What's a show that should've gotten cancelled or ended SOONER than it did?
Too many "what got cancelled too soon" questions, what's a show that went on too long?
Hard mode: no The Walking Dead
Too many "what got cancelled too soon" questions, what's a show that went on too long?
Hard mode: no The Walking Dead
Game of thrones. They should have ended it when they caught up to the books. Just leave it unfinished. That’s not satisfying but better than what we got.
I was gonna binge this show after it ended but I can't bring myself to watch a show that I know has a shit ending, so it will forever be one of those shows I missed
If you're okay with the head canon, just stop watching when the wall falls. White walkers won, humanity has ended. GG.
that's 3 seasons into terrible shit.
stop after season 4 first 4 are genuinely some of the best television ever made
season 5 already has serious fucking cracks in it and season 6 and 7 are carried by one big episode.
It was so good early on though. IMO you would do better to just watch the first 5 or 6 seasons and make up an ending in your head vs not watching at all. Or read a brief synopsis of the last couple seasons just to know where the characters ended up.
But then you might feel the call of the void, and want to watch the last couple seasons as a sort of "bad movie night” on steroids. On one hand, you will fully understand the magnitude of the fuckup, but on the other, you will taint your fond memories of the early seasons. The choice is yours.
Yeah, and maybe consider a sequel once the rest of the books came out.
I started reading the series around 2002, when there were 3 books. Martin released book 4 in 2005. In the afterward of the book he said that book 6 was basically already done… book 6 didn’t come out for 6 more years (2011).
It’s been 12 years. We're waiting on book 7. Given his age, it doesn’t seem like the series will be finished by Martin. Hopefully he actually does know what happens through the rest of the story and has it down for whoever takes up the mantle.
I think he stopped because the show gave us his ending and he knows everyone hates it.
I think the production team was fully aware that those books weren't getting finished.
The actors would have aged way more than their characters at that point. Especially the kids and the very old characters.
Spoilers ahoy. If you've not seen game of thrones, read on to get the disappointment out of the way now
I disagree wholeheartedly. As much as "who's got a better story than bran" sucked, I think that was likely the ending that was intended in the books as well (and the extreme backlash against it is why we'll never see the last books). GRRM stated on multiple occasions that he was working closely with HBO and that they knew the general shape of the story he was trying to tell.
I feel like the majority of the problem with GoT was Benioff and Weiss. GRRM wanted at least two more seasons in which to tell the story (and, knowing what we know now, to delay the revelation that he didn't really have a way to untangle the story he tangled), HBO made it clear that they would keep riding the money train no matter how far the station, but D&D wanted to wrap the series up ASAP so they could work on producing some Star Wars films. That's why Jon goes from Dragonstone to the wall in a single cut. That's why the entire war with the nights king that was central to the whole series was over in an episode. That's why Dani went psycho in her moment of victory. That's why cersei's death was so predictable that it's a cliche in ttrpgs, that's why cleganebowl was ultimately disappointing, that's why the resolution to dragons being in westeros was "idk he just left lol", that's why the resolution to aryas story was "idk she just left lol" (even after several seasons developing her character as someone who believes that if Starks don't stick together they'll be destroyed), that's why the resolution to the war in the north was "idk the north...won? but also surrendered? lol", that's why LRJ didn't matter at all, that's why the spider went from being the most politically adroit character on the show to doing a whole musical number entitled "Do You Wanna Do A Treason?", that's why littlefinger's whole trial was "we know he's a dick just kill him", and the fact that House of the Dragon is being made by people who want to make it is why its almost as good as the first 5 seasons of GoT
It all comes down to the fact that they wanted the show to just be over, and now it is I suppose.
The issue isn't the ending itself, it's how they got there. They rushed the ending, and as a result it made no sense.
There's one point on the ending that no amount of taking their time and telling the story correctly will resolve, and that's that accepting the crown goes fundamentally against who Bran has been since the beginning of the show. I would have been okay with a reluctant king in Jon, because it would fulfill the prophecy, fire would have won out over ice, LRJ would have mattered, Varys would have a complete arc, Jon being a Targaryen raised by a Stark would have given us an emotionally satisfying end to the civil war by uniting the north and south in one person, and Jon had already proven himself to be caring and competent in a leadership role he didn't really want when he was at castle black.
Bran didn't just not want to be king, he expressed absolute disdain for the office of king. He repeatedly says that it doesn't matter who is king. Unless we're assuming that something happened to make this ending make sense, it just doesn't. If we are assuming that something happened to make this ending make sense, then it's incumbent on the show to show us what happened and they failed to do that.
I really don't think Bran as king is a bad ending but I would have really liked to see Sansa or Jon.
What made it bad for me was how quickly it was decided. "Lol who should be king?" "I dunno not me" "how about the crippled boy" "haha perfect, the end"
There should have been more talk leading up to it - not just the episode but the season as a whole. Nobody ever ponders who will take over when they win??
The last two seasons were so rushed. Things happening nonstop and I enjoyed the slow moments of that show as much as the action. It felt very Hollywood (in a bad way)
Big bang theory. It was absolute garbage.
I think I'd like to point out that they shouldn't have had even one season. It's so fucking offensive.
It's weird with Big Bang Theory, when it first started me and my friend circle loved it, thought it was brilliant but yes it did lose something after a few seasons.
But online everyone just seemed to hate it - could it be because we're British and it just landed better with us..?
It was good the first few seasons, people shit on it because they shit on everything popular, but it WAS a good sitcom, it just never grew up.
