Reasons I've Stopped Reading (or Watching) a Series

This week's Long & Short Reviews prompt asks why reviewers have stopped reading (or watching) a series. 

For me the most usual reason has been inconvenience. If a series seemed worth reading at the public library, and the library had volumes one and two, or volumes 1 through 93 (as in the case of The Baby-Sitters Club), I've often read the existing volumes in order. If, however, more volumes came out later and the continuity of reading the series of library books was broken--maybe the librarian decided not to order volume 94, maybe I'd moved to a different neighborhood where the library didn't have that series--I've not usually made any effort to keep up with the series. Two or nine or ninety-three volumes have seemed like enough. 

Then there's the sheer size of some series. I liked Nancy Drew, in grades two and three, but not enough to read all sixty volumes. Just two volumes of The Hardy Boys and three of The Bobbsey Twins felt like enough. 

There are series that are generally agreed to have lost their inspiration, the later volumes having been cranked out just to sustain interest in the volumes the author really enjoyed writing. Anne McCaffrey wrote two unforgettable trilogies about her fictional planet Pern, then published another book set on Pern every year for years afterward. Everyone remembered the Dragonriders and Harper Hall trilogies but did anyone remember any of the later volumes? 

Some have similar feelings about Piers Anthony's Xanth series. For nine volumes, this quirky fantasy-adventure-comedy series impressed even critics. The philosophical questions raised in Night Mare were even considered seriously in some philosophical and religious books of the 1980s. Perhaps it was just the reputations of their different publishers that made critics feel that later volumes like Vale of the Vole and Zombie Lover contained no serious thought but were just comedies based on puns. Certainly, though, as Xanth became familiar to its readers and its author, its plots have grown thinner. If you like Xanth you don't ask every volume to be as philosophical as Night Mare. Not everyone likes Xanth. I like Xanth and would have gone on collecting all the volumes if I'd had the money to spare. 

 

I suppose all fictional series will become harder to believe beyond a certain length. Readers could suspend disbelief in Lenora Mattingly Weber's Beany Malone and similar children's stories where each school year or term brought a child protagonist a new adventure, even if that meant that Beany Malone belonged to two different demographic generations, being a teenager in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Readers suspend disbelief in cartoon strip series like "Blondie" and "Peanuts" where the characters never matured noticeably in any way, because a cartoon strip captures a moment rather than a stage in someone's life. If "Blondie" and "Peanuts" had been published as graphic novels I'd imagine that even primary school readers would notice that the characters have stayed the same age for an unconscionably long time. The number of years the Baby-Sitters Club spent being thirteen wasn't even decent. A story worth putting into a book ought to have some effect on its characters. Lord Peter Wimsey stayed believable, and likable, because he and his fellow characters learned from their previous adventures; Agatha Christie's characters seemed to be muddling through the same stories over and over, as Dame Agatha aged, because they didn't.