Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1255374-20150930020647/@comment-995426-20151022232913

That's the thing! I know DPfanboy may have thought I was being too negative, but I don't think I would have responded the way I did if I didn't sense that other people were genuinely afraid the show would keep ignoring characters. My "rule of thumb" may be cuttingly cynical, but most of the time anymore I feel like that's exactly what's going to happen.

I know that, at my age, I'm older than the show's target audience, and the show acknowledges viewers like me as a peripheral audience at best. But that said, it seems to me like this show is not growing with the audience it actually targets. Instead, it keeps shifting the target age a bit younger, and a bit younger. And the reason for that seems painfully obvious: It's targeting the audience most likely to buy toys, and abandoning the audience that has aged into a demographic less likely to buy those toys. In this sense, the show is adopting some of the worst elements that plagued the 1987 TV series.

So of course they're going to quietly drop plotlines and character developments, because they're not necessarily going to expect their core audience to have been watching longer than just a year or so, and their older peripheral audiences (including everyone 13 and over, which includes everyone able to edit Turtlepedia) really aren't the audiences they expect to profit from anyway.

Sad thing is, it doesn't have to be this way. There are plenty of merchandise-driven properties on other channels that maintain a good quality of production, writing and character development as well as a respect for their peripheral audiences (My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and its adult male brony viewers come most to mind), and still manage to sell their toys. But lately, it seems like Nickelodeon as a whole has been struck with a kind of network decay, where they're really just phoning it in and don't really seem to care anymore. It's almost as if they'll do only what it takes to make their revenue target, and seem more interested in doing it as cheaply (in quality) as possible, cutting all sorts of corners with only a few brief hiccups of real quality. They used to do a better job than this.