We are binging ‘Major Crimes’ on the ROKU channel before it leaves.
Seasons 1-4? Love them. Not the best procedural, lots of stuff wrong from the law-talking guy perspective, but a great show. Love the characters, humor, pacing…
Season 5, starts to get a little iffy.
Season 6 is a badly written soap opera, directed by an AV Club dropout. By the time Raydor passed out for the 4th time, I was rooting for her death. I felt sorry for Tony Denison having to play Flynn like that. I don’t think the soap opera hacks who wrote season 6 ever even saw The Closer.
Big Bang Theory after the first six seasons or so, when it started to be about “relationships.” Loving, caring, pussy-whipped Sheldon made me sick, as did whiny angst-ridden Stuart and Raj.
“True Blood” started out great. Good writing and acting. Interesting concept. Cool powers.
But once the showrunners decided that * everyone * in that town had to have some sort of supernatural element, it started to get ridiculous and sad. I never even watched the last season, I was so disappointed.
I’m sure that someone will mention “Lost” or “Heroes,” but I never watched them
Well, the poster children for this is many HBO series, of course. Or Lost. Or Heroes.
But I nominate Monk.
Started out as a detective show with a quirky detective, who solved mysteries.
Later it became a show about the quirks of a quirky detective. Mysteries were a side note. Now sure, many still liked it, but it became much more of a comedy, and i didnt think making fun of him was really “funny”.
**The Simpsons **- 7 seasons of must-see appointment TV in the 90s, including the 2nd and 3rd seasons when I felt it was hands-down the best thing on television. Followed by the truly awful 10th-12th seasons that were unbelievably crappy.
On the other hand, it’s still on 20 years later, so it must appeal to someone. I bailed at the end of the 13th season in 2002.
The X-Files should have ended when Duchovny left. The last two seasons of the original run were pretty weak. As for the revival, the first season was crap, with the exception fof the excellent “Mulder and Scully Meet the Weremonster”. I actually enjoyed most of the revival second season’s monster-of-the-week offerings. The conspiracy stuff was utter shite though.
I agree with the OP, except I’d put the slide for Major Crimes much earlier, practically to the last episode of The Closer. Rusty was a black hole of suckitude that sucked any goodness out of the series.
The Closer was a show about cops. MC was a soap opera about the life and loves of a young gay man in LA, who happened to hang out with cops. I think any resemblance to actual law dried up and blew away. I view MC as sort of the Casebook of Sharon Raydor, as written by Rusty. He understands nothing of law, civil rights or police work, so the story elements and plots that make no sense are because Rusty doesn’t understand what he’s seeing or being told.
But even more that MC, I’d vote for Burn Notice. In the beginning, Michael was a good guy, a team player, a spy who went out of his way to prevent collateral damage. As the show went on, he became more and more what the CIA believed him to be. First he helped Ansen erase records from the CIA, then he outright murdered a CIA man, and by the end he’d become the terrorist he used to fight. And he got his mom killed! And the show still thought he was the good guy!
There was practically nothing for women to do on TV on the early 90s, except play straight-man to doofus husbands. There was so much bad TV going on, that a show didn’t even have to be that good to be exceptional at this time, but the first two seasons of this show were really special. The middle seasons weren’t great, but they were still better than most of what was on at the time. The end of it was no better than something like Diff’rent Strokes. I didn’t even watch the last season, it had gotten so cringeworthy.
First 3 seasons great. Next two pretty good. Season 6 just went downhill fast resulting in one the most idiotic season finales of all time. Kept watch for a while longer hoping it would return to form. Nope. Gave up.
Shonda Rhimes is a serial killer wannabe, IMHO.
Note that after season 3 they spun off the show Private Practice which may have diluted the creativity. But a lot of things changed. E.g., the selection of music for the show also got worse.
Arrested Development. The original seasons on broadcast TV were quirky, intelligent and hilarious. The new episodes made by Netflix were unwatchable. It was clear that the actors must’ve had other conflicts and only worked part-time. Half of each episode were flashbacks. I did not make it far before giving up.
I only partially agree with this. Season 5 was definitely bad. Seasons 6 and 7, though, were actually quite good and only suffer in comparison to the first four years under Sorkin which were stellar.
Star Trek: Enterprise. The first two seasons were interesting. The post 9/11 changed everything episodes could only rise to the level of pure shit on rare occasions.
My personal choice on this is Castle. I loved the series for the first five seasons. In season six (during which Castle and Beckett were engaged), it started to feel like the original premise was getting stale, and the fact that the engagement got stretched over the entire season was tiresome.
The feel of the show increasingly increasingly strayed from its original tone in seasons 7 and 8; i know that the series creator and showrunner, Andrew Marlowe, was stepping back from it (and I believe that he’d left entirely in season 8). Also, there were a lot of rumors during those seasons that the two stars, Nathan Fillion and Stana Katic, didn’t get along, and less and less of the show was about their characers’ interactions, to the point that it seemed like few scenes featured both of them at the same time.
My pick and the standard I measure all other declines by. Heroes was the top new show the year it aired.
I still think season 1 was really great. It was so bad after that season that it is stunning. I don’t think I could plan to make a show as bad as it got.
Just a huge disappointment. Mind-boggling. I can’t think of anything else that got worse more quickly.
I heard Sleepy Hollow and Once Upon A Time also declined, but neither as instantly as Heroes.
I disagree. The later years had some disappointing episodes, but some really good ones, too. I thought most of the last season (more Jimmy Smits and Alan Alda than Martin Sheen) was quite good.
I pretty much agree with this. Even Season 5 had its moments (see: The Supremes) but it was so much worse than the preceding four seasons. By the time things spooled up for the Santos campaign about mid-Season 6, it was really good again.
I see somebody else mentioned Sleepy Hollow. That show started out with what I thought was a really intriguing concept … but it crashed and sucked so hard after that first season. I had to look it up just now to find out it limped along for four seasons, cause I was out of there after 14 or 15 episodes.
