My expectations were sure a lot lower, but I haven’t expected much in the last 20 years. Abrams’ first movie all but killed my interest in the series.
Two thumbs up. When you posted this response, I read up on the show and ordered the first season on DVD. I’m on the 4th episode and know this is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks for the tip!
And with so many seasons, I’ll have plenty of material to watch as I run.
Mine is Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. I really liked it from the beginning, liked every character, enjoyed the writing, and loved the central premise - that even in a world with superheroes, not every problem is suitable for solving by superheroes.
And then like three quarters of the way through the first season, they revealed that one of the main characters was a secret bad guy all along. And I can’t explain why, but it just instantly ended my interest in the series. It just seemed so tiresome, like I could already see ahead the next thirty episodes of “he’s bad!”, “but maybe he’s good?” “nope, he’s bad!” “But maybe a little good?” and I’d just seen it all so many times. Never watched again.
I just pushed through Season 1 of “Stranger Things”. Winona Ryder’s acting was terrible. Saw first few 15 minutes of Season 2 with the bank robbery and overpass escape mind trick and I just can’t anymore.
I quit watching the dumbed-down daytime version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? because I was tired of listening to people who had no chance in hell of ever winning anything substantial prattling on forever to fill airtime with pointless drivel.
Since I loved the original iteration of the show, I thought I’d try the new nighttime version hosted by Jimmy Kimmel.
I switched it off after fifteen minutes. It was just more of the same, only twice as long! 
The original show with Regis Philbin was full of that, with the contestants agonizing over the options just to waste time and Regis also prolonging things.
I didn’t see those. I was watching the Russian version, where I’m willing to bet they spent less time dragging things out. Also, the contestants were put through a screening round, where they had to show they could answer hard trivia questions in brief periods of time. Even if things took longer than they should have, the people who passed the screening were a lot more interesting to listen to than most of the dolts who get on nowadays.
I’ve seen clips from the UK version of the original show, and they pretty much match my memories of the Russian variant.
I also stopped watching Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. around the same time, but mostly because they basically required you to watch Captain America: Winter Soldier to really understand fully what was going on in the show and I was like… nah, I don’t want to have to watch other media to get the full story in this show (and to note, I did watch Winter Solider at some point and I basically watched the rest of the MCU films a month ago - I imagine that’s a lot of that show I would have been behind the 8 ball on).
Agents of SHIELD was less and less tied to the movies as time went on because of some behind the scenes drama (which I believe boiled down to different producers who did not like each other). By the time the show got around to mentioning Thanos the reference felt very out of place because clearly those events weren’t happening in show the same way they happened on the big screen. But they ended up having some fun with the movie plots in the last season. The team was time traveling and so were the bad guys so certain events ended up playing out differently. I thought it was fun.
Deal or No Deal is probably the worst show in this regard and why I stopped watching it. In between “rounds” they would literally take 5-10 minutes to talk about their personal lives and stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with the game at hand.
There was a British comedy series one called Come Back Mrs Noah - a British Housewife won a tour of Britain’s first Space rocket. Molly Sugden was Mrs Noah - basically playing Mrs Slocombe from Are You Being Served (the show was written by the same writers). The two spacemen/pilots were the two upper-class British officer twits from It Aint Half Hot, Mum (again, same writers - probably same production company), and Ian Lavender from Dads Army (bingo) played the reporter taking her on the tour of the rocket. You can guess the plot - ‘No, don’t touch that Big Red Launch Button Mrs Noah!’.
The first episode (mostly set on the ground) was one of the funniest half-hours I think I ever saw. After that, they obviously ran out of material, the jokes became ‘anti-gravity corsets’ etc, and I gave up after two episodes and five minutes of the third.
To me it’s series. End of “13 Reasons why” (actually 7 reasons why and 5 spacefillers), I felt absolutely no reason to watch a second season do it all again.
Similarly with Stranger Things. No need to see any more of that.
I thought the same with the O.A. My conclusion was that it was all ambigious and she might have been mad. However, I was glad to have watched the second season of that purely for that absolutely batshit ending.
Actually have two series that qualify.
The first is the probably long forgotten ‘Monster Garage.’ The basic premise is fun, get a bunch of petrol heads, mechanics and metal artists, give them a crazy vehicle build, and a very limited budget, one week, and the requirement that the vehicle still looked stock. There were a bunch of crazy improvisations, and just as importantly failures in the first season.
By the second, as the show had become popular, there were tons of ‘donations’ from manufacturers so the budget was rarely an issue, and they became increasingly lax about looking stock. So it became all about the conflict between the host and the guests, and any fun of seeing a scrounge or MacGuyvering of old equipment to fit a new need was lost. I stopped watching about halfway through the second season.
