TV Shows that Got Stale

Cafe Society
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Before we begin, note that there are going to be a lot of opinions here. Nobody will be right, nobody will be wrong; this is a thread for opinions.

With that said, what are the shows that you feel became stale? By that, I mean that they deviated somehow from their original premise, or suffered odd cast or character changes or just plain went on too long.

For me, Happy Days is one. When it started, it was a comedy centered around Richie Cunningham and his high-school friends. It took place in the fifties, and was fairly simple and lighthearted.

As the series progressed, Fonzie took over the centre more and more, becoming almost a parody of a tough 1950s hood (his original character) in the process. Chachi was introduced, Richie and Ralph left the show, and Ted McGinley’s and Richie’s wife’s character were introduced. Hearing Fonzie’s “Whoa” and Chachi’s “Wa, wa, wa” was fun the first few times, but hearing them mutiple times an episode for what seemed to be gratuitous laughs wasn’t.

But more importantly, the series became less-plausible and went farther and farther from the “1950s kids in high school and college” stories it began with. In the beginning, we could accept Fonzie as a motorcycle hood. But as a teacher? Joanie was cute as a Junior Chipmunk, and of course she would grow up, but to be in a successful band with Chachi? By the end of the show’s run, the show bore little resemblance to the simple Life-in-the-Fifties show it was at the start. It didn’t seem to be much different from other contemporary family sitcoms.

MAS*H is a tough one. I always enjoyed it, but it seemed to less funny and more preachy towards the end. The martinis, wisecracks, and general silliness were toned down or removed entirely, and the show concentrated more on moral lessons with a few jokes thrown in. This may have been due to the changing mores over the show’s run, but the fact remains that the episodes at the end were very different from the ones at the beginning.

More recently, I feel that Buffy has gone stale. A show about a modern-day teenager who somehow has ended up with the responsibility to fight vampires was a great premise. Her mother has no idea why she needs to go out at night, and her friends are confused as to why Buffy spends so much time with the librarian and in the graveyard. It was fun, and each episode contained a complete story.

Now, it seems everybody in Sunnyvale has some kind of connection with the paranormal. Willow is a witch, her boyfriend is a werewolf, and everybody seems to know about Buffy and her friends fighting the forces of darkness. (Anybody else think of “Who ya gonna call? Ghostbusters!” when the show took this turn?) That was what started me losing interest, but the change to a continuing storyline from episode to episode was what convinced me to stop watching.

I know Buffy has a lot of fans here, and that’s fine. If you think it and Happy Days and MAS*H are the greatest shows ever and changed for the better, that’s fine too. These are just the ones that I feel lost their original premise, and should have ended sooner.

What are yours?

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Frasier is one. It’s weird, though, because it’s the same as it always was. Except for the whole Daphne/Niles thing. The whole comedy between them was that Niles would throw out these obvious clues and Daphne would be naive about Niles’ love for her. Although I did like that one episode where Frasier and Niles enroll in a auto shop class.

Another one is The Simpsons. I love The Simpsons (I breathe The Simpsons!), but as the seasons progress it’s all Homer. They should level it out. They should quit the show while it has some thread to hang on. It used to be a good parody of dysfunctional family life, but now it’s just “lets see what mad-cap adventure Homer is in this week.” Many great characters are being pushed farther and farther back in order to have a Homer Episode. What ever happend to Bart? Or Lisa? Or Marge or Maggie? Plus, they’ve gotten into unbelievable situations. I think one of the dumbest things they have done is kill off Maude Flanders (and the way she died was so stupid).

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I think one of the prime examples is the case of Roseanne. I mean, what the hell were they thinking? I get the impression that Roseanne set out to destroy her show in such a spectacular fashion that it would leave me feeling dirty for ever watching it in the first place. Sounds like something she’d do.

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IMHO -

Northern Exposure should have ended a few episodes earlier. Once Joel left it became less interesting.

