My personal sign is when you start seeing awkward collaborations start cropping up. One time when I was thrifting, I picked up a graphic novel that had the Justice League, team with the Power Rangers of all things. I glimpsed into what the plot was about out of morbid curiosity and it was just a plain generic time and dimension thing.
Nothing ever connected between the teams at all. DC Comics, while fledgling at times with how they go about their series and movies, still have far more relevance than Power Rangers do. I think the Power Rangers are just grasping at straws to keep being relevant when people have largely moved on from them.
It’s less of an issue in comedies, but main characters becoming Flanderised in drama series is where it becomes obvious they’ve run out of ideas.
For example, at the beginning of Stranger Things, Hopper had basically given up on life, and over the course of the first two seasons he finds purpose again through helping find Will, and later, raising Eleven as a surrogate daughter… And then in season 3 he becomes ANGERY MAN WHO FIGHTS PEOPLE - and that’s about it.
It runs in parallel with a show getting too many characters to handle. It accelerates the Flanderization of characters who don’t have a lot to do. Stranger Things had that problem as well, with a far too bloated main cast by the end.
I’ve seen this in video games. The Trails series builds itself on slowly assembling these big Avengers teams of heroes - but each dynamic only works when there’s like 2-4 of them.
Get as far as Sky the 3rd, and you get one lead saying “It looks like this next dimension will be tougher than ever” and then some 13-odd people giving generic barks of affirmation in turn.
For me, Will: It’s when… Dustin: The characters in every scene… Max: Talk like… Steve: This.
There are too many characters, and the only way your audience can remember that half of them still exist is… Nancy: For them to start sharing lines.
Oh, yeah, the detectives are all gathered with the Captain, briefing him on what they’ve discovered, and each actor has a line that offers a fact in the case, and they go around the group, and each one tosses in their fact like it was rehearsed, which it was.
In reality, they’d all pool their info, and the main guy would brief the boss, while the others watched. Or maybe they’d brief the boss in private, while everybody else did their jobs, like a real workplace.
But I’ve never been in a meeting where everyone chimed in one line at a time, without interrupting, arguing, stammering, shuffling through pages, etc.
In real life, it would go:
Nancy: Of course! We need to-
Nancy and Steve: dfoi intd foruotm thhoe…
*awkward pause
Nancy and Steve: Go ahea-
*another awkward pause
Nancy and Steve: No, you go ahe-