Did the basic implausibility of the series wear thin after a while

[TMC]

To give you a better idea:

No, what happened was that the show’s greatest strength (which helped it get to #1 in the first season) ultimately became boring….

For the first season or two, the show was almost always shown in two parts per week… each segment being just half an hour. Part I would always leave Batman and Robin caught in some kind of death trap from which they couldn’t possibly escape. Having watched the first segment, a viewer felt an irresistible impulse to tune in to see the second half of the episode… “Tune in tomorrow, same bat time, same bat channel!” The public ate it up.

This impossible-cliff-hanger pattern worked well for (for example) James Bond and Indiana Jones, when you saw the movie once every two or three years. But when exposed to this rigid formula every week, it grew tiresome after 52 weeks per year. By the third year, the public had a case of “been there, done that.”

In any case, the recaps at the beginning of the second half of the episodes were brief, so those weren’t at fault.

The basic implausibility of the series wore thin after a while. (Again, if you see an adventure only once every couple of years, it’s not as grating.) Week after week after week, you saw super villains who were so smart it never occurred to them that if they just shot Batman and Robin at the earliest opportunity, they’d never have a problem. But even more illogical was the idea that simply removing Batman’s mask would end his crimefighting career… AND YET EVERY WEEK, BATMAN IS KNOCKED OVER THE HEAD OR PARALYZED BY THE VILLAIN, AND NO ONE EVER THINKS TO TAKE OFF HIS MASK!

(Batman is Bruce Wayne? Who knew?)

For a while, none of this mattered. It was just pure “camp,” and I find it highly amusing to watch it in syndication today… as a farce and a comedy. But after a couple of years, the public’s taste for this camp grew sated.

In the third season, the network tried things to get the public interested again. Most notable was the addition of the “Batgirl” character. In my opinion, the casting of Yvonne Craig, who started her career as a dancer and understood how to move well, was an outstanding choice. And half a century later, every Baby Boomer remembers Yvonne for that (along with her co-starring in an Elvis movie and her memorable appearance on Star Trek).

It was confusing, though. The second season featured many episodes with Catwoman in love with Batman… now that plot line ended and they brought in Yvonne Craig as Batman’s potential love interest. The romantic tension was there.

But was she going to be paired up with Batman — or with Robin, who was closer to her age and size? I could never figure that out.

They experimented with the format other ways. The show went to a one half-hour a week format, with an entire adventure starting and ending in just one segment. But nothing failed to stop the ratings slide, and the network threw in the towel.

Batman was almost saved, because a rival network wanted to buy the show. (That’s happened rarely in TV history, but it has happened.) But the buyers didn’t want to pay the cost of reconstructing all the sets from scratch, and they asked they be able to take over the existing sets. Too bad, because the producers of the show had just deconstructed the set and destroyed or burned up the pieces. The prospective buyers didn’t want to sink hundreds of thousands into the cost of those expensive sets, and so sadly, Batman never got a fourth or fifth season.