Have you noticed that your favorite show has started to seem shallow, like it's not the vibrant 3-dimensional world you fell in love with? Or maybe your show has become such a twisted tangle of unresolved mysteries and dangling plot lines that you get lost just thinking about it. In either case, the problem is to do with the Subplot.

Subplots are an important part of every show. They allow for more than one story per episode, so you don't get bored with the main one, and extended subplots can be used to link episodes, forcing or enticing the viewer to tune in every week to get the whole story.

Remember the old episodes of the Simpsons? Each episode generally had two plots running side-by-side, a main plot and a subplot. Lisa tries to get into a fancy school and Homer adopts a goat. In the best case scenarios, the two plots would meet up near the end and resolve each other. Seinfeld was the best at this, where the two plots would converge in such a way as to be brilliantly surprising and so surprisingly obvious that you couldn't believe you hadn't seen it coming. This made their world seem more alive, like there was a lot more stuff going on.

But when comedy shows start to go bad, they lose the subplot. It's almost like they are so low on ideas, they can't afford to waste two plots on every episode. So you get a whole episode where Lisa does nothing but try to get into a fancy school and another episode where Homer does nothing but get a goat, AND THAT'S ALL THAT HAPPENS. Just 20 minutes of the same forced joke over and over.

Family Guy has only recently become guilty of this as well. Sure, Peter may go from one thing to another in an episode, like singing "Everybody knows that the Bird is the Word!" for a total of 3 minutes (I counted) and then hanging out with Jesus. But that's all that happens. No subplots involving Meg, or Chris or Stewie. They barely have any lines at all anymore, unless the entire show is about them, in which case you don't see any of the other characters. This is why that world seems so shallow and empty. It's like nothing else is going on in that world except what we are watching.

And as for live action or dramatic shows, the exact opposite holds true. You can usually tell that they've run out of ideas when the subplots TAKE OVER the whole show. This occurs when an entire season is comprised of ideas that would have made one good episode in the first season, but are now stretched out over six. This again is a sure sign that the writers have run out of ideas, and can't afford to waste an idea on just one episode.

Shows like Smallville, Lost and Desperate Housewives are the type this usually happens to. If you find that you can't remember where one episode ended and another began, or you can't explain what happened in this week's episode without explaining what happened in the last four, then your show is guilty of this sin.

Now, these are not meant to be hard and fast rules. They don't apply to ever show ever made. These are just patterns I have noticed among the shows I've watched. When I find that a show has stopped being enjoyable, I want to know why, and that's why I came up with these rules. What do you think? Do you know of any shows this has happened to?

People might not know this about me, since I'm decked out to hell and gone with Superman imagery, but I used to be very big into Dragonball Z. So big that I not only watched the shows and read the manga, but I started going way deeper into the story than anyone had and making connections that no one else had made before.

And so now, I've got so many ideas built up that I need to do something with them.

Anyway, here is the first few chapters of my first DB story, of which I hope there will be several. This one is a sequel, but they won't all be. I've got ideas for prequels, and side-stories and crazy crap no one has ever heard of before. But it all fits into the Toriyama-verse of Dragon Ball's creator Akira Toriyama.

So take a look if you have some time to kill, or you just like dbz, and let me know what you think.

www.fanfiction.net/s/4627868/1/Dragon_Ball_Omega

So I tuned into Bleach (the only anime I currently watch) a little early tonight, and I saw something that made me pretty sad. It was the end of Toonami. Not just them closing shop for the night, but Tom and all those little CGI robots packing up and saying goodbye. After 11 years, Tom told us, Toonami is gone for good.

That is so surreal to me. It's like the end of an era. 11 years. I was there when it all began. Back when Toonami started, and they were on weekdays after school. They showed stuff like Thundercats and the old 1940's Superman cartoon. After a while, they started showing anime, like Sailor Moon and Dragonball Z. And that's when things got good.

See, kids, back then, anime wasn't on every channel. It wasn't like today, where aisle after aisle at Best Buy is filled with anime. Same with bookstores and manga. The only game in town for those of us who knew what it was were shows like Sailor Moon and DBZ, which usually came on at like 6 a.m. Sunday mornings. But Toonami changed all that.

They put anime on in the middle of the day, where we could easily find it. And not just old anime, they brought in new stuff we had never seen before. Gundam Wing, Outlaw Star, Tenchi Muyo. For years, Toonami was the only game in town. They MADE after-school cartoons. Life was good.

But, like they say, nothing gold can stay.

See, anime was great because it was a refuge for those of us who still loved cartoons, but were tired of kid's stuff. Anime treated us like adults (or at least like teenagers). But ignorance is bliss. See, to show anime in such a visible location as weekdays after school, Toonami had to make a few concessions. They had to heavily edit some of their shows to make them acceptable. No squirting blood, no nudity, no profanity. And, of course, once we found out what we where missing, a lot of us were ticked.

See, it was fine when we didn't know. Heck, some of us could already tell (clearly those bathing suits were digitally pasted on) but we could live with it. And frankly, I didn't need to see little Gohan's "Little Gohan" to enjoy the show. I understood that some things just aren't acceptable on American TV. I got that. My major argument was "Yes, it's edited, but we're still getting a good deal. In Japan episodes come out once a week. Here we get them 5 times a week. Can you imagine waiting a whole week between Dragonball Z episodes where all they do is stare at each other? That'd be brutal. It's quantity over quality."

But then, they moved Toonami to Saturdays. So now we got heavily edited anime only once a week. No sale. I moved on to other things.

It's funny how things change. Showing an anime on TV used to practically be like having a license to print money. Now all I see on Adult Swim is those guys complaining that no one watches their anime.

Anime helped build Cartoon Network, and now it's treated like a second-class citizen. Oh, well. Life goes on. I guess I'm just a sentimental guy. I always think back on stuff. Toonami did a lot for me, even when they screwed up. When they first got the new DBZ's, it was 75 episodes. After that, they started milking it, only showing like 30 episodes a season. I used to get so mad. "They put a six month wait in-between a two-part episode and call it a Cliffhanger. Jerks!" But all that meant was that I would buy the DBZ videos when they came out, and share them with my friends. And my school was blessed with a disproportionate amount of hot girls who really liked anime. That's how I got my girlfriend, who I'm still with. We met and bonded because of our love of anime back in high school.

So thanks Toonami. Thanks for the good times, and even the bad times, because they are just as important. So good luck Tom! I think I'll got find that old tape I recorded the first season of DBZ on, complete with the original Toonami credits, and "Fat Astronaut Tom." Take care, space cowboy!