an argument could be made that Budweiser has been working hard to transfer consistent values to the growing light beer market for decades, while Miller has been fanning out it's value across brands. i don't know the numbers, but it's an interesting game of find the brand value and identify which has a better purchase on tomorrow.

The application to brands is not so clear to me. We remember the problem Coke had with Coke Classic and New Coke in 1985-6. To fend off Pepsi, Coke formulated a tastier product only to find it roundly rejected as unAmerican and to return to the original.

I think the consistency problem for brands needs to be thought out more completely.

The problems of continuity are well-known in the comic book industry. The idea of The Marvel Universe, cooked up back in the 1960s, was extremely powerful at the time because it made the adventures of the various characters seem less arbitrary and hence more exciting. It was also good for cross-promotion of comic books, because characters from one could appear in the others. Over time, however, the complexity of the structure passed well beyond rococo and writers seeking originality had to carve out local spaces where parts of the Universe were ignored or even contradicted. There were also some company-wide efforts at creating "alternate" universes where old stories could be retold in different ways. It's still a pretty useful thing to have, though, as in Marvel's recent "Civil Wars" storyline that crossed all its books as the government passes a law to force all superheroes to register with the government.

In general, I think the comics people (especially DC) are moving away from the strict consistency approach to more of a mythology approach. With mythology, different takes on the same idea coexist and the dominant ones win out because of their power with readers and later writers, rather than by editorial fiat as part of the Official Continuity.

But within a single TV series, my personal opinion is that consistency is pretty important. Heroes actually has a huge problem with this factor. When you have a telekinetic guy who can throw lightning bolts and fly and who knows about his enemies' powers yet still manages to get knocked out, etc. repeatedly, the whole premise of the story seems pointless. If you want to tell a story that's more human and not about superpowers, fine, write something more naturalistic. But if the whole point of originality of your tale is that these people have superpowers, it's stupid to deploy them inconsistently in order to set up various "emotional" or "thematic" scenes.

JJ Abrams has a talk on TED.com where he explains his black box of mystery kind of approach to writing that seems to mirror this way of thinking about tomorrow, or sight lines as you say.

if every act is directed towards the management of mystery, excitement, delight, etc. and not towards defending ones position or validating the past, then it seems like everything becomes a matter of much shorter, smaller, increments. an intimacy of expectations, which creates a kind of magic.

isn't there an anthropological idea of charisma that speaks to this?

As a counter point, in the UK, a season (or what they call a series) usually lasts a mere 12 episodes with sometimes a Christmas special, instead of the US standard 22. They also retire shows after one or two series, for example the Office and Queer As Folk, well before they jump the shark and while the show's popularity is still on the rise.

A British show closer to your post and the X-Files, is Dr. Who, which had a decades long run and was restarted 3 years ago. Here, the main character is "re-generated" every few years, and is also given new companions (ie side kicks) who travel with the Doctor. Each new actor give the actor a different spin and characterization, which breaks up the consistency.

As we pass some, (all?), ownership for our brands to our customers do they get to choose the importance of consistency? It seems a slippery slope that might have some interesting outcomes.

The best example of this that I know of is the Grendel comic created by Matt Wagner. He purposely changed the story multiple times. Not only would the story change temporally, but the person inhabiting the Grendel character would change. Wagner also used different artists to create the look and feel of the Grendel books.

Yeah, some of them worked better than others, but Grendel lived as a concept and that allowed the freedom to stay creatively fresh.

Up to that point there was a legitimate tension and mystery between the wish to side with Mulder and believe, and the unproven strangeness of his beliefs. As soon as the aliens turned up on screen the strong possibility that he might be wrong was squandered, and it became a rather less psychologically interesting matter of conspiracy against a Mulder whose beliefs were confirmed by evidence we had all witnessed too. "I want to believe" was an article of faith on the part of the viewer. Proof denies faith. The new film has precisely the wrong title, inadvertently highlighting the show's shark-jumping moment.