Have you ever watched a pilot episode to a TV series and feel cheated or that it fell short? The same can happen to a season, but it is particularly damaging when a story fails to hook on the very first episode.
Mr. Selfridge has gone on for four seasons, as of this writing. There's no doubt that they got something right. However, it cannot be ignored that the first episode jumped too quickly and left no hook for me to watch more.
What this boils down to is excellence in screenwriting. The fact that millions of people continued watching the show is not the point.
The point is that if something can be improved, then why not do that?
I represent a small part of the initial audience for Mr. Selfridge, but it might be significant enough that a number of us did not continue past the first episode.
From a screenwriting perspective, it seems criminal to "gloss over" a big part of the Selfridges story and jump to its store opening a mere year after breaking ground. A great feat of construction, no doubt full of its own dramas, was overlooked. These aspects make up the journey of the story; something which all good screenplays must have.
For me, this was a screenwriting mistake which resulted in loss of intrigue to pursue the series.
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