Like many shows, it got a lot worse in later season -- but I think later seasons were still really expensive to produce. Given that this seems to be such a com

Like many shows, it got a lot worse in later season -- but I think later seasons were still really expensive to produce. Given that this seems to be such a common pattern, I wonder if there's a viable model, where the show's budget ramps down as the audience shrinks. Much like with tech companies, it doesn't have to be binary between a really expensive operation which requires a mass audience to be profitable or fully dead/cancelled. What if it could gracefully shrink until it was a small, cheap show with a niche audience, until a final season watched only by philosophy undergrads is a series of dialogues about Baudrillard or Merleau-Ponty between a single 'robot' and human character in a blank white room?