Also, I found the depiction of the Indian guy funny at first but it quickly got racist and never got better, they just kept piling on the racism
Their depiction of "nerds" was also offensive and shitty in many of the same ways. But because that's what the writers told you is nerd behavior and culture, it seemed more acceptable somehow.
my sentiments exactly..
to be honest, i felt like that general view of culture fueled its way into the real world. i have people at work thinking the IT department is just some bastion of antisocial hermits that you can just talk to anyhow, or know automatically what exact issue you have when you say "my computer is not working".
Interesting. I didn't like it for a very similar reason. Their depiction of nerds or geniuses or whatever you want to call them was pretty offensive. I could never get into it.
Edit: to be clear, I'm not saying that I'm a genius or even particularly intelligent. I'm not. But the barrage of stupid nerd stereotypes was just obnoxious and offensive.
Nope, I'm British and I hated it.
The newer characters they introduced were just not likeable. Bernadette and the other female lead just dragged the show down. Stuart was shit too. They should have centralised the show on the main characters from the start and actually built on their stories a bit more. Instead they all became flanderised
I'm on the flip side with that one. I absolutely loved Big Bang Theory, but honestly I can't stand Young Sheldon. I mean sure the show has its funny moments, but still, why oh why won't they just let the show die?
Any show that needs a laugh track to tell you when it's trying to be funny isn't going to be funny. I actually heard a perfect description of why BBT wasn't good (to me) a couple weeks ago from the Venture Bros creators. BBT was a show created by people outside nerd culture trying to tell nerds what nerd culture is. And IMO it entirely missed the mark.
It's a live audience though, not a laugh track
Laugh tracks are an immediate turn off - literally. I remember being curious about a show, and then switching it off after about 30 seconds when the canned laughter kicked in. It told me immediately that the humor would be broad instead of clever.
This doesn’t apply to older shows, though. All in the Family is still one of the best sitcoms ever, laugh track or not.
Edit: I forgot - they never used a laugh track. That was a live studio audience. Sorry!
Live studio audience is a lot different than canned laughter.
Wow, you’re right. I’m surprised I forgot that distinction. They even say “All in the Family was taped before a live studio audience” at the beginning of every episode. Whoops!
Big Bang Theory also used a live audience instead of a laugh track
Zabinka.
Westworld should have just been an amazing miniseries.
Enterprise needed one more season.
Yeah!! If anyone interested just watch the first season, it doesnt need continuing it was great!
It really does. The ending wraps everything up perfectly. The seasons after are basically just "and then they went to theme park B and did it again". There's nothing lost by only watching the original season.
I mostly disagree on the "they went to park b and did it again" bit, but only mostly. Shogunworld was just a detour and it's unclear if any of their Hosts achieved sentience. Season 2 mostly focused on the rebellion happening in the first park. The third and fourth seasons are absolutely going to another park and doing it again, but with the twist that the new park is the real world and reversing the roles of hosts and humans, comparing the hosts' loops to human behavior (which they undermined with Rehoboam, in my opinion).
See also: True Detective.
There's a reason that it's one of the few shows to be referred to as True Detective (Season One) when people talk about it
It feels to me like the writers of westworld slowly forgot what the show was about or something as it goes on. Like when you come up with an alt universe for a story that ignores the point of the original, like a version of Star Wars where Luke joins Vader that abandons the themes of family and redemption.
SPOILERS AHEAD IDK HOW TO DO SPOILER TAGS By season 3 it just felt like they plopped characters into the plot and wrote them to logical/"cool" conclusions, like "ooo wouldn't it be fucked up if Halores took over the world and made the humans the hosts in her game" they just really lost the plot later on imo
Any sci-fi series that starts messing with time-travel or random time frames is when it goes really bad. You stop caring for any of the characters and any major death scene is not as convincing as before
Seriously folks - there can be only one and done:
HEROES
Save the cheerleader, save the world and then please - go home. But nooooo../
Gonna disagree, we needed more Heroes, but from a writing team with a vision and purpose. Or at least one that understood the character driven nature of the first season was it's selling point, not just the half baked superhero action. The '07 writers strike really screwed that show.
Season 1 rocked but I'm still bitter that Hiro saying "Nissan Versa!" is stuck in my mind so many years later
Boop Boop!
Could you also please tell the writers not to create 2 characters that are so overpowered that they threaten to destroy the world every time they turn around? Not everyone needs to be a supercharged Rogue...
This really worked for season 1 because you didn't know which one of them was going to be the catalyst of the bomb. They should've disposed both of those characters at the end of the season, but NBC just wanted a money grab and bring them both back for something incoherent in the following seasons.
I always found funny how, Hiro could have saved all of them in all seasons by just traveling in time, so the writers always trapped him somewhere.
Or, you know, have them be HEROS. I kept waiting for them to do something that helped someone that wasn't a HERO or fight something that wasn't a HERO. If you took everyone that had powers and put them on Mars, nothing on earth would change.
Honestly, I rewatched season 1 again a couple of years ago and it didn't really hold up for me. The Niki and Micah storyline just seemed to slow everything down. I don't know if it the newness factor wore off or if my tastes have changed, but it just didn't have the same feeling.
Watch series one of Misfits for more (better) Teen Superpower action!
Quick edit: yeah just watch until Nathan leaves
How I met your mother. They saw a cash cow and milked it.
Big Bang theory. It was kinda ok at first, but then it was just bad.
It says something with HIMYM that the season 9 teaser was the kids, all grown up, yelling at future Ted to wrap things up because it's gone on too long.
