It doesn’t matter whether they’re at the beginning, before a commercial break, or at the end of a show, it always annoys me when TV shows feel it necessary to include…

‘Coming Up’ Previews that Reveal Too Much

Attention television producers: Believe it or not, there are people who are faithful to your show. There are viewers who follow your story lines (as unbelievable as most of them are) and enjoy watching them unfold each week. Why do you find it necessary to spoil many of the key moments in each episode with teasers, aimed at hooking casual viewers? Do you think that’s the only way you can keep people tuned in?

This practice seems to span all networks and genres. It’s like the producers (or perhaps marketing people) believe that every pivotal plot point needs to be revealed before an episode actually airs to make sure viewers are interested enough to tune in next week.

Recent (and recurring) examples include previews shown for NBC’s Heroes, FX’s Nip/Tuck, and ABC’s The Bachelor.

Lately, so little has been going on in each episode of Heroes that revealing anything in the “Coming up…” previews is revealing too much. The show has been light on content and heavy on repetitive dialogue so hearing the most important lines delivered in preview-form often ruins the surprise of what’s going to happen.

The folks at Nip/Tuck appear to think that their viewing audience doesn’t remember anything about any episode from the past. The “Previously on Nip/Tuck…” sequences that are shown at the beginning of each episode essentially reveal what the entire upcoming episode is about by including select sound bites, scenes, and characters from prior episodes. If you see a character that hasn’t been in the show for several episodes during this “Previously on…” segment, it makes it pretty darn clear that they’re making a return. Likewise if a specific plot point is mentioned in this segment, that’s what the upcoming episode will be about. This is on top of the “Next time on Nip/Tuck…” preview from the end of the prior week’s show revealing just about everything else about the episode. It’s like watching the whole episode before actually watching it.

And while I don’t actually watch The Bachelor, my wife does every week, so I see bits and pieces here and there, including what appeared to me to be a 5-minute “This week on The Bachelor…”, showing clips of everything that was going to happen over the course of the following two hours of television. For that show, I suppose it’s convenient because then viewers can just fast-forward to the end and see who gets the boot.

Another equally-annoying practice is editing these “Next week on…” previews in a completely misleading way, making you think something is going to happen when it never actually does. Editors will mix dialogue from multiple scenes, forming a preview for a story line that doesn’t actually exist. In a way, this is even worse than spoiling what is really going to happen as it just confuses the viewing audience once the actual story is revealed.

I believe that “Coming up”-style previews should be assembled with care, showing only enough to keep the viewer interested but without actually revealing any plot points, surprising character appearances, or anything else that would have come as a shock when watching the episode. But the world of television revolves around ratings, not viewer satisfaction, and if previews that show an entire episode-worth of information condensed into 30-seconds are what keep viewers around, it must make good business sense to keep them going. For me, it just annoys me and makes me not want to watch the shows anymore.