When I was 12 years old, I was super excited for the premier of the original Battlestar Galactica. “It’ll be like Star Wars, but on TV and every week”. Liked the 3 hour premier, but each week was less interesting than the previous week. By Thanksgiving I was deciding to just start my homework early and skip it.
I quit after episode 4 or 5. It was good TV but I could tell terrible things were going to happen to people, and I didn’t have the stomach for it. I’m glad I never got into it because I heard of certain gut-wrenching moments later on (torture and sadism) that I would not have been able to handle. Hell, I had friends who were fans that quit watching after a certain scene involving a barbed wire baseball bat.
I quit early in Breaking Bad for similar reasons. The three or four episodes I watched were some of the best TV I had ever seen. But after that bathtub fiasco we were both like, “This doesn’t really feel great, does it?”
Yep… Loved Dies the Fire, gave up halfway through The Protector’s War.
They lost me when they got to the “Do-Not-Forsake-Me-O-My-Darling”* episode.
*Cylon voice.
‘Bojack Horseman’ got old fast.
Little House on the Prairie after the first episode when I realized it was not going to follow the books. I was 9 or so.
The Stephanie Plum novels by Janet Evanovich. Listened to the first one as an audiobook read by Lori Petty; she was great and my wife and I thought it was very funny. Read the second book and thought it seemed very similar to the first. Started the third one and said, yep, she’s just writing the same story over and over.
The never-ending Negan plot on “Walking Dead” really turned us off, although we watched it to the end, reluctantly. And then Rick, that tool, when he had Negan in his sites and could’ve ended the whole ugly thing, he lets him live! Nobody in their right mind would’ve done that after all Negan had done! Then in the next season they brought in that batshit crazy woman as the villain, and that was it for us.
“Riverdale” started out well, updating the familiar “Archie” characters from my youth, 60 years ago, and casting them in a drama. The first season of 13 episodes was quite good. The second season of 23 episodes might have been good had it been 13 episodes too. Third season we watched about three and took the first bus out of Riverdale.
I loved Outlander at first. Scottish culture! Historical fiction! Time travel! And then after about 10 episodes it became torture porn, and alternating she-saves-him followed by he-saves-her. I’m out.
Are you me? I too love that trilogy, rereading at least Dies the Fire every year, like comfort food. But yeah, when it started with Rudi as the main character and leaning more and more into fantasy elements, I eventually became extremely uninterested. I think I did purchase up to 6 or 7 books in the series, hoping, but I don’t think I ever finished the last couple.
ETA: Rudi, not Rudy
I lost interest in Star Trek: Discovery in the middle of the first season and Star Trek: Picard after seeing just one episode. Haven’t watched any one of either since.
Yeah, this. You have to care a great deal about the nature of celebrity. I do not. It’s solidly written though, care nothing for the subject so that killed it.
Well put.
I will go you one better: I lost interest in Next Generation a few episodes into the first season. It was just too damn sanitary, totally lacking any grit. It did not help that Denise Crosby was an utter shit actor, and the stupid-ass holodeck BS, only one good story was ever born out of that fiasco. I have since seen that there are two or three good episodes from the series, but mostly it was just garbage.
I agree on all counts. Thirty-plus years later, there are only a handful of episodes I can bear to watch.
Yep. my spouse tried to get me to read it, and after that first long drawn out torture porn scene, i was outta there.
Mindhunter. I really liked Season 1. Season 2 got tripped up right out of the gate but seemed to recover at the very end of the first episode. Then it did a face plant from episode 2 onward and it was just agony watching the trainer try to get it back up so the poor jockey could breathe again (at first) and (finally) at least get a decent burial. But it never did. I am indifferent to season 3 (if there even is one).
Honorable mention for The Man in the High Castle, which I think was basically the opposite. It started off as a drag, but then got better after episode 6 of season 1 and, though it had its ups and downs thereafter, was never such an utter wreck of mediocre, by the numbers writing (full of clunky exposition dumps in lieu of world building and contrivances to keep things going) as the first five episodes. I guess sometimes it pays to fire the show runner.
Do what I did and just jump forward to the Brandon Sanderson books (the last three books of the series). He’s a much better writer than Jordan ever was, and after some catching up in Book 12, he actually moves the story forward at a good pace. Most importantly, he does what I can only call a reverse lobotomy to the characters, making them suddenly and blessedly not stupid.
And in case you’re afraid you won’t understand what’s going on without reading books 9-11: don’t worry. Nothing happened in those books.
Gee, thanks for that unboxed spoiler. I just started the second season. 
I agree: it started out so promising with interesting brain science stories (like Planet Money for psychology) and then it quickly devolved into “here’s a sad story that has a passing mention of psychology”.
I also agree with Outlander and The Walking Dead (finished the first season of each, gave up midway through the second season).