I loved himym, all of it, except the ending. Like I get what they went for, but it dismissed all seasons.
The whole last season was trash and then they had the audacity to say "and then he got together with Robin anyway". Why have him meet their mother when all he wanted was Robin? Just have them end up together and be done with it.
I will say for all of the hate BBT got, they didn’t try to do something bullshit for their ending like most sitcoms had been trying to do (e.g How I Met Your Mother). They created a simple good/wholesome ending.
Scrubs.
I understand that they were trying to create a spinoff. But to continue with the same name and then teasing us with the previous main characters just destroyed what was the perfect series ending.
Original Scrubs was one of the best shows ever made in my opinion - great cast and chemistry, genuinely funny whilst also bringing in the drama and tragedy of a hospital and it's patients, great writing, kept up momentum until the end (the original end not the crap that come after), great acting, one of the most faultless TV shows ever made.
I'm sure most people here would agree that cancelling Game of Thrones once they ran out of source material and waiting for the books to be done (lol) would have been preferable to what we got.
GoT would have exited the cultural zeitgeist a lot sooner than it did, probably to the detriment of future viewer engagement and thus a source of revenue for HBO, which is why they pushed it forward, but still...
I don't think that math worked out for them. After season 8 GoT just vanished from the public mind, at least in my experience. The show was so terrible in the end, they would have made a lot more money in a 5 year hiatus selling merch than they got from running the show to completion.
Compare it to the lord of the rings for example. They got a rescan, color correction, more bonus content and a 4k release 20 years after the first movie came out. I doubt we will get anything comparable for game of thrones. No one pulls out the DVDs to watch game of thrones once a year. Plenty of LOTR fans do.
Just finishing the last fim, extended cut.
Or at least wait for enough coherent fan theories and just use them.
GoT should have just never happened in the first place, and we should have gotten 5 more seasons of Rome instead.
Supernatural
They managed to escalate all the way to God's grumpy sister.
And then went even further, making the next enemy: The British.
It ends at season 5, as intended, in my,opinion.
I watched up to the end of season 5, knowing that was the real ending to the story.
I thought I would stop after that, but I can't help myself, I just keep going. I'm on season 7. It's not as good, but it still has good stuff. It definitely helped that in season 6 they go to the set of their own show and watch the original showrunner get killed. I have to give them credit for that level of self-awareness. I doubt I'll make it all the way to the end, but I'm still enjoying it for now.
Yeah, there are some good episodes after, but the metaplot got really dumb.
Bruh, they managed to escalate all the way to God himself. Literal God is reduced to a mere human by the benevolent spawn of Lucifer, somehow, and said spawn becomes the new God. Seriously.
Well that's just the logical next step
Yeah, that show was good for a few seasons and then just got weird.
I randomly decided to binge supernatural and caught up during season 15 with only 3 episodes yet to be released.
The timing was almost supernatural.
The Simpsons is still going.
It hasn't been good for over a decade or more at this point.
It's a dead man's switch, if new episodes don't keep getting released, its assumed that the USA has fallen and by the computers monitoring, and the nukes are automatically launched.
Honestly, this makes the most sense to me. I never really hear about the Simpsons now, and don't know anybody who watches it... It feels like it's just being put out into the void right now.
How is this not the top post? There is no other show that has gone on for longer than should have ended ages ago.
Last decade! Simpsons should have stayed in the 90's.
The Office. Last couple seasons were garbo
cue downvotes from the “still watches The Office on loop” crowd
The last seasons are a lot weaker, I have to agree. I got my hopes up real high when Will Ferrell entered the chat, but he was just a temp :-(.
Still watch that Garbo on repeat though ^_^
I gotta say Will Ferrell was probably one of my least favorite parts of the entire show, right after Nellie and Sound Guy.
Should have stopped the show when Michael left, and made a TV movie of Dwight's wedding.
I still think the way Jim handled being (or technically not being) the best mensch is worthy of being canon.
But Nellie and Robert were just too bizarre. Will Ferrell was just awkward. It could've been good but he was just very strange. No one was a worthy replacement. Even Ray Romano would have been weird if he hadn't gotten scared off.
I would watch the Michael session on loop if I wanted to pay for peacock.
The definitive answer is Supernatural. Shambled on for another 10 seasons as the reanimated husk of a really good that was written to end after season 5.
Past season 6 I just treated it as Supernatural: The Whatthefuckever Story
Westworld. First season was perfect and it concluded perfectly fine.
still can't believe they changed season 2 because someone guessed it online what a bunch of morons, have lost all interest once I learned about that. have never watched season 2
For real? How was it supposed to end?
We don't know. But they did literally say this in interviews, that the story changed because someone guessed it. Like, how transparent can you be about having no vision for your show.
I just watched season 4 and I believe the plot is good. It adds to the overall arc.
Problem is that after season 1 the show runners decided to make it even more mindfucky. It became an exercise in intellectual masturbation and got convoluted for the sake of being convoluted. Shame.
I feel like they could have developed more stories in Westworld alone before taking the storyline where they did. I knew bad things were coming when they brought in the new manager. She was nice enough but she didn't have that duplicitous edge. She was in over her head and I couldn't see past that.
House of Cards went on far, far too long. Should've ended at or shortly after he became President.
The double tap on the desk should've been the last scene.
I dunno, upon subsequent rewatches, I’m glad we got Robert California.
I AM THE LIZARD KING!
James Spader is a fucking genius. If you haven't seen it already, I highly recommend watching Boston Legal.
Do you want the nature or the sex metaphor?
