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.
The “clip show” is a good sign the writers are running out of ideas. The writers write 10 minutes of dialogue and the rest of the show are scenes from previous episodes.
Clipshows were a necessary evil on broadcast shows, especially scifi ones that cost a lot of money. Sometimes the show would have to do a clipshow or a noticeably cheap bottle episode to save up for an expensive episode. Also, in the pre-streaming era, people couldn’t just watch all the episodes in order on demand so an occasional episode summarizing what was going on was actually useful.
I liked the clip shows from Community because they showed clips from “episodes” that weren’t shown. They would just reference events that we didn’t see happen and show a clip of it. Idk if that counts though.
a parody of a thing is not the thing itself.
I think clip episodes are actually when the production runs out of money so they force the writers to make something very cheap. Usually at the end of a season.
There’s usually a large chasm between the good episodes and the low quality of a clip episodes, rather than a gradual decline.