The fifth season was, sure. The fourth, however, was the worst season out of the combined 12 seasons of Buffy and Angel.
I remembered it this way to, but I just finished rewatching the series for the first time since it first aired and the general story structure actually doesn’t really change that much throughout the run of the show. They start having recurring characters outside the regular cast, season long (or longer) plot developments, and episodes that are heavy on character backstory and development in the first season, and the first multi-episode story starts at the end of season one. And the plots that I remember being season long epics towards the ends of the shows run aren’t actually that long.
Agree that it does get better over the run of the show, but I think its just because the writers get better and the characters more developed and interesting. Plus they have a lot of more whimsical episodes in the second half of the season run which might not be everyones thing, but I liked.
I actually heard (don’t know firsthand, as I’ve never watched a full episode of the show) that the first season started off strong, but was already starting to coast as the season ended up.
It’s true. Everything after Company Man (the episode where we finally find out what Noah Bennett really does) was on the downward spiral.
I always thought The Shield was a series of ups and downs. The first season was excellent, got even better in season 2, kept the momentum going when you saw what season 3 was gonna be about … but then took a nosedive where the second half of S3 sucked. S4 and S5 with their guest stars of the season were also excellent. However, I thought S6 was the worst of them, and it wasn’t until the last two episodes of S7 that the show got back to its greatness. So yeah, I’d have to disagree about the later seasons being better.
I am having a hard time thinking of any series I watched all the way through where the latter have was better. It tends to be the opposite, or the MIDDLE of the series was the peak, like a mountain.
So it definitely fits. Based on seasons 1-3, the series does not start to become good until season 4. 
I thought of that, but I haven’t watched the show at all, and decided to hold my tongue. 
Fenris, I too am rewatching Barney Miller, having not scene an episode in decades. I’m in the middle of season 2 right now, and Wojo is dumber than dumb. As I said, it has been decades, but I thought he became more normal as the seasons progressed. It’s hard to picture Wojo getting dumber. As for Fish and Yemana, they were both one-joke characters (as was Luger), and very similarly written. Too bad they didn’t keep Fish, because having one character like that was good, but Vigoda (who will outlive all of us), at 56, looked too old to be a street detective. Amazing that, at 56, he looked nearly as old as he does now, 30 years later.
Wojo gets much much dumber. In the early episodes he’s a dumb, opinionated…not redneck exactly, but close. In the later episodes, he gets “Hawkeyed” and becomes a more sensitive New-Age guy. He stays just as dumb (or more) but instead of at least having his own values, he becomes this wide-eyed “Gawrsh! REALLY?! That’s TERRIBLE!” sounding board for whatever the writer’s pet issue of the day was. In the early episodes, if a hippie came in spouting off against Nuclear Power (say), Wojo would roll his eyes and blow a raspberry. In the last 2-3 seasons, he’d have a dialogue with the hippie and be converted.
With Yemana, I don’t even know if he was a one-joke character: he liked gambling, made bad coffee and was lazy. All three combined don’t equal one joke. The problem is the writers never let him do anything. Which is a shame, because outside of Hal Linden, Soo was the most talented actor in the cast.
Luger became more interesting as things went on (excluding the stupid mail-order bride thing). As the vice cop (who’s name I can’t remember) gets more play, it becomes obvious that Luger is totally dedicated to “Barn and the boys”–he’s a long winded old bore, but he’s 100% loyal and has their backs come hell or high water.
Levitt really < cough > grows too (as a character). From overeager jerk, he starts to get bitter and a bit nasty as he realizes that he’s being jerked around by Barney and the department and will never be more than the butt of jokes by the guys. There’s one bit where he’s told to help a plumber, gets covered with waste/sewage and blows up at Barney and the rest of the gang, asking what the hell he has to do to be treated with a little respect.
The worst character was Dorsey–lasted 3 episodes in season six and holy crap, the actor was terrible and the character just annoying as hell.
I’m with Carmady on this: seasons 4 and 5 were the best.
Good point – for instance, the reason B5 slipped somewhat between seasons 4 and 5 was that the arc got disrupted. (JMS didn’t know that there would be a season 5 until too late, so things had to be quickly wrapped up at the end of season 4, and early season 5 had to get the “aftermath” story back up to speed from a dead start – hence the excessive prominence of the “telegoth” story.)
To me, 4 was the best season of the show - it was absolutely insane, in the best possible way. Season 5 ended even better, but had a very weak start, so on average I’d say 4 was stronger.
Another show that got better later on, sort of, was Law & Order. It’s like the *Simpsons *- it’s been on for so long, and it’s current episodes are so much weaker than the show at its peak, peak, that people forget how long it took to reach that peak. L&O didn’t get there until Sam Waterson joined the cast in 1995 or so (yes, kids, there was a time, lost in the mists, when Sam Waterson was not on Law &Order).
Oh boy do I disagree there! I think L&O lost a lot of its clinical, procedural nature (which for me was its strength) very shortly after Waterston arrived. Suddenly instead of the cases, the show focused more and more on the leads’ personalities, beginning with Waterston’s motorcycle-riding, serial-affair-having Jack McCoy. Once they implied an affair between McCoy and Kincaid I was done.
I preferred the lineup of Stone/Kincaid/Briscoe/Logan to any of the later crew. But it’s horses for courses, I know. The show hasn’t lasted for three hundred years without a lot of people preferring the later years, so everyone else’s MMV.
Red Dwarf was pretty dreadful in the first series, so I couldn’t understand why everyone was raving about it later on until I grudgingly watched an episode and got hooked.
Likewise the first series of Black Adder was very forgetable.