Dexter
I felt seriously betrayed by that show, I'd loved it for so long. I could've probably forgiven everything but the last two minutes.
I gave up getting invested in shows after that.
I've never been able to watch past Rita dying. Colin Hanks as a villain sounds amazing, but whenever I get to her death it just feels too shitty and I can't bring myself to start that season.
Agree, and I didn't even hate season 5 as much as the rest of the world. The last season was frankly painful.
Simpsons. Hasn’t been great since Season 12. Maybe glimpses in a few later seasons. But it’s now running on 35 years. Most of the original voices have left as have long gone all the good writers. The remaining can’t voice characters outside their ethnicity. And the show. Just “fart jokes.”
Probably the most brilliant show for a dozen seasons. Now just a husk.
This fucking overcorrection has got to stop. If every fictional character must be portrayed by a person who is as close to being that character in real life as possible, it's no longer "acting."
If they banned men from playing women visa versa, Bob's burgers would get cancelled first and that show is just beautiful
What? The 6 of them are all still there. Hank Azaria gave up Apu/Lou/Carl and Harry Shearer gave up Dr. Hibbert, but the vast, vast majority of characters are still being voiced by the same actors.
I do think that the fact that The Simpsons has been on so long that they had to go ahead and do that is strong evidence that the show has run its course + ought to end, but the re-casting is a symptom, not a cause.
Also not to be morbid, but IMO they should really think about wrapping it up before the main cast starts to retire or pass away. The actor who voiced Mrs. Krabappel already died, and I mean... Harry Shearer is 80 this year, and the rest of the cast is getting up there too. I guess they could always recast or (God help us) try to use AI or something, but yeah, they should try to send it off with a little bit of dignity left I think.
That’s not morbid, so you don’t need to feel bad for bringing it up. It’s a valid, practical concern.
"stop stop... he's already dead". Pretty much how everyone feels about the show.
Yeah on that, notice how everyone quotes the original Simpsons?
I often wonder who's still watching it. Like obviously someone is, because it's doing well enough to keep getting renewed. But what's the demographic? I don't know many young people, but I'd assume they're not watching it. Certainly nobody in my age range ever talks about it (or if they do, then they just say what the people in this thread are saying - it used to be great, haven't watched it in years), and I don't know of anyone in the boomer/parent age group who ever talks about it.
Of course, just because nobody I know watches it doesn't mean nobody at all is watching it. But just like... who are they?
I watch it during lunch sometimes and have kept up with every episode so far. Its not what it was of course back in the day, but I largely use it as semi- background while eating lunch, knowing that if I have to cut things short or divert my attention it won't matter.
I heard it's been better recently but I watched an episode like 2 years ago and didn't crack a smile the whole time, it was terrible. The Simpsons movie was a good bookend to the series I think.
Every single reality show that went longer than the first commercial break.
Whoever birthed the genre lived too long.
Survivor is good, but thats really a long drawn out game show more than a reality show
Star Trek discovery, should have ended after the intro
Watching Star Trek Discovery was like reading Ayn Rand, except after hammering their point over and over, all the characters get 50 page recap monologues instead of just John Galt. EDIT: I loved that it was Fabulous, but the writing felt like it was written by cis het college freshmen allies. There are ways to be queer as fuck that don’t suck donkey ballz. There were SO MANY “and then everyone clapped” moments.
All the characters? Discovery is the Michael Burnham show. It’s a shame she’s such a terrible person.
Enterprise should have ended before the intro, then picked up in season 4
Once Upon a Time. They felt like they had to just introduce a new Disney character at every turn and that they all had to be somehow related to one of the other characters. They also had a chance to tie things off by having Regina fall in love but nope, had to drop an A-Bomb on that possibility. Can't have a happy Evil Queen can we?
This was my first thought, and I genuinely didn’t expect to see it mentioned. Wow. Hi.
Season 1 is top notch. It is consistently worse from there. Am I mad the show went on? No. Still, if the show had ended when the curse was broken, it would’ve been all time storytelling IMO. The magic effects and writing were so cheesy after season 1… It all seemed so well made at first.
Kind of burned out on the show in season 3 to be honest when they threw away all the character growth, felt like no point watching any more. I read ahead to see what they do later on and it just got worse
As a Futurama fan...Futurama. The reboot is very mediocre at best, the show was great when it was a bunch of characters with wildly different personalities messing around in the year 3000. The first reboot was kinda less interesting but ok for the most part, I personally think the movies were pretty bad and the new season just wants to be South Park with 3-year old dated references. It had a good run, should've ended after season 4
I was looking for someone else to mention Futurama. The new season is just so mediocre. You hit the nail on the head, they're leaning so hard on social commentary but most of the references are already dated (Bitcoin mining, lol) and in general it's just rather cringey. I've yet to hear one joke that actually had me bust out laughing, and the writers seem to have forgotten the subtlety that made Futurama stand out from other animated sitcoms.
Billy West sounds like he's lost his voice and it feels like the rest of the cast are phoning in their performances a lot of the time. And what's with the release schedule? A Christmas episode in August? I remember there being delays but I don't understand why they would rush to get it out, they had so long to get it right and they still messed it up.
Oh yeah, and what the hell happened to Zoidberg's girlfriend when he was all alone on Christmas? Are they just completely retconning season 10 or what? I don't remember if they said exactly how far back the time button sent them.
I’m still holding out hope that it gets better as it goes along but you’re absolutely correct about the new reboot. It’s fallen into the same trap as The Simpsons where it’s “pick a trend and make fun of it” show after show.
Game of thrones. Just pretend last 2 seasons don’t exist and you’re good.
