TV Series that only had a great first season (closed spoilers)

Cafe Society
1

What are the TV Series that had a great first season then fell away rapidly after that? That you are not sure to recommend to friends because they’ll likely get hooked as you did, then disappointed if they can’t resist continuing?

A few examples to start:

Prison Break
Even if a little contrived, it was a lot of fun with great characters. However the writers clearly didn’t know what to do after they got out of prison. The third season had its moments IMO, thanks to them being in prison again, but the contrivances required to have all the characters together broke any chance of suspension of disbelief.

The Lazarus Project
A really clever example of taking one simple concept and running with it; thinking through all the implications on the characters and the wider world. The second series felt like a blatant holding pattern though, and I don’t think I even got to the last episode.

Made in Abyss
A bit obscure, but it’s one of my favorite manga series. Beautiful, dark, deep; a bit like a real abyss. I think it was likely a victim of its own success, because after descending 5+ levels in the first season, they stick on the 6th level for the entirety of the second season, and it’s just dull. It’s not obvious why the characters have lost all sense of urgency (I haven’t read the comics)

2

True Detective had an amazing first season. The next couple were poor, and I never returned to the series.

I believe Fargo had the same fate, except that the most recent season is supposed to be good.

3

I think the second season of Fargo is the superior one. That’s the one staring Patrick Wilson.

I’ll put Yellowstone in this category. It set up an interesting situation with parallels to The Sopranos and The Godfather in a different setting. The conflict with both the reservation and land developers was interesting. All with a backdrop of modern cowboy life. It quickly lost its way. Storylines got abandoned. Characters became cartoons of themselves.

4

Heroes is the first thing that comes to mind.

5

Killing Eve was a good example of this. The show had a different showrunner for each of its four seasons, which you could sense. The first season was terrific, but it fell off a cliff once Phoebe Waller-Bridge left. Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer both did their best with the material they were given, but talent can only mean so much.

6

Alias.

The original premise was great. SD6 is a criminal organization, whose lower level members think they are working for a secret branch of the CIA. Agent Sydney Bristow discovers the truth after SD6 murders her fiancee, and starts working with the real CIA to bring SD6 down from within. The first season and a half was brilliant, with increasingly complex plots, secrets within secrets, lies within lies, missions within missions, within missions.

Then half way through season 2 , all of a sudden it changed. Sydney discovers a single point of failure that brings down SD6 in a single episode. She, and her former SD6 colleagues, start working for the real CIA, which never made sense. Everything that made the first season and a half so good was gone in an instant. I watched the rest of the season, and the first couple of episodes of season 3. I didn’t like it, and gave up.

7

Definitely the first thing that came to my mind.

8

I also agree with Heroes

9

Dark Angel (2000-2002)

Interesting first season, good characters, a strong conflict between the protagonists and the information controlling, surveillance drone enabled Milgov antagonist, along with a nice look at an America which was suddenly just not that important/powerful anymore and the drastic class/wealth imbalance taken to the next level.

Season 2? Monsters of the week and a cheesy snake cult.

There are reasons of course, but dammit…

10

Dexter. It wasn’t that all the other seasons were bad, only that the first season was superb and none of the subsequent seasons could live up to it.

11

Deleted as I picked a show canceled after the first season

12

Boomtown was a cops and lawyers show set in L.A. with a Rashomon-like storytelling device where you saw scenes repeated from different viewpoints. I thought it was great, but apparently it was too hard for viewers to follow so the TV execs dumbed it down in the second season and then it got cancelled.

13

Forgot about that one. You’re right about it. Great first season. It was created by one of the writers of Band of Brothers and had a bunch of the same cast.

14

I didn’t even think the Rashomon conceit even lasted the first couple episodes.

Maybe they just didn’t do a god job of it.

15

Nobody has mentioned Lost? That first season was so enthralling, it kept most people on the hook long after it became obvious there would never be a satisfying payoff.

16

That was obvious to my wife and me in episode 2. We never regretted turning it off.

17

Sledge Hammer If you’re going to blow up the entire city, you really can’t tell the viewer, “now we’re going to go back and look what happened five years earlier that wasn’t at all connected to this.”

Jericho Season 1: A small town in rural Kansas is the only place not destroyed by nuclear war. Season 2: Somehow they manage to keep finding supplies and people from all over start showing up.

18

That’s a mischaracterization, although, yes, the second season fell off dramatically because it only happened (and in an abbreviated form) after they had already cancelled it and fan response was intense.

Jericho Season 1: A small rural Kansas town is trying to adapt after a limited nuclear attack on the US blows up 23 major cities (I use attack because it wasn’t a war, and, well, lots of spoilers). Lots of disruption, lots of other issues with aid that may or may not indicate more going on, and lots of refugees. But it’s hardly the only place left.

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B Positive

Got some open comments below that discuss the basic premise of the show without spoiler-guard. But have covered anything that gives away specific points of a plot of any single episode.

I actually watched this because it was such a bizarre concept for a show. We watched a guy develop a friendship with a woman who had volunteered to donate a kidney to him, albeit, she barely knew him.

It wasn’t great, but some of the characters were interesting. I know someone whose husband had been on dialysis for a long time, had a transplant, then when it had failed had gone back on dialysis until his death. She watched the show, and said it was pretty realistic as far as life on dialysis, just maybe made it look easier than it was, and didn’t show the big bruises on you arms.

By episode 3, I was watching it for the subject of this thread-- where the hell was the show going after the transplant? the premise would be gone-- but how long could they drag out the premise without getting to the transplant-- the guy couldn’t be on dialysis season after season-- that would be like not firing Chekhov’s gun. There didn’t seem like any good options.

They attempted to do the transplant on the last episode of season one, with the success hanging in the air until the second season, but it failed to build any suspense. I tuned in just to see where the hell the plot was going without the transplant MacGuffin. It went all over, like a pinball on crack, and made about as much sense. They tried to reformulate a show based on a single event, but the anticipation of it didn’t really fill the first season all that well.

I can’t fathom that the writers and developers really thought they could get several seasons out of the aftermath of a kidney transplant, no matter how quirky the doner was, nor what the state of the marriage and child of the recipient was.

The show was canceled without making it through the second season.

I’m not sure how well this fits the thread, because the first season was not spectacular-- but it did outshine the second significantly, so there is that. I wanted to post it, though, because it’s the only example I know if where the developers developed a self-terminating show like this, and tried to go one with it, but failed because it was pretty much a foregone conclusion.

20

Altered Carbon

The first season was fantastic, but they insisted on casting actors with very distinctive mannerisms which made a complete joke of the conceit that this was the same person, but in different bodies. The show was cancelled after season 2.