Dexter jumped the shark not long after the trinity killer
Folks - I would appreciate it if you would make at least minimal effort to ascertain whether "popularity - however you assess that - increased as of the time you feel they lessened in quality.
It seems Heroes got less popular from one season to the next. But, remained popular enough to keep going for four seasons.
Lost seemed pretty steady with maybe a slight uptick in the middle.
The Walking Dead also seemed mostly steady with a slight down drift.
It’s hard to imagine a show that got more viewers as it also got worse.
ETA: Interestingly, Game of Thrones stayed pretty steady till its last season when it fell off a cliff. I will never forgive Benioff and Weiss for that.
Mission: Impossible. The first season, with Stephen Hill as Dan Briggs, was excellent: sharp, tight and well-written. I liked the fact that Briggs was a mastermind who planned and advised, but stayed away from the action, and that they brought in experts to help out. The show usually had some major snag in the plan, which they had to fix on the fly. As a small thing, I loved the way he looked at the dossiers at the beginning, and that they looked like dossiers, not glamour headshots.
But they fired Stephen Hill and replaced him with Peter Graves. The claimed they wanted someone to be more of an action hero, but it seems likely they didn’t like having to work around Hill’s religious beliefs as an orthodox Jew, meaning he had to leave Friday afternoon and was unavailable on Saturday.
Jim Phelps was more of an action hero, all right, which was exactly what the show didn’t need. It became more formulaic, and the plots were simpler. I lost interest quickly.
My case for this is Simon and Simon. The first season was fantastic. Clever writing and some wry humor. I only made through about half of the second season. Plot gave way to slapstick and hijinks. Looking at Wikipedia, I’m shocked to learn that it ran for 8 seasons.
But I think too much comedy ruins a lot of good shows.
on which platform, are you watching this show?? I cannot find it streaming anywhere.
Showrunner left. Then Dexter changed from being a clever serial killer to an idiot. Probably because the showrunner left.
Some mentioned here had reasons.
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Comedy ruined by the main characters getting together. This was Friends, Big Bang Theory
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Actors left. I’d say it was hard to say Two and a half men was actually “good” but it did get worse when the type of character they were parodying, Charlie Sheen, left.
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Budget got constrained. Walking dead was great first season. It had plot points from the comics to hit, but it had to take 6 episodes of seasons and extend them to 15 episodes with same budget and storyline.
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Success called them out. Lost was actually kind of good till end of Season 3. Though Season 2 suffered the same from point 3, where they had 24 episodes with 8 episodes they had to spacefill. Though they fixed that next season (think a writers strike affected this too, but it never went back to the long seasons. Then they had to do the plot they claimed to have.
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Should have ended. Prison Break. They escaped the prison. End.
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Don’t know. Arrested Development
The original run I liked most all of it. It faded a little but was still good. The re-boot…meh.
Without Charlie Sheen, Two and a Half Men wasn’t worth watching. The producers should have swallowed their pride and done everything they could to keep him on board.
The Blacklist went on for way too long, dragging a mystery box that they never really bothered to open for ten increasingly painful seasons. It started off with a pretty good idea for a police procedural but several seasons later they did an episode about killer sex robots. I wish I was joking about that.
Having said that, The Blacklist always had good music and I did find a bunch of songs through that show that I still enjoy to this day.
Yeah, I know. I loved the first three seasons, I can half understand the problems of the fourth season which was all over the place because of the commitments of the cast, they did a rework which put all the fragments together, and I never managed to get through that.
Fifth season, I can’t remember much about at all.
I’m on the fence about The Big Bang Theory.
At first, it was four nerds who were into comic books, comic book characters, “Star ___” (fill in the blank with “Trek” or “Wars”), and other nerdy pastimes. Problem was, the hot blonde girl across the hall. Great comedy.
Then, when everybody paired off (Sheldon and Amy, Howard and Bernadette, Leonard and Penny, Raj and the Veterinarian of the Week), it became little more than Friends. Maybe they didn’t gather at Central Perk, but the guys’ living room or the comic book store was just as good.
It was still entertaining, but when Howard became less creepy, Raj learned to speak to women, Sheldon learned that the world wasn’t all about physics, and Leonard found that he was valued, it was miles away from what the show started out as.
Yet, you describe Friends at the later stages of it, when I’d say it was off the boil. Friends two best characters were Chandler and Monica, wrecks of confidence, and the ones with mostly the best lines, and that was removed once they got together…
Friends was best Seasons 2 -5 (lets face it, Season 1 took a bit to get going). It is almost exactly the same template. All single. One lusts after another.
Well, my question has 2 components - one entirely personal and subjective. It is entirely possible for me to personally think a TV show - or band, etc - is worse despite their increasing number of fans, sales, etc.
Thanks for making the effort to check actual popularity, tho. It is somewhat surprising/disappointing that so few others are making any effort to do so - other than to refer to number of seasons. I may ask the mods to close the thread.
I don’t think BBT could have gone any other way. The characters and their relationships had to grow and change, to make a compelling story with enough variation. Creepy jokes and selected mutism gets you only so far.
This might be controversial, but I’d say Rick and Morty. I can’t quite place why, it could just been “around too long, ran out of ideas, ideas not as strong”, but I watched the last season once, and feel absolutely no need to watch it again. And don’t really care about any new season coming soon.
I dunno, it just moved from ideas I was interested in…
Writers who try to dance the fine line between “will they or won’t they” over a long period of time end up painting themselves into a corner. If they keep on putting it off with increasingly improbable machinations, it soon becomes clear that they are just manipulating the audience for cheap laughs and will just piss viewers off. But once the characters finally confess and consummate their love a lot of the built-up tension can quickly flee the set like air from a leaky balloon. TV Tropes put it best:
Hooray! They got together! Finally! We’ve watched them Meet Cute, groaned at the arrival of the Romantic False Lead, sat through seasons upon chapters of Will They or Won’t They?, shouted hurray at their Now or Never Kiss and this is the moment we’ve all been waiting for! And for good reason, because now…
Um, because now…
Uh.
This happened in Frasier with Niles and Daphne but has been the bane of many other shows stretching back to I Dream of Jeanne. I about bailed on Frasier after yet another tease, where a preview showed a clip of Niles saying to her that “I wanted to tell you”, making it sound like he was finally confessing his love, but it was instead just a lame fake-out and he was talking about something else completely unrelated while she remained as wilfully oblivious as ever. I was about as furious at a show as I have ever been when that episode wrapped.
They finally got together the next season IIRC and handled it about as well as any series did and there was still humor and drama to be had; to keep having Daphne remain that oblivious to his adoration indefinitely would have stretched the willing suspension of disbelief too far, and the writers to their credit eventually realized this.
It didn’t do the two False Leads (Mel and Donny) any favors either as they basically existed as Plot Devices and not actual believable characters with depth of their own; however, the latter came off much better in the aftermath than the former, note.
I second this.
Like, I was going to mention MASH, but when I looked at the ratings history, I did not see a rise over the season as I expected. It may have kept getting “worse”, by whatever standards one would use, but the audience (myself included) just kept on watching the same. Unless you count the most-watched-evah! finale, which by god did suck!
Mission Impossible’s ratings went up the first three seasons but had a steady decline the remaining seasons. Especially the last, where it really sucked.
Thanks. I just think that would be a much more interesting discussion than, “List shows you personally became disenchanted with over the course of their run.” Pretty sure there have been any number of “jumped the shark” threads in the past.