I disagree, the issue with Game of Thrones is that they tried to end it too early and ruined the characters and story in the process.
You just explained why the last 2 seasons sucked which goes in line with what was said above
It doesn’t seem like you disagree lol
They are saying it needed more seasons though.
If we had source material, maybe, yeah.
Just not whatever that “creative liberty” was.
Last 4 I'd say. Seasons 1-4 were smashing, then it really fell off a cliff.
The divergence point is when they changed what happened to Jon Snow
Last 4 seasons you mean.
Scrubs: one of the best medical shows ever made. The last season was just a waste of everyone's time.
Frasier: After Niles and Daphney got together the writers were stalling the inevitable end.
The Son: Two seasons was two too many. Who TF thought it was a good idea to have Pierce Brosnan play a Texan?
The last season should really just be viewed as the spin-off that it is.
And for that it isn't anywhere close to scrubs, but even if it didn't work imo there are worse things on tv.
Ended way too soon:
Invader Zim (there were plans for 7 seasons, but Nick said it was "too expensive")
Jimmy Neutron (again, f*ck you Nickelodeon)
Inside Job
The Misadventures of Flapjack (i mean, it's length was ok, but i'm salty about it's rushed ending).
Went on for too long:
Stranger Things (looking back, only S1 was good)
Rick & Morty (it was pure filler from S3 onwards)
The Simpsons (should have ended with the movie)
Spongebob Squarepants (also should have ended with it's 1st movie)
The Fairly Oddparents (i share the common thought that the show ended in "Channel Surfers", but there were a few good episodes afterwards).
Regular Show (mainly about Mordo's disasterous love life, everything else was fine, and the ending brought me manly tears :')
Stranger Things should have been an anthology series with Matthew Modine’s character and his experiments as the common thread linking each season.
*Netflix wants to know your location
Ended too soon, I would also add Rome and Deadwood
Inside Job is so good, I was crushed when I heard they canceled it. Such a fun concept for a show, and I thought it was really well written. Was really funny, but also had it's sad moments. I'm bummed about that one for sure.
I'm glad Paramount is at least still hosting Zim. It was definitely a big part of my early teenhood.
I loved invader Zim!!!! Did you see the movie they released in 2020 that tied up the series? It was honestly really well done.. I didn't hate it
Dexter.
Big Timber is the canonical sequel to Dexter.
The Walking Dead for sure. I couldn't make it through the second season.
Also Fear The Walking Dead. I actually really liked that show for the first 3 seasons or however many it was until they changed showrunners. After that it really became a slog and I didn't finish it.
Yup, what can you really do with a zombie apocalypse though, it's not the best setting to try and drag on. Just like 10 episodes would have been enough.
If someone made World War Z (the book, not the movie) into an anthology series, I could see it going on for a few seasons.
It wouldn’t have hurt if they stuck to the comic book version of events. It was only TWD in name after season one. Sure they added characters from the comic but the story was so off base by that point that I really didn’t care.
It’s so difficult for me to watch the show having read the comics.
Yeah I think it kind of doesn't fit too well into the long TV format because you have to have a sort of base-under-siege type of story (like all the Romero movies), a kind of survival road-trip or a globe spanning thing like World War Z (the book I mean lol). Changing locations constantly is pretty expensive for TV, and having a base under siege for 8+ seasons is boring, so you always end up with this thing where the group finds a shelter, stays there for the whole season, then it all blows up and they move onto the next one. Which you could probably get away with for a bit but over 12 seasons like Walking Dead is definitely starts to drag.
Weeds should have ended at the burning of Agrestic.
That town was a character, and the most compelling one in the series.
Supernatural. Imo season 5 was a great ending and a nice bittersweet way to end the series, instead they just kept going and the plot got too convoluted and I stopped caring. Might rewatch at some point, but idk if I'll watch past season 5
Honestly, it's worth skipping season 7 if you do make it that far. The leviathan are one of the worst television plots in history imo. That said it gets pretty decent again for a few seasons.
Rugrats after they added Dil. He was dead weight and the show went from the babies going on adventures to the babies taking care of a baby.
Lost - seriously fuck that show Prison Break Heroes The Walking Dead Dexter
Are the first to spring to mind…
Heros reaaaally went to shit with the writers strike. Wow did it get bad quick.
Get ready, this is happening again.
Very glad I don't see anyone badmouthing the later seasons of Community. S4 was meh, but S5 and 6 are top-tier. I wish Elroy and Frankie had more episodes.
I'm still waiting for the movie.
Lost.
And every mystery show that keeps piling on more and more mystery and never resolving anything.
basically ww should have cancelled JJ Abrams before he got his hands on fucking star wars
The Simpsons
The Blacklist. Started out great and then I couldn't even finish the last series.
I forgot about The Blacklist, I'm always so surprised when I hear it's still going on! Seriously, season 1 might be one of the best crime dramas of the 2010s, everything that I watched after that (through season 3) was awful. Apparently Red is the main woman's dad? And her mom??? I have no idea
Honestly, how is it still going? I watched the first couple of seasons and it was already being held up entirely by James Spader, with everything around him being sort of bearable.
Fun fact, my wife and I now use the term "Blacklisting" for whenever a show has already explicitly revealed something to you (or made it so obvious you worked it out), but then there's a scene where the main characters stand around and talk through that plot point in ELI5 language. That was like at least a third of the screen time.
Honestly? Stargate SG1. One of my favorite shows.
The whole theme of the first seven or so seasons was teching up and gathering allies to say "you're not my real dad/god" to the evil sufficiently advanced aliens.
