I also wanted an achievement

Have any of you watched Community?

(Some spoilers below)

It's a show by Dan Harmon (of Rick and Morty fame) about a group of students at community college, and it very quickly became a show pointing fun at its own meta - going so far as to have a main character refer to each year as a "season" in a way that perfectly correlated with the shows actual layout.

Notably the last two seasons (or years) of the show took a shift. After season 4 was written without Harmon the show had a very different feeling, and even after his return in season 5 the show would never be the same. One of the main cast members left at the start of the season, and another left halfway through. A third member left again in season 6. In both series, new characters were brought in as replacement (the season 5 replacement did not return in season 6) which kept the numbers up, but it wasn't the same show after that point. The character dynamics were different and there was a constant feeling that the show and its characters had lost something.

What's interesting is how much I relate to the feeling of the show (and of other shows that underwent similar changes in status quo). In university especially you tend to spend three years with the same group of people. Then, if you stay around longer, you start to lose people as they move on with their lives outside of the university. Every year, people I know graduate. They are replaced by more people, some who only stay around for a year at a time (MSc students), and by the end of my degree I find myself still with the same core set of friends, just in a social environment unrecognisable from how it started.

I've always thought it tragic that we watch shows repeatedly, being able to relive the show at its highest point and avoid the missteps, but in life we are forced to stay wherever our plots winds up.

I don't think the writers did this intentionally, as the cast who left did so for personal reasons. However I think it's apt that a show about meta humour is most relevant, not in its own plot and characters, but in the meta that existed around them as a fictional show.