After Shows.

I blame LOST.  

There was a time when I devoted a TON of my precious energy to unravelling what I thought was a mystery inside a riddle wrapped in an enigma.

I really thought the folks running the show had a big plan and we mere mortals could parse the clues and figure out that plan.  

As we now know, there was no plan and the show ended with a big collective whimper.  I still haven't watched the last half of the last season and I never will.  I was that disappointed with it.

But.

Some (not all, but some) showrunners took a lesson.  Shows like Game of Thrones, Dexter and others took a lesson from LOST and the before it's time Deep Space Nine and tried to implement a planned over-plot and an endpoint.  They haven't always stuck the landing, but you can see the intention.

Then there's this "after show" thing, which takes the lesson and runs too far with it.  I've seen them on a few shows but paid little attention.  These days I watch shows.  I rarely care enough to dissect and analyze them.  I see that the old LOST spirit is alive and well in those after shows though.  

Here's the thing.  It's a lesson I learned from my own writing, as unsuccessful as it has been:

If you need a second show to explain your show to me, you're not doing it right.  

There's nothing wrong with sprinkling clues in a show for your hyper-obsessed fan base, but they have to either by simple enough for most to catch or if they're really tricky, they need to be explained in show.  If I need to watch the writers and directors talking about what's what in order to understand what's going on, that's a fail.  If the intention is to clarify or reinforce things that they don't feel they truly conveyed or might have been missed by the general audience, same.