But then having reached the end of that arc and wanting to keep the show going, they introduced some even more godly evil aliens who weren't just sufficiently advanced but were actual magic. I felt it deflated the point made in the whole first arc, that there ain't nobody better then you, to then trot out some evil canonically supernatural entities.
I definitely disagree on that. SG1 (and Atlantis for that matter) were top quality till the end imo.
The point with the Ori was imo that you shouldn't follow evil gods EVEN if they have magical powers and a nice message. It made the arguments far more tricky, because they couldn't just reveal their false godhood and automatically win. To me it felt like a very natural progression of the underlying theme, kinda like the next level of difficulty.
Assuming you're talking about the pryors or however you spell it, wasn't the whole point they were trying to make that "any sufficiently advanced technology looks like magic"? It's been a hot minute since I watched it but my recollection is that they were pretty clear on that.
The Ori became the main villains. They were the evil version of ascended ancients. The Priors were their human minions who had been given a fraction of their powers.
That whole period of the show was blatantly an attempt to reset the story in an attempt to bring in more viewers. The SGC was almost completely restaffed with different characters. There was an attempt to even make a whole new SG-1 cast but it seemed pretty half hearted and kept rotating in the classic characters of Carter, Teal'C, and Daniel in varying combinations to assist Ben Browder's and Claudia Black's characters (I honestly forgot their names).
The idea of "sufficiently advanced technology looks like magic" was not exactly novel to the Ori. The entire concept of Gou'uld was that they presented themselves as gods. Ori seemed like writers being told they had to come up with a new villain capable of making the humans look like underdogs again, and so the power level of the villain went up.
If I recall correctly, the show was originally supposed to end when Atlantis was discovered. I suppose somebody got cold feet about canceling the flagship show, which led to the awkward situation of renewing it rather than fully handing the story to the new show.
They need a spin-off show that follows that one bounty hunter guy that captures them in his invisible cargo ship, and drinks water with blue 'flavor'
One episode was not enough.
Also, the alien deathrace episode, that was dope.
The first time I rewatched the show from when I'd seen it as a kid, I was convinced there was an episode where he came back. He just made that good of an impression. That guy had so many story hooks.
The drag race episode was so silly. For some reason both it and Star Trek Voyager randomly had one.
The drag rade episode gave Demolition Man vibes, it was so cheesy, but Samantha Carters enthusiasm for it, being a gearhead adventurer, was just perfect.
I also liked that one Goa'uld who helped the team pilot a tunnel boring machine to the core of some planet. She had a great arc for just one episode.
Arrested Development
I was so hyped for season 5. I had really never had a show affect like this before. It felt like it was made for my generation. I watched a full nevertwo episodes and quit watching all together. What ever the chemistry the show had was almost completely gone. You can see some sparks smoldering when Tobius comes home in a rock suit and is mistaken for a pedophile. That was all that was left of a once great show. FOX is a POS for what they did to AD.
I actually quite liked series 4 with the odd chronological structure, and think the recut ruined a lot of the jokes. However series 5 was just depressing, everyone looked so old and uninterested in being there.
Dexter
Edit: Weeds
Weeds -I started to think about leaving after a lot of build up between deflated after two main characters couldn't fathom celebrating Thanksgiving differently. Fully checked out and turned in my keycard when they got Snoop Dog to rap about a new tree strain. Lastly, Nancy was usually the direct cause of all their problems.
Stargate: SG-1 should have ended at season 8. They beat Anubis, all the conflicts were tied up, there's a nice scene where the crew is just relaxing at O'Neill's pond. And then they ordered another season. So they did the same thing that Xena did and said "Well we ran out of ancient dead religion gods, I guess Christianity is next except they still exist so we have to be kinda cagey about it" and just kept making the show.
It was supposed to end there. Series 9/10 were meant to be a new show called SG - Command but Sci-Fi wanted to keep the recognised branding and show name so SG1 carried on. I think there was some good stuff in the Ori arc too.
Archer.
Archer should've stopped right when the coma stuff started.
TIL Archer was still going
Supposedly it's premiering its last season. But yeah.
God i miss the first seasons of archer
The Simpsons
The Office (US version). NBC should've put it out of its misery after Pam and Jim married if they had to hold on to airing it. But really it could've ended way earlier than that.
The Battlestar Galactica reboot should have ended after Season 2; 3 was meh and 4 was terrible.
Ugh, that ending was just terrible.
Amazon's The Rings of Power.
It should have been cancelled 8 episodes ago.
Scrubs should have been done with season 7, saying good bye to JD. no weird season 8 with new side stories that all sucked!!
Oh and Family guy... when Seth left the writing and production of the show and only did voicing, the shows quality changed .. it's funny, but its no where near as on the nose funny as season 1 through 10.. now when they break the fourth wall for a brake away joke, it just feels... off.. peter is not ironically funny anymore.. the meg jokes got stale and honestly cruel to where it was not Soo funny anymore.. Lois used to be a great loving mother, even to meg, then became just cold and unrelatable to me... Stewie was funnier as a world domination deviant before they completey changed his character around.., Brian used to be more relatable and then just got pretentious and misogynistic that really wasn't ironically funny anymore.. Chris is maybe the one character who has barely changed from the early seasons... idk it's just not that funny any more to me..
Blame the network for how Scrubs was handled, iirc Bill Lawrence never wanted to acknowledge that season 8 was anything but a spin-off. As such, any rewatches of Scrubs in my household end with season 7.