The second is a personal and slightly guilty favorite, the TV series Dark Angel. The first season setting, with a surveillance based police state running the ‘civilized’ portions of America, while the rest of the plebs lived in a newly impoverished post-EMP scrounger society was interesting. The main character was a powerful ‘guuuurl who kicks ass’ before they became more mainstream, and the government was definitely the enemy. The male protagonist was a rebel journalist trying to get the truth out there, but with, you know, facts, rather than just accusations.
Then came the second season. For reasons likely based on the circumstances in the real world of 2000, it was suddenly unpopular for the government to be the overt enemy, so it became about how a sinister cult was secretly behind the ‘big bad’ of season one. And it became less about how people try to get by in a world where America isn’t a super power anymore (with a super powered heroine of course) and about how said super-powered heroine is beating up or sympathizing with the monster of the week.
Now to be fair, it wasn’t a perfect series even in season one, with many of the characters in the cast being underdeveloped if endearing in their single point of uniqueness. But Jessica Alba was fun and attractive, the setting was one of the better dystopian but functional societies, and the villain was one of the rare ones as both interesting and intelligent.
Season two felt dumbed down, and I’m not even getting into the tactic they used to deal with the tactic they used to postpone the ‘will they/won’t they’ issues between the male and female lead. So season one was one of the last shows I remember watching ‘live’ as it came out. 2 episodes into season 2 (most of which spent resolving the cliffhangers of season 1) , and I already hated where they were going. I ended up skimming the rest of the season hoping to see a change, or at least an answer to some of my questions, but nothing.
I quit it at the same place but for a different reason – the global millennia-old genetic engineering conspiracy which stretched my suspension of disbelief a little too far.
The problem with that show can be summed up in two words: Jessica Alba.
I’m loving all the recommendations (and warnings!) here. What I’ve decided after this thread is that I’m going to be okay with just watching the first season of a series, and then guiltlessly giving up and moving on. So shows like 24 and Orphan Black that I’d been hesitant to commit to… well, I’m barely “committing”!
I found a DVD set of the first season of Dark Angel.
And I love it… it’s a lot like Alias. And I agree on the fun near-future world building (And I’m working on getting a JamPony sticker made for my bike bag…I mean, after the big EMP, a bunch of the action is set in a bike messenger warehouse!)
WHY did you have to mention that? I just had a little acid reflux remembering the worst half hour of my super-hero-watching life.
Loved the original comics, so I tried… and made it all the way through well, most of the first episode. I could not believe it was Marvel. It was so amateur! Hackneyed lines delivered by daytime soap actors.
My wife suggested we try “How To:” with John Wilson on HBO and we binged the first three episodes and found it compellingly quirky. Then we saw And liked the fifth episode when it first aired Friday night.
So we had to go back and watch episode 4, How to Recover Your Furniture, which started the same way. But then it veered into a guy trying to restore what he lost at circumcision, with detailed visuals of his “program.”
I’m guessing we’ll never see episode 6.
I really liked “Monster Garage” in the beginning. It was fun to see people working through all kinds of issues to put together a crazy car that did some secret thing.
Then it began to be more about the host’s capricious attitude and the typical meddling by the producers to interject drama and conflict.
Ugh. I think that turn was about three or four shows in, and I stopped watching.
Had the same problem with “American Chopper”, where it started pretty darned awesome, then it became clear that Discovery Channel was telling everyone to yell at each other more. I’m sure plenty of people watch for that, otherwise they wouldn’t do it that way.
Surely there are some workplaces where shouting is the norm, but they are not as common as reality TV implies.
The Tick: To this day I consider the first episode the best first episode of any show I’ve seen in my life. Crammed to the gills with humor, energy, wit, and action, and it manage to fit a complete plot into it. The later episodes didn’t quite measure up, of course, but it was still pretty funny and had plenty of colorful characters I loved to see butt heads against each other. Then the “adult” crap took complete control, and everything went to hell and never returned. I’m fairly certain the shark-jump moment was trying to make Josef Stalin a comedic foil. 
King of the Hill: Funny thing is, it’s been so long that I don’t even clearly remember what made Peggy Hill such an awesome character or what the second season did to utterly ruin her, but I definitely have never gone from 100 to 0 on a show faster than this one. Hell, even The Simpsons took its time.
Survivor: I was a little late to the game in season 1 but still followed it religiously to the end, even speculating on the prospects for the remaining contestants. Big fan of season 2, and I cheered when… the team with Tina Wesson and Colby Donaldson pulled off that unexpected comeback. Season 3, it’s like my enthusiasm drained further with each minute. I guess I could see how contrived it was at this point and couldn’t be bothered anymore. Feel the same way about Hell’s Kitchen, although I never was a big fan of that one.
The Amazing Race: Right up to the end of season 3, I considered this an extremely contrived and goofy but still compelling contest where the best team would win in the end. Then I saw the winner. Never watched another minute since. Don’t feel like I missed much.