>>149245752
>You can really only write stuff about the restaurant for so long, all there is is a small dining room, a kitchen, basement, and storage. It's really hard to make new stories in such a confined space.
If you ask me, it's not just about the restaurant setting. Bob's Burgers is (barring another writers' strike) going to air its 300th episode next year. There are shows that maintain somewhat consistent quality while lasting this long, I don't believe BB to be one of them, but regardless - no episodic sitcom that never makes any major changes in its premise/setting needs to go on for this long.
It's not just the fact that you can only write so many plots with a restaurant setting, it's also the fact that you can only write so many (decent) plots with the same characters in the same world during the same time of their lives, period. The characters sort of change but never for the better (see
>>149243812), the only major change the world went through is that there's now a repaired sinkhole in front of the restaurant, and time will never progress because it's one of those shows. There have been like 12 Christmases and Halloweens, but Louise is still 9.
I'm not asking for the show to fully embrace real time and make her 23 years old. But just a 3-4 year timeskip would have worked extremely well, that way it'd actually make SENSE for her to be all depressed and angsty now, Tina could be pursuing more serious relationships and move on from a decade-and-a-half of terrible will-they-won't-they with Jimmy Jr, Gene could become an actual character, etc.
You can only do so much with the exact same setting featuring the exact same characters at the exact same age doing the exact same gags over and over and over again. At some point you've just written/seen it all.
