The first two seasons of Sneaky Pete were pretty good. Season three felt like a completely different show and I don’t think I even made it through the second episode. Everything was off: the writing, the acting, the direction, the music etc. etc…
Chuck completely upended its own premise and treated all its characters terribly. And also stopped being funny.
Dexter was brilliant up until they decided that an adopted brother and sister getting it on was fine and natural, and everything else in the show dropped in quality too. What happened to Deborah was more upsetting than any of the other deaths in the show.
The X-Files still had a few good episodes in seasons eight and nine (a couple were really amazing, actually), but it just didn’t work without Mulder as a full time character.
***Designated Survivor ***started out really well, but seemed to fizzle once the big conspiracy was dealt with.
Thank you for mentioning Chuck. My wife and I did a rewatch and honestly, we had to start skipping a bit because the decline was so noticeable.
We used to really like it, but ended up kind of hating the last couple seasons when we watched it again. Stopped being funny was one part of that.
I have a sinking sensation that ‘Killing Eve’ is going to decline. Sunday’s premiere 3rd season episode was…ok. Not amazing. Maybe it just needs to get up to speed.
The Walking Dead has been declining for years, so no surprise there.
Even ‘Better Call Saul’, still excellent, has had some so-so episodes this season, and it’s almost over - for now! Even so-so-episodes of BCS are still better than 90% of other tv, though.
Is Game of Thrones too obvious?
I get that it was a really hard story to wrap up in any satisfying way and there’d always be fans who would complain but if you tried to spoil the ending for people they would not have believed you.
A number of the shows that immediately came to mind (Heroes, The West Wing, The Simpsons) have already been mentioned. Here are a few more.
Due South. The first two seasons were absolutely brilliant comedy/drama/adventure/bromance. The 3rd/4th season (it aired as a single third season in the U.S. and as separate third and fourth seasons in Canada) was just bad. Not surprising - it originally aired as a prime-time network show in the U.S. and Canada, but CBS cancelled it after two seasons. It was revived after a hiatus of over a year as a Canadian network/U.S. syndicated show, with a smaller budget, one of the two main characters re-cast, and the creator/head writer/show-runner from the first two seasons wasn’t directly involved in the revival.
Picket Fences. Another show that had two seasons of absolutely brilliant comedy/drama, combined with compelling if overly melodramatic legal wrangling (it was a David E. Kelly show…). Then Kelly left, and the third season was a drudgy character-driven soap opera. It had low ratings, but it won the Emmy as Best Primetime Dramatic Series its first two seasons, which embarrassed CBS into renewing it. The drecky third season killed finally killed it.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The first five seasons were absolutely brilliant comedy/drama/action/horror/romance (yes, there’s a pattern here), but after it was cancelled by the WB and revived on Paramount, the sixth season was just dreary (although it paradoxically had one of the two best episodes of the whole series, “Once More with Feeling”). It came close to returning to form in the seventh and final season, but it just never re-captured the magic. Much more surprising than the two examples above, as the creator/head writer/show-runner stayed with it the whole run.
Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. By far the shortest good quality run, it was a brilliant you-get-the-idea for the first half of the first season. Then Captain America: The Winter Soldier literally blew up the show’s premise. It limped on through the second half of the season, and it was…decent, but it couldn’t recover. After that, it steadily declined, but had just enough of the original magic that would poke its head up every once in a while to keep me watching until the time travel shark-jump in Season I-Don’t-Remember made it unwatchable for me.
It was around when I stopped watching it that I had an epiphany. In the first episode, there’s a scene where the team leader (Agent Coulson) insists that the team capture and help a super-soldier that’s running amok instead of killing him. Agent Ward, the team’s combat specialist, objects that there’s no way to bring the super-soldier down without getting S.H.I.E.L.D. agents and bystanders killed. Coulson replies, “You’re an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. Find a way.” It’s a scene that makes being humane, merciful, and decent look positively bad-ass. As the seasons wore on, the characters drifted further and further from that, and wound up just being bog-standard paramilitary operators who responded to threats by killing them, and for that matter, killed for revenge, when they didn’t need to.
