Nowadays, with so many different things to watch and ways to watch them, it can be difficult for anything to have an impact if it’s not, say, a six-episode HBO miniseries or the only new thing on Netflix that everyone wants to make fun. And then there is Those who have and those who don’t, an original drama on OWN that will come to an end later this year, after showing 196 episodes over eight seasons, which is very. Credit for the program’s longevity goes to creator Tyler Perry, who is famous for always valuing quantity … you know, the other thing, although it’s not like Those who have and those who don’t (which is a heavy title) was a series of underdogs that no one ever saw. As reported by Deadline, the series has an average of 3 million viewers and is “always” classified as one of the cable programs most watched by black women.
But all of this will soon be in the past, because as soon as the show – which Sonia Saraiya called “Black Downton Abbey“ inside The AV Club review eight years ago– returns from his midseason hiatus in May, airs the final batch of episodes in his eighth and final season. Oprah Winfrey, OW at OWN, said the program’s success is entirely due to Perry’s “very vivid creativity and imagination”, with Deadline provoking that it will have an “end that nobody will see coming”. Exciting! But it is apparently not exciting enough for Perry and OWN to go on 200 episodes. It can’t be that hard to write four episodes of a TV show, right? Come on, Perry!