Small show, but Eureka. Everything after the time traveling reset shouldn't have been made.
Awesome show! I just kind of fizzled. I would love to see more episodes if they were good.
The last season of Scrubs. They basically switched out the main character. Should have been a different show.
the last season of scrubs was amazing.
Scrubs: Med school sometimes misattributed as season 9 was okay
It was written as a spin-off called Scrubs Med School, but marketing was afraid it would flop.
I seem to be one of the few people who liked it.
It was okay. Part of the problem was the new characters started out as flanderized and one-dimensional as the original characters were by the end of the show, so it was already against the stupidity ceiling.
Spongebob had an astounding three season run. I could probably even go to bat for a few of the season four episodes.
But thirteen seasons and counting? Other than handsome Squidward, I can't think of a single joke/scene that people love from an episode post-movie.
Over the period of 24 years too.
The canonical answer is "Happy Days".
Just before the shark jumping. Yea, this is the original.
For me, Lost.
Writers introduced way too many mysteries that they didn't resolve. ABC should have given them less episodes so they were forced to tie up loose ends faster.
The office should have ended when Mike left.
Scrubs, the reboot they kept as the same name for whatever reason with the interns? So bad.
Arrested Development. The streaming seasons. Terrible.
Futurama. This new season is painfully bad.
Seems like almost anything that has a break for more than a couple years and reboots on a streaming service. It's never as good, and often terrible.
Wasn't AD just one stream season? I only remember the one existing.
I liked the premise of seeing all the separate events coverage first and then seeing how each character got to that point. It's an interesting concept. But it was just bad in execution.
there is season 4, season 4 remix, and season 5. the show actually has an ending
The expanse (the novels). Time jumps in sci-fi are hard to do right. The show had the good sense to end it before the time jump, but they still had to put in admiral Duterte and MCR II (Laconia) in the final season with little to no follow-up because that was in the books
I know it will probably never happen but I find it fun to think they could do a time jump IRL, do a new season after years so everyone is literally older
How many years was the jump?
Without adding any details, the last three jump ~30, ~5, and ~1. The thirty makes the world-building they wanted to do more sensible, and underlines that this is the start of something pretty different and final, but contrary to @nxfsi, I think it was handled fairly well.
House of Cards
NCIS
It especially began to suck when it swapped over to real life :(
I remember watching a couple of episodes of Under The Dome and then getting bored of the concept and bailing on it. I forgot about the show for a couple of years and then saw something advertising a third season and I was like "How are they still under that fucking dome?!"
Me with Prison Break. Watched the first season, thought it was pretty good but moved on with my life. Then a few years later saw a trailer for Season 4 or 5 and said "you mfers already escaped from the prison! What are you doing back there??"
Riverdale. It had so many chances to end well, but it just got more and more ludicrous until they just had to reset everything for the last season.
Everything Shonda Rhymes does
Castle
House
Oh, I disagree about House. I wish that was still going. He was my favorite asshole.
I really liked House. The show just went off the rails in the last couple of seasons as I recall
I got a little weird about House once the main cast got half swapped out, but by the end I came to terms with it and I think the show actually ended pretty solid
As much as I love Castle, I hated the "I need to do this myself to save you" mentality. Took like three different versions until the last couple episodes and "ok let's work together". Then I think writer strike or maybe actor discrepancies and it ended in such a flat way.
The leads disliked working with each other quite a bit by the end, and you can see when they started filming them apart as much as possible.
It fell into the trap of “things happening to the character” instead of “things happening external to the character and letting them figure it out”. I find that almost every serialized show starts to go that way about 4-5 seasons in.
Family Guy
I recently binged all family guy since I stopped watching regularly on Disney +, it had a period where the quality dropped but seems to pick up again later on, quite a lot of self awareness in some jokes too. American Dad will always be better though.
Futurama should not have been rebooted.
I tried watching the new Hulu release. It's extremely forced and cringy.
Roughly 95% of all shows.
Lost
The X-Files. The direction they took after Robert Patrick joined just did not work and felt like a spinoff more than part of the main series.
I love Bones to death, but they really should have stopped it earlier.
Supernatural seasons 2-7 are pretty great, but it just tanks during season 8 IIRC.
Season 7 is also pretty bad tbh. Hallucifer was hilarious and of course it introduced Charlie, but the Leviathans were so fucking boring. Their master plan was... capitalism?
It had a phenomenal last episode, but I think most people agree that M*A*S*H went on way too long. They really started running out of good, meaty concepts for shows around the time David Ogden Stiers (nothing against him, I like him) joined the cast.
Surprised I haven’t seen Prison Break yet. After season 3 it just went down
First two seasons were phenomenal. From that point forward it was a battle royal between the writing team, with each one trying to push their personal perspective on the series to the point it was like watching three different series mashed together.
The lead actor died at the end of season one. That is it. Pack it up and go home.
You had one good season. It was the concept. The moment the actual break is done, there is nothing to go on.
That's enough for now.
Because just how long can that thing go on for?
Any of its iterations. Same as above.
Good show until you start to put in and take out characters just to maintain the pulse of the thing.
Now I'm done!
American Gods. I mean, still better would have been to just do it as good as the first season
Stranger Things.
Season 3 and its fallout in S4 (Hopper in Russia) were pretty dire. Cut those and go deeper with the Satanic Panic plot from S4 instead. Maybe actually have a church leader involved, not just jocks and the PTA? Riff on the "spiritual warfare" literature of the period, Mike Warnke, Frank Peretti -- distant cultural ancestors of QAnon, by the way.
