There are several here that I definitely concur with… (Heroes, Dexter, True Blood…)
And one that I was a big fan of start to finish (Lost!)
But I am here to throw two more shows on the fire that have not been mentioned yet…
1> Alias- I really dug Alias’s first four seasons. (Even the 3rd, which I had been told was pretty bad). But the last season of Alias was unwatchable. It was a chore to finish, and I hated myself for doing it.
2> How I Met Your Mother- Had a moment or two in the last couple of seasons, but was a shell of former self.
HANDS DOWN its FALLING SKIES. its alien sci fi stuff. it has CGI and a decent first 2 seasons but after that it turns to friggin Full House with aliens and it keeps getting worse until the end and even at the end it was like nobody even cared. The last episode to end it was like a video game that just made the bad guy a big talking spider. so, in the last episode the big alien was actually a big talking spider that died easily and somehow its millions of alien hordes were nowhere to be found. budget pulled im guessing. worst thing ever. i recommend it!
How I met Your mother had like 7-8 good seasons and the last one was epically bad. I want to rewatch all of it but i will skip the last season. the last season is dead to me. total waste. might as well have had a giant talking alien spider.
I liked Richard Roper a lot and I also liked Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, but I always missed Gene’s brilliant criticism. I do think it was worse without him, but the real decay was when Roger couldn’t do the show full-time. To me, it was less decay and more just a sad ending.
It would have been worse if Gene and Roger were still there and the show declined.
X-Files is my quintessential example. I loved it for the first few seasons, but eventually the alien conspiracy stuff started to get too pananoid and convoluted, and I lost interest. When they removed Scully from the show for a while, that was my “jump the shark” moment. I always liked the monster-of-the-week episodes better anyway, but by then those were getting tired as well.
I liked Lost all the way until the end. I even liked the finale. My only gripe is there were too many plotlines and details that got left hanging.
The Simpsons has just been on for way the hell too long. It’s like Saturday Night Live, in that it’s been on so long it’s considered an institution, but really almost nobody cares anymore. Homer, Marge, and the kids should have ridden off into the sunset at least a decade ago. Probably longer.
Masterpiece Theatre should probably retire as an anthology series. I realize that WGBH Boston has a grant under its auspices that supports buying the mini-series from the UK (and once, Australia), but considering that A&E and BBCA now do this, *Masterpiece Theatre *isn’t special anymore, and really has no purpose as an anthology series. If it still had Alastair Cooke making introductions and comments, then it would well be worth it, but there’s a different person every time, never the commanding presence of Alastair Cooke, and never someone with the insight, or ever the recap for people who might have missed an episode (which, let’s face it, with DVR and On Demand doesn’t happen anymore) that Cooke had. They don’t even play the full theme anymore.
WGBH can still bring mini-series to the US, but I think it’s time to drop the frame of the* Masterpiece Theatre* anthology.
I loved MT as a kid, especially a tween and teen, and the theme got me all stirred up. The truncated one they run now just deflates me.
The first (and ONLY) season of Heroes is one of the all-time great mini-series. Roughly 22 episodes and a storyline with a start, a middle and an end. And what was great? It ended. Well worth your time to watch. It would have been terrible if they tried to continue a story that was completed into a second, third or even fourth season…luckily, those seasons never happened.
And the newest season is unwatchable. When it started the time was broken out so it was about 33% cooking/restaurant stuff, 33% family drama crap and 33% decoration rebuilding.
This season it’s 33% “We’ve surprised the owner who doesn’t know we’re coming, and they might not want to do it! Will they or won’t they?*” about 55% tedious family drama crap, about 10% decoration/rebuilding and the remaining 2% involves food or restaurant management.
*And since they’ve already showed the owner dithering over whether they’re going to do it or not, the owner clearly signed the release, or they couldn’t show the dithering. So it has less suspense than an average episode of Scooby Doo.
Happy Days, Northern Exposure, Welcome Back Kotter, and The Office all demonstrated losing the lead character is a bad thing. BUT, NYPD Blue managed to survive John Kelly leaving after the first season. It turned out Sipowicz was the stealth star of the series, but that was only really noticeable after Simone died.
Avoid the switcheroo. Ellen Degeneres’s sitcom started out about a single woman who owned a bookstore and her quirky friends. Then it became a sitcom about a woman accepting she was a lesbian and dealing with that. Important and timely, yes, but it wasn’t what the viewers signed up for. This happens a lot when what starts out in the series as a minor character becomes the star. Consider Steve Urkel and JJ DYNOMITE!
Some shows go down when the star gets power-crazed. Roseanne, Kurt Cameron from Growing Pains, etc. Between Bob Reed’s mutiny and the kids teaming up with an agent, Sherwood Schwartz was relieved when the network cancelled The Brady Bunch.
The “Theme” for Masterpiece Theater was the Fanfare and Rondeau by Jean-Joseph Mouret (1682-1738). I have a Nonesuch recording of it. Even the original Masterpiece Theater never played the whole thing, but I agree that it’s a crime to abridge it the way they do now.
I’ve heard this excuse a lot, but plenty of shows survived the writer’s strike. It was Tim Kring that screwed the series over. Notably, he took over the show from Bryan Fuller (see upthread about Dead Like Me) who wrote the first season.
First season of Ancient Aliens (yes, the show with the crazy-haired “Aliens” guy Giorgios Tsoukalos) was very neat and compelling. Second season got pretty off-base. All other seasons fell off a cliff. “Albert Einstein might have been an alien?” C’mon, now you’re just making yourselves look bad*, History Channel!
*if the actual show itself didn’t make them look bad. But hey, i think a lot of those S1 theories were pretty clever!
How about season 5 on Babylon 5?
There was a reason – JMS wasn’t sure of a 5th season so he jammed the ending into the 4th. Season 5 was pretty much filler (minus Sleeping in Light)