Suggested by this thread about the once-great, now-ludicrous Law & Order: SVU.
Which, incidentally, is the first show I’ll mention.
I used to–well, not quite LOVE SVU, but at least appreciate it. At its prime it was hard to love because of the grimness of the cases. But it was well-acted, intense, and frequently intriguing.
Like all long-running dramatic series, of course, SVU (or rather its writers) began to run out of ideas in time. Moreover, they also began to feel the need to push the envelope–to put the characters in increasingly implausible jeopardies. But I kept watching anyway, if only because I figured eventually Stabler would go ahead and kill someone and I didn’t want to miss it.
But then they sent Benson to prison undercover to find a rapist. Then they great pleasure in showing her humiliated and stripped and beaten and nearly raped. It was just too implausible and exploitative and too damn stupid to believe.
So that’s why I gave up on a series I used to appreciate. How about the rest of y’all?
This is my SVU moment as well. I still watch it sporadically, but that episode was when I quit watching it every week.
Likewise, I quit watching Bones every week after the third season finale.
Making Zack Gormagon’s apprentice because it was “logical” was probably the stupidest crap ever. This was compounded by the fact that the writers had no idea which member of the cast was going to be the apprentice until they wrote that episode. Making the apprentice Zack was just done to make the audience mad.
So fuck that, I’m done.
Otherwise, I have a really bad compulsion to stick through with every show I watch until the bitter end. I watched X-Files every week right up until the shitty clip show-filled finale. I still watch 24 even though it feels more like an obligation than something I love (like seasons 1-4 were).
On SVU and regular Law and Order, it doesn’t seem to be enough anymore to have a victim murdered. There must be torture and/or dismemberment for full effect. Add bonus points if the victim was burned alive.
I gave up on West Wing at the beginning of the … fourth?, I think … season – Fall of 2001. They started with a stand-alone episode to explain to all us yahoos what the appropriate response to 9/11 was. I didn’t actually disagree with any of the points made, but I was so profoundly offended by Sorkin’s self-righteousness/self-importance in appointing himself the arbiter of correct responses that I was unable to recover my previous enthusiasm for the show – and, in fact, I’ve maintained a pretty thorough-going Sorkin boycott ever since. (Luckily his “SNL”-set show sucked, so I didn’t have a crisis of conscience.)
I used to watch the American The Office. It was always borderline for me. When they had Michael lay down in the middle of a presentation like a gibbering idiot it was too pathetic for me to continue watching.
I stopped watching The X-Files when both Scully and Mulder left. My loss, I’m sure… but it just wasn’t the same. I’ve caught a few of the Doggett & Reyes (sp?) episodes. They’re okay.
But they don’t have that special rapport or chemistry that S&M had. Scully made the show.
I seem to stop watching TV shows as soon as I miss one or two episodes and don’t really care. I can watch for ages and then if I miss a couple without bothering to tape them I generally just give up and let them go. This means that the majority of popular shows lose my interest after one or two episodes.
I stopped watching Desperate Housewives shortly into the third season. I was okay with the silly, over the top behavior of the housewives, but the writers seemed to change the housewives’ basic characters to fit the plots.
I stopped watching Dancing With the Stars at the end of the first season, when the judges gave that couple a perfect ten for a dance where the ABC soap star stumbled and fell. Hurley (sp?) wuz robbed! I think they’ve changed the scoring system since then but that first season felt rigged, and I still don’t trust 'em.
Heroes: the end of Volume 4. After the eps got better, the season finale didn’t make me want to go back.
Lost: at the end of season 3. The flash-forwards looked interesting in that ep but I lost my patience with the show by that point
My Name is Earl: during the “Earl in prison” arc
I stopped watching Cold Case – a show I had liked for several reasons – when they had the episode in Nashville. I live in Nashville, have lived here for a long time, am a native Southerner. I get really weary of the stereotypical presentations of the South and Southerners. This show took the cake, however. There had been a small article in the paper before the ep was filmed, an interview with the creator of the show who was here on a research trip, to find out more about Nashville as well as scout locations to shoot exteriors, etc. Since I already watched the show semi-regularly, I was looking forward to that ep.