Orphan black - first season was amazing, it was an amazing concept. It was pretty clear the writers didn't know wtf to do once they got a season 2+ and they choked imho
Dexter. Just leave it at the end of season 6, on the giant 'what the fuck' moment. Leave it there with all the potential and possibilities and open questions for people to wonder about.
I'd argue the end of season 4 would have been an incredible ending. We'd have talked about that show for a generation if we ended it on that note.
It was almost impressive how they managed to fuck up the ending that badly, revive it for a mini-series, get this close to turning it around and then fuck the ending again lol.
It's like the X-Men movies comitting suicide by badly adapting the Phoenix Saga twice, with the same writer.
The 2020 Dracula Netflix show.
The first episode is a fun reimagining of the original story. The second episode is a neat "reverse who-done-it"/bottle episode. The third episode should not exist. Full stop. "Dracula wakes up in modern times and it turns out his weaknesses are just PTSD and then he chooses to die out of honor or something."
Penny Dreadful
The second season ends on a fantastic melancholy vibe that matches the whole tone of the show. The third season wastes all character development to have extra drama.
Dracula episode 3 was one huge disappointment. I remember being totally hooked from episode 1 until that end of episode 2. All that potential, wasted
Big Mouth. Season 4 redoes and then it just gets awful
Every Jenji Kohan show.
Mad Men. If it had ended with him standing on the top of the stairs saying "This is not the end!" it would have been perfect. Everything after that was weak wish fulfillment.
Idk dude... That Coca Cola ad created on top of the ruin of Don's life wraps it up perfectly for me.
Heroes
I think if they stuck to the premise of every season with different set of characters it could havw worked, they didn't so they had a problem of Hiro and especially Peter just being way too OP, like at a certain point simply a god level hero hard to write around that
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. The first half of the series was great, I literally almost choked from laughter a couple times. The show kept going but I thought the jokes weren't landing as much anymore.
Oh definitely a hot take! Obviously there are outstanding episodes in the newer seasons, but you also can't say it hasn't changed alot.
I still love the new stuff, there are real classics in there, though it's not as edgy as it was
Arrested Development. The Simpsons. Scandal. Scrubs. Friends.
At least the last season of scrubs was a different enough setting/cast, so even though it was definitely not as good, it didn't "ruin" it for me like some other series that have gone on too long.
Family guy
I think The Shield ended a season too late. If the seasons 6 and 7 were condensed into one with [spoilers ahead] the fallout of the Kavanaugh investigation and the money train, rather than stretching them across two different season, I think the ending would have a tighter pace and would really feel like the "walls are closing in." Plus the whole cartel subplot of the last season came out of nowhere
Edit: Riverdale too, but that should go without saying
Edit 2: House of Cards should've ended with Kevin Spacey leaving
Edit 3: True Detective
Probably controversial, but the final season of Star Trek: The Next Generation was pretty bad - 2 good episodes (and the finale, though people tend to ignore its flaws because the last scene was so satisfying), but the rest of it was mostly Season-1-level filler.
Young Sheldon. There's nothing left they can do with the formula.
Game of Thrones
How I Met Your Mother
Tokyo Ghoul
Chuck. It was on air at the same time as Better Off Ted, which was a fantastic show. IIRC, two seasons into Better Off Ted, the network had to choose between the two shows, and they chose to keep Chuck running. We were robbed.
But how would NBC's decision to renew Chuck impact ABC's decision to cancel Better Off Ted?
I still agree with you, however, in that Chuck (as much as I enjoyed it) probably should have ended after season 4, and Better Off Ted was still in it's prime and could have lasted a couple more seasons.
Wish Agents of SHIELD had ended before anyone uttered the name Daisy.
I'm bingeing this now. It's an interesting show. The last few seasons have been "there is an extinction level event and we must stop it" and then it starts all over.
I've been surprised by the quality of the show, but yeah watching it just straight has made it feel very repeatable.
It's a decent show. But I doubt I'll be watching it again.
I was okay with the name reveal. My problem was the unduly hyped Ghost Rider arc, and also the last two seasons, which were certainly unique, but couldn't possibly have been more tacked-on.
Casa de Papel. The first season is its own contained story and it was fantastic and ended perfectly. The subsequent seasons were okay, but you could really tell that the writers hadn't expected the show to continue after season 1, and everything kind of felt made up on the spot and not nearly as well constructed. I watched it because I love some of the actors/characters, but when I recommend it to people, I tell them to only watch the first season.
Friends.
Lost.
The Tonight Show with Jay Leno
I was just thinking about the friends later seasons, hooking up Joey and Rachel, wtf was that about?
It was about money. Nothing else.
All I can think is that they were running out of couples, and the execs wanted to keep their cash cow alive for as long as possible. So, they ordered the writers to make it work somehow.
Just finished watching Marcella and I was so bored by season 3.
Season 1 and 2 are pretty great whodunit mysteries with many twists and turns to keep you guessing. Some super dark stuff thrown in there too and got me emotional on a couple of occasions.
Season 3 feels like a terrible spinoff where not only is there no real mystery, you'll dislike all the characters, including the 2 main returning character. It feels like an 8 episode single episode. You could probably watch the first and last episode and not really miss anything.
Servant. When your whole hook is "eerie and mysterious", you need to provide some payoff for the viewer at some point. After 4 seasons we got some really underwhelming payoff, and by that point the show had gotten so stale that Leanne was actually getting a significant amount of dialogue, so we also find out that that girl isn't a great actor. Thank god the production value was so high in other ways, because the narrative itself became very cheap.