Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1255374-20151111163045/@comment-995426-20160313000941

I'm not talking short-term continuity. I'm talking long-term continuity. Any series can have strong continuity in the short term. I care if it has strong continuity in the long term. That isn't just about the myth arc, but subtler details about characters and their dynamic and the overall genre they appear in. I understand this ultimately may be too much to ask from any television show, and that third seasons of any show often decay. That may have been naive of me, since aside from TMNT I don't watch many all-ages shows at all. But then, I'm an adult comics reader, and my expectations of continuity in a story are just a lot stronger, because expecting that from adult comics is relatively more realistic because readers seem to have longer memories for detail than TV viewers.

Read about the fleeting demographic rule. The general rule of thumb is, the useful memory of TV viewers is about two years, after which shows feel freer to retool characters, shift genres, and even recycle scripts with the fewest complaints. For comics, the older assumption was that the useful memory of readers is about five years, because they thought that only children read comics and there would be a high amount of turnover as older children stopped reading them and younger children started&mdash;this rule largely no longer applies, as so many children never actually stop reading them when they become adults. Adult comics break all those assumptions, as many readers can stick to the same series for decades, and they still remember details&mdash;after all, an 18 year old is an adult, and a 48 year old is also an adult.