witcher 1 had a middlingly interesting story and the loading times made some sections almost unplayable, and the combat system was dull and repetitive. Witcher 2 significantly improved in all aspects and became... playable. Witcher 3 is amazing.

[thompur]

Buffy, the Vampire Slayer.
The first season was o.k., but gets a pass, as it was 1. an introductory season, 2. a mid-season replacement, and 3. they didn't know if they'd get renewed. Still, it had a fair share of good episodes.
Seasons 2 & 3 were exceptional, really hitting their stride mid-season 2, and carrying through season three.
Season 4 was the weakest as a whole, but had 7 or 8 great episodes among some admittedly very weak ones. Season 5 regained the quality of seasons 2 & 3.
While I mostly enjoyed seasons 6 & 7, each with individual episodes that are among the best television ever created, neither had the narrative flow of the previous seasons, and in retrospect, I'm glad it ended when it did.

[Velaryon]

Some of these have already been mentioned, but here we go:

Webcomics, especially OOTS. It was always good, but over time it evolved from good to great to one of the best things I've ever read.

The Dresden Files had a bit of a rocky start with the first two books, but got consistently better after that.

I actually like early Star Trek TNG, but will still acknowledge it got much better as it went on. Likewise for DS9.

On the subject of Trek films, specifically the reboot series, Star Trek Beyond is the only one I think is even remotely good so I guess that counts.

In the realm of video games, I'm going to say Mega Man, or at least the NES and SNES titles. Mega Man 2 is the most famous of the original series, but IMO every game of the first six was an improvement over the last in many ways. I'm less familiar with the X series but as a general progression from the original series I think it fits.

I can think of a few bands for whom this is true as well. Iron Maiden got way better starting with their third album when they recruited Bruce Dickinson, and just kept getting better from there.

Iced Earth, while less known, got better in many ways as they went on. The guitar work got less complex, but was more than made up for by the vast improvement in the vocals once they got Matt Barlow.

Avenged Sevenfold went through a similar trajectory, except without changing singers. As they got more "mainstream" they lost a little bit of musical complexity, but the singing improved and the songs got more catchy and IMO much better on average.

[flyinglemur]

Maybe also Avatar, The Last Airbender. It got better over time but started already quite solid and it only had three seasons. Which might not count because they followed this up with a continuation series that wasn't as great.

I think the Legend of Korra definitely fits here. It had a rocky first season and a very unsatisfying second season, but the third season improved on it pretty dramatically with the fourth season being the best of the show.

Like others have said OOTS falls into this category. It was always funny, but the first book was mostly just gags as the overarching story hadn't really developed yet. Starting with No Cure for the Paladin Blues, and then especially in War and XPs the story improved dramatically as the strip moved past just DnD rules commentary.

Adventure Time improved greatly after the first two seasons. It started out mostly as a simple comedy but became gradually more serious starting in season 3. It had some weirder bits in the middle, but overall it improved pretty heavily, with the last few seasons being pretty high quality. Especially the Islands and Elements mini-series.