With Hill Street Blues , he introduced the ever-changing story, where familiar characters might marry, divorce, sustain injuries, or even die, and where a development introduced on one episode would continue to be a factor on following episodes. This was a breath of fresh air compared to what we had before, but ultimately it represented another failure. Instead of stability without meaning, what we wound up with was constant change without meaning. Constant change itself induces boredom and even worse, hopelessness, if there is no sense of dramatic development or of closure imposed on it. Since life itself so often seems like a violent shaggy dog story, television series that portray an unending morbid swirl of events hold a distorted mirror to life, making it seem worse than it is.
Television easily runs out of stories.
Falconcrest became boring long before every character had married every other character and had discovered an unknown parent, brother, sister, or child. In its last season, it resorted, remarkably, to the Mark Twain prescription for endings, and began drowning all the characters it did not know what else to do with. Worse, in order to keep the audience interested in the unchanging adventure, television must constantly raise the volume, by including incidents more violent or morbid than the general tone. This then sets a new standard and more violent or morbid incidents are inserted to wake the audience again. St. Elsewhere was an early example of this.