I’ve only seen two or three episodes of last season’s X-Files. And this is a series I’ve been following from day one. Introducing John Doggett was interesting but there’s too much emphasis on Scully’s pregnancy. Every time I turn on the TV, I see a trailer with them talking about Scully’s baby. Enough about Scully’s baby!

Friends - You do get a little gem occasionally, but I’d like to see this show come to an end soon.

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I always got the impression that at the begining, X-Files was sort of like Twlight Zone or whatnot; where Mulder and Scully would run into some weird situations for their assignments, and every now and then it would touch into something on their personal life. The biggest continuious plot was about Mulder’s missing sister. Now it’s just a soap opera. I quit watching years ago because I would be clueless as to what was happening because I happened to miss an episode.

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I think the whole family is pretty well played out. I think what they need to do now is focus on some of the background characters. There is a whole universe of bit players that have never been explored.

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Go to Jump the Shark for the definitive discussion of when any TV show went bad.

Nearly all do.

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i got pretty fed up with Twin Peaks. there wasn’t a straight character in the whole damn show, and it just kinda got old fast. years ago, i used to watch Magnum PI (P.U.)but it got very stupid, very fast.

i hardly watch any tv now, unless its PBS or comedy central

OH YEAH! i was watching SNL on Comedy Central last night! what the hell? these are blatent rip-offs of old skits! very sad, but the chick that was hosting (i don’t even know who she was!) was MEGA-HOT! so it wasn’t a total waste. (but i was watching with my wife, and had to pretend like i wasn’t really too impressed with little miss pup-tent)

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Moonlighting really lost it. This was a show about Maddie and David working together to solve crimes despite their sexual tension. By the end, there were whole episodes where they didn’t solve any crimes – just dealt with their relationship. If I wanted to watch a soap opera, there were better ones available.

–Cliffy

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Mork and Mindy When I first saw this show in its orignal run I laughed so hard I had trouble breathing. I would look forward all week to the next episode (I was 16). By the second season the show was almost unwatchable. What a waste of the talent of Jonathon Winters. I recently caught the original episodes on the Comedy Network. This show has not aged well. I guess I am used to the humor of Robin Williams and it does nothing for me. Pam Dawber is still hot as the “girl next door type”

Another show that I could hardly wait for at that time was Soap. Again it was hysterical to start, but just stupid by the third season.

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As a long-time fan of The Simpsons (I’m still using the sig I used on alt.tv.simpsons back when the show was still worth posting about every week) I have to agree that the Mike Scully era (Seasons 9-12) has been pretty weak. It’s more The Wacky Adventures of Homer and less The Simpsons. Still, I have some hope for the upcoming season as Al Jean is returning as executive producer. He was on board for the first four golden seasons. Hopefully he can restore some of the magic. Although a major source of concern is that the last time he returned he mostly did pop-culture reference heavy episodes of The Critic disguised as Simpsons episodes (The X Files parody, The Mary Poppins parody, the Crimson Tide parody).

Cheers overstayed its welcome by about a year and a half. By the last season the original characters were one-dimensional versions of themselves (Sam is horny, Carla is a bitch, Norm is lazy, Cliff is annoying, ha ha ha, everyone laugh now) and the later cast additions (Woody, Frasier) were more interesting.

Star Trek: The Next Generation had a dreadful final season. I always suspected this was a case of being spread too thin. After all, the Generations movie was in pre-production, DS9 was running, and Voyager was being readied. I guess TNG was just left on autopilot to finish up, so we got the same 3 plotlines over and over:[ul]
[li]Something wierd happens, Data figures it out because as an android he’s unaffected, Geordie reconfigures the deflector grid to emit the proper radiation pulse, everything is OK.[/li][li]Space-time continuum is messed up, Geordie reconfigures the deflector grid to emit the proper radiation pulse, everything is OK.[/li][li]Long lost relative we have never ever heard of reappears and causes a problem (Deanna’s dead sister, Data’s Mom, Picard’s son, Worf’s foster brother), Geordie reconfigures the deflector grid to emit the proper radiation pulse, everything is OK.[/li][/ul]

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The A-Team. After they escaped their death sentence it got so wretchedly surreal. Even my great love for Hannibal couldn’t save it.