It didn’t take long for my mouth to drop open in horror, and it stayed that way most of the show. Everyone had “Hollywood Southern accents” which is to say, completely bogus parodies unrelated to any real Southern accent. The police chief was called – get this – “Big Daddy.” And he called the female lead of the show “Little Sister” in a condescending manner. Every character was textbook Southern stereotype, ignorant, corrupt, racist, sexist. “Southern Hospitality” was equated with the police chief’s assistant hooking up with the male lead on the show. It made my stomach turn.
This isn’t out of the ordinary for TV – it’s the rule rather than anything like the exception. Yet, here was a show I liked, that seemed to have a streak of humanity to it, and then they do that, ESPECIALLY when the creator came here to get a taste of the real Nashville. So, no more Cold Case for me.
X-Files when they stopped being self-contained episodes about freaky stuff, and started being ongoing government conspiracy crap where if you missed an episode, you were out of the loop forever.
Bones as soon as I heard about this season’s finale. I missed the end of the Gormagon storyline and was mostly watching the reruns on Bravo, but I think I could’ve made it through that, lame as it was. But they ruined it as soon as I read the preview article about Stewie Griffin’s appearance and the Bones/Booth hookup. Maybe next season they’ll redeem themselves, if they can turn it around.
Will & Grace when they started being caricatures of themselves; I liked season one sarcastic, aloof Karen, I didn’t like how she got more shrill and ridiculous as time went on… they turned Karen & Jack into Dumb & Dumber, and it just got, well, dumb.
“Prison Break” after the end of the second season. It seemed like they were artificially extending an already told story with another layer of conspiracy.
“Heroes” after the episode with the scene taken from the Jeff Goldblum version of “The Fly”. Not specifically because it was such a total rip-off (or homage), that’s just the point I realized the show was out of ideas and didn’t have anything else to offer me.
This goes back a ways, but I stopped watching ‘Moonlighting’ after Bruce Willis and Cybil Shepard’s characters got together. The whole show had been about the growing sexual tension between them – as soon as they acted on it, the tension was gone and there was no reason to keep watching.
The X-Files had storylines about the “mytharc” from the start. Hell, the pilot and the first episode were mytharc episodes. They always mixed mythology eps with creature-of-the-week eps – there were consistently 5 to 7 mytharc episodes every season. The X-Files - Wikipedia So, if the mythology stuff is what turned you off, then you weren’t paying attention early on.
Me too. I got tired of being jerked around. “Oh, here’s an interesting story idea…let’s explore it…well, we don’t know what to do with it any more, let’s do this one instead and drop the first one, the viewers won’t care, they’re so caught up in the MYSTERY we can do whatever we want.”
House. Same damn plot every single time. At least CSI keeps it interesting, even if they do solve the mystery at the 48:00 mark too.
Desperate Housewives. Gabby throwing the cell phone of the man in the wheelchair across the parking lot so he wouldn’t call the cops on her for parking in a handicapped space. Nope, I’m out.
Heroes. I used to tape it and watch it with my daughter because she had judo. Sunday night rolled around, we realized we hadn’t made time to watch the previous Monday’s episode, and didn’t much care about it.
The only MSTV for me now is** Big Bang Theory, The Closer, Burn Notice,** and The Tudors.
I quit watching Battlestar Galactica after all of the graphic implied rape in the end of Season 2. Raping the blond girl, almost raping the Asian girl (whom I really liked) and the disgusting callousness of the soldiers underneath that colonel or Admiral or whatever. That shit does not need to be in a sci-fi show. if I wanted that much dark reality I wouldn’t be watching a sci-fi show. I want to be entertained, not horrified.
I kind of quit watching X-Files after Season 4, but I own Season 5, and will watch it one day.