All television shows have varying degrees of writing quality when comparing episode to episode. Which shows historically have you found to have the most uneven writing?
I think Simpsons deserves a mention here. This show was great in its best years, then dipped in quality during the “Jerkass Homer” years and now in the past couple seasons have had episodes that swung between meh and pretty good.
The Treks are a good candidate. Every series had at least a few Hall of Fame episodes as well as some of the most abysmal 45 minutes possible.
Just watched a painful DS9 episode with the moving death of Vedek Baleir… coupled with a goof-ass stupid B-story about Jake and Nog’s bad date. I note the wikis comment that even the show staff were embarrassed by that one.
I think most “good” shows follow Rod Serling’s Rule of Thirds: If you have a TV show and you get 1/3 great episodes, 1/3 fair, and 1/3 crap, you’re actually doing OK. And the weak episodes are usually spread out, not bunched up in one season.Twilight Zone definitely follows this rule, and I would put classic Trek in there. I’d put TNG or DS9 at more like 1/2, 1/4, 1/4.
Given that, the shows with the greatest range between the best and the worst episodes are the hardest to watch. Law & Order has some stinkers that are so bad I turn them off. Worse than Spock’s Brain bad! Not even good for background noise. Stingray only ran one short season, but binge watching it is like watching two different shows with the same name and cast. I don’t know if they fired their whole staff at midseason or what, but the difference is astounding.
I missed Frasier when it was on the air. I watched all eleven seasons on Netflix over the past couple of years. The quality of the writing on this show was, IMO, very high most of the time. Occasionally they would produce a show that was like the lowest form of sitcom. These shows around revolved around all or most of the main characters being in a locale that was different from the usual few sets, like someone’s cabin at the lake, and one or two of them hiding or misunderstanding something that was going on. I can’t get much more specific than that. I just remember watching these episodes with impatience and disappointment, thinking that the writers had had an off week and resorted to old sitcom clichés.
One Day at a Time. Some episodes are really brilliant, and the reason the show was on as long as it was, but some are so bad they make you squirm. The show was breaking new ground, and I think they probably got censored a lot, which may have created some of the episodes that were just dull. Others that are cringeworthy were attempts to explore the dynamics of a divorced woman and her daughters, written by men who were never divorced, or the product of divorce-- or maybe divorced, but not with children.
A few were so spot-on, they still are brilliant even 40 years later, though. I loved the show to death when it was new, and I still have a soft spot for it.
Rhoda is another really uneven show. I think it has to do with a poor premise saved by the genuine talent of Valerie Harper and Julie Kavner. Also, other than Brenda and Rhoda’s mother, the peripheral characters were kinda dumb. But there were still some episodes that were brilliant. It’s a really mixed bag.
There were a whole bunch of those shows, vaguely inspired by Knight Rider if not Route 66, about a “lone hero with a bad past and a cool vehicle and some quirky friends out to dispense justice.” Nearly all of them wander all over the map in their short runs, once the showrunners, the network and the ratings discover that premise only works well for about three episodes.
Quick, quick - who “faced” Michael [del]Long[/del] Knight before plastic surgery turned him into David Hasselhoff? (Cliches. Always cliches.)
Ally McBeal had some great episodes and clever writing and also complete unwatchable dreck.
I didn’t know. I always intended to rewatch the pilot and see, but never did. Then I forgot. At least, IMDB says who it was. So I looked him up, and I still don’t know who he is. 
Babylon 5, like DS9, managed to run the gamut from moving to unbelievably stupid in the same episode with Grey 17 Is Missing. Only in this one it’s the “B” plot that makes the whole thing worthwhile while the “A” plot is total garbage.
I recently watched all the old “Tales from the Darkside” and the first maybe 5 shows of the first season were fantastic, then it went down the crapper from there. Very inconsistent - you never knew if you were going to get an interesting story with a freaky twist at the end or a lame attempt at humour. I found most of the “comedy” episodes were barely watchable.
Big Love started out as a fascinating character study of a plural marriage in a fairly realistic modern USA.
Then in the fourth season there was a scheme to smuggle parrots from Mexico, and the good guys escaped from the bad guys (yes, there were good guys and bad guys) by chopping some guy’s arm off at the shoulder with a single swing of a machete, and then telling his goons that if they hurried him to the hospital it could still be reattached.
(Although season-to-season inconsistency is very different from episode-to-episode inconsistency, which is probably a lot less common these days.)
I think Big Bang is going down hill fast, not really wanting it too.
If it’s not out of bounds, I nominate Saturday Night Live, which has at times been wildly inconsistent season-to-season, episode-to-episode, and sketch-to-sketch within a single episode.
True, it would have been somewhat less embarrassing if JMS had swapped the letters by coming up with a title based on the good plot thread.
His name is stuck in my memory because he’s a third cousin, or something. I was told that at the time, by a star-struck aunt, and never forgot. (Also no idea if it’s true or just a coincidence of common names.)
Recently, I found that Donald Glover’s show “Atlanta” had episodes that were very good followed by episodes that were straining to be funny and that failed miserably.
“Lost in Space” could go from “amusingly bad” to “dreadfully bad”.
SNL is an odd bird. They’ve always had spotty writing. Even when you go backto the so-called Golden Age early seasons with Belushi, Akroyd, Chase, Radner, et al you find that yes there were a handful of spectacularly hilarious skits, but for every gem there were at least a dozen turds. I find their batting average is actually a little better in recent years, maybe not as many grand slams but a lot more base hits these days.
Also “Portlandia”, mostly written by SNL’s alumnus, Fred Armisen.