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Late Night with David Letterman got pretty stale after about the second season on CBS (re-named Late Show with David Letterman).

He’s just become so… Leno.

Ugh. I loved the old sketches on Late Night when he used to go out in oublic and make a fool of himself. He was mean to all the kids and chefs who came on the show. Now he’s nice and his humor seems rather… well, stale.

I miss Dave.

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Law and Order has become so formulaic it seems almost like self-parody now. Pre-credit scene slice of NY life leads to someone finding the body, nobody in the first scene has anything important to contribute to the investigation. The obvious suspect is never the killer, or in the few cases where they are there is someone else behind the scenes controlling them. Usually the second person questioned (almost always while they are busy doing something else, nobody stops what they are doing when a homicide detective has questions) drops some clue that makes the detectives look at each other and change the direction of the investigation. Cute female assistant DA argues with the DA. Old guy says ‘Make a deal’…I could go on, but I’m getting annoyed thinking about it.

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Oz on HBO. The plot lines just keep getting more and more ridiculous to the point where the show has very little realism. In the last season one of the characters is finally paroled and it looks like he’ll be able to start a new life, not. Turns out it was all a dream and he’s still behind bars. I like the show but they need to make the next season the last one before everything just becomes totally lame.
Sopranos. I love this show but I’m starting to get a bit bored with it.

I’m not really old enough to remember many episodes of MASH when it was originally on the air but I’ve seen plenty of episodes in syndication. I’m to the point now where I don’t like watching the show because of Hawkeye and the writer’s philosophy regarding war and everything else.

X-Files, I really enjoyed this show for the first few seasons. When they were going from case to case and every episode wasn’t related to some really cheesy mega conspiracy plot. I haven’t watched it for three years now because I think it is no longer entertaining.

Well that’s about all I can think of off the top of my head. I’m sure there are others.

Marc

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I haven’t watched the X-Files since the fifth season. The clincer was the blind girl episode, which was so appallingly stupid I think I was actually bleeding out my eye sockets, just from watching.

I tried watching Will and Grace but I found it to be too predictable too often. Excellent one-liners but not enough to hold my interest.

bean-shadow, I believe (I’m pretty sure) that Maude Flanders was killed off because the woman who did that voice had to fly out from Texas (?) for each episode featuring Maude. She got tired of the commute and decided to leave. Errr… that’s the story I was hearing, anyway.

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Brits might think of Birds of a Feather, about two wives of jailbirds living it up next door to some snooty (but sex-mad) neighbour.

Funny to start with, but the BBC kept churning out series after series after series after series, and the jokes gradually died, until some of us just wished the wives would get locked up too.

And what happened when it FINALLY ended a little while ago? The BBC only went and decided to repeat the whole mush from episode one.

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Has anyone else noticed that Friends was alright when it was just a straightforward sitcom but now that it has become a soap opera, it’s just unbearable. Why don’t they all just pair off and live happily ever after outside of my TV set.

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How about the flared Levis they were putting Fonzie in sometimes, in what was supposed to be around 1960? Am I being hypercritical here? Or is it important to get small details right?

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Who was it said “always leave the audience wanting more”?

Another British one: Red Dwarf was great for around 6 series and then lost it in the same subtle way as other shows mentioned above (the same characters saying similar lines, but it just didn’t work). The last series was virtually unwatchable.

And just to counteract these (slight hijack?): Blackadder ended at exactly the right moment, on one of the best bits of comedic pathos I’ve ever seen. My heart wishes there had been a fifth series, but my head knows that would have been a Bad Thing.