For me it doesn’t help that Zachary Levi is not a very nice person. I disagreed with him about something once on Twitter - he said something about atheists not having a moral code and I said that atheists can have morals too, not exactly a controversial statement - and he literally asked his followers to attack me, which they did with gusto, with him liking and retweeting several of their attacks. He even claimed that he wasn’t a believer himself, but then liked his followers saying that he was a believer. I hardly ever post on Twitter so have very few followers. It got very personal and was totally bizarre.
This was long after Chuck had ended, so isn’t why I disliked the way the show progressed, but it has made me not want to rewatch the early seasons I had really enjoyed.
Can any The West Wing fans explain the change they didn’t like? I wasn’t a fan to start with but I am curious about what someone who liked the show thinks went wrong.
I tried the first episode of The Good Place… and I finally binged a show for the first time, watching the whole first season. Loved it.
Had a fun plot twist at the end… so I had to watch the second season, which was… all over the place. Is the third season worth hanging in there for?
I feel like I did when I fell in love with The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret. The first season was SO much fun. David Cross, Will Arnett… and “Dave”. Second season not as focused, not as funny. Third season a whole different animal (HAD to be… really clever, but very different premise).
I thought the first two seasons were great. I couldn’t even make it past the first episode of season 3. Maybe I’ll try it again now that I’m just home all the time.
Another Amazon series like that is Bosch. I really liked the first 4 seasons, but I quit watching season 5 after watching him wander around as a fake druggie for episode after episode. I didn’t even finish it.
Shouldn’t the first post be “The Andy Griffith Show”? A lot of people complain about “The Simpsons”, “Game of Thrones”, etc. But the later seasons are still easily available to view. The color episodes of “Andy Griffith” have such a poor reputation they’ve essentially disappeared unless you have the DVDs. For example, the diginet METV has aired the B&W Don Knotts era episodes in its prime time leadoff slot for years. They’re also staples of TV Land and even air on regular broadcast TV in the South. In contrast, METV always aired the color episodes in lesser early slots and stopped airing them altogether several years ago. And most of the other outlets gave similar short shrift to the color episodes.
Misfits. Going on memory, the first season (“series”) or two were fantastic, but at some point it jumped that big man-eating fish.
After seeing it in another thread I was going to mention Due South. One of my favorite shows of all time until it was cancelled and destroyed in the 3rd season.
Possibly the best writing on Television.
I thought that “Neon Joe, Werewolf Hunter” and “Eagleheart” followed the same kind of pattern: a very funny first season, but far more weird than funny towards the end.
Heroes.
There isn’t a close second.
It started with kidnapping of the President’s daughter. Then him removing himself because the VP had already resigned. And then bowing to the Speaker of the house when he gave them a list nobodies to nominate as VP. It just wan’t believable to me. Then the attack in Syria or wherever, then McGarry’s heart attack, the President’s MS…upping the ‘drama’ ante.
Common problem when good writers leave shows. The hacks that are left think that good writing means ‘more dramatic situations’. Castle was great example. We didn’t love the show because of the drama. We loved the humorous back and forth between Castle and Beckett as they solved weird crimes.
Makes sense, thanks Typo and it has reminded me about The Bill.
Started out as a gritty, down to earth, police procedural with realistic characters and plots. Plenty of nicking toe rags and scrotes and never getting bogged down in soapy plots. It was good for years.
Then they went for ratings, soap style plots, explosions, ridiculous, over-the-top villains. The got younger, more attractive actors and just killed the whole point of the show. It made so many people sad.
i quit the Simpsons when they moved to Thursdays although the move did what it was supposed to and put the cosby show out of its misery
you know i think the Asian “series” model is better one series on every weekday for about 4 months and then it completely ends no cast changes or getting worried about dilution over years ect