My biggest problem with most of the shows listed is they have to outdo themselves and go on for too long.
Season one: Great premise!
Season Two: Same premise, but TWICE the danger!
Season three: I don’t know, robot ninjas or something?
I miss when shows could just grow in the first season or two, and then you’d only get raising stakes two or three times a year (season finale/premier and sweeps). Otherwise they’re just stories.
These days shows have to justify themselves right out of the gate.
These days shows have to justify themselves right out of the gate.
I miss mid-budget live action scifi shows with strong enough episodic elements that I can actually remember individual episodes. These days seemingly every show feels like an 8-12 movie that blurs together.
Star Trek Strange New Worlds is the closest current thing to an exception. Before that The Orville.
Most other scifi that comes out has to be an “event”.
I miss mid-budget live action scifi shows with strong enough episodic elements that I can actually remember individual episodes
Kamen Rider.
The Orville had that in the first season or so, after that it went heavy into serialization. I dont think I even finished whatever the last season was because of it.
The most infamous example of this is Supernatural where the first few seasons were very episodic and exactly what you described. Then, after season 5 it keep escalating until dudes are fighting off the end of the world for the 6th time lmao
Oh, this is about Riverdale, isn’t it?
Riverdale actually did what I’ve always wished for a boring failure of a show to do, and just completely go nuts.
Oh our boring high school drama show is slumping? How about an organ stealing cult, a superhero, and a guy escaping from the cops in a rocketship!
Hah, yes!
Just finished season 3 of Yellowjackets and White Lotus and I just felt, meh. I’m hopeful for season 4 of both shows but I’ll be living off the honeymoon phase from seasons 1 and 2.
Its more that they have to keep the money train going, than they have to outdo themselves.
Never got the appeal of these ones. They aren’t bad shows, but they did not do it for me.
Game of Thrones
Lost
Better Call Saul
Peaky Blinders
Breaking Bad
This, plus The Sopranos, The Office, Parks & Rec, IASIP, 30 Rock, etc.
I get that they’re well liked, and they are the source of lots of meme material, but I could never manage to get through a whole episode.
I’ve never been able to make it through an entire episode of Community, for the same reason. It’s memeable, but I just don’t find it funny at all.
I have watched any of those except the first couple of Breaking Bad. It was too real for me so I just couldnt.
I lasted 5 minutes with Peaky Blinders. The loud music drowning out the dialogue did my head in.
Big Bang Theory
Same here. I always felt they were making fun of my fellow nerds and geeks as opposed to celebrating our intelligence and quirkiness. The writers obviously got the humor and nuance but chose to poke fun so that the rest of the world could laugh at it. I mean I understand why but I didn’t really like it for that reason.
I didn’t even think they got the humor right. Watching episodes without the laugh track shoes the jokes are just a group of bullies being bullies to each other.
Laugh tracks always make me feel like I’m being programmed.
I’ve been called “Sheldon” for my autistic traits in a degrading manner. The show plays autism for laughs plenty of times, and also ridicules the “nerds” all the time for no reason. It’s like a bunch of self proclaimed high school “jocks” wrote it
The most infuriating part about it is I know that if I rant about how terrible bbt is, it will only cement me as Sheldon in their minds.
Lost was the tv version of clickbait. 3 concurrent story lines rotated from week to week. Every episode a cliffhanger that you had to wait 2 more weeks to resolve into a nothing burger. Even watching that shit on disc or streaming is annoying as fuck. I might have liked what was going on story wise, but I got too annoyed with the format to get past mid season 2.
Yeah. Lost was when I was intrugued by J J abrams style, and then completely turned off by his inability to tell a story or have a plan beyond the halfway point.
And then they involved him in seemingly every major movie franchise ever for the next two decades… and he kept doing the same crap. Lots of flash and dazzle and dramatic moments that ultimately mean nothing because the characters have no story to tell, no real arc, no consistent rules creating a believable universe for the watcher to be sucked in to - any rules can be thrown out the window anytime a dramatic cliche opportunity arises. Yet he still seems very popular.
Lost went on far too long and they backed themselves into a corner by saying that the big secret was what nobody had guessed, but this was right around the Internet getting popular to talk about tv shows, so everything good had already been suggested. If it had been me, I would have just picked the best one and gone with that…
There is a recut of it, still available via torrent, called Chronologically LOST. It is every scene, but in chronological order, and only once each. Really cool way to see the show and make sense of it.
Unfortunately, mid season 2 is where it finally stops having enormous fluff and starts picking up pace. Fair criticisms though
Friends.
Seems like everyone likes this show but I dont think I ever watched a full episode.
My humor is more like Scrubs, Seinfeld, IT Crowd.
Friends had Chandler and Joey bromance, which is a precursor to the Scrubs bromance.
The rest of the show isn’t similar, but that part was spot on.
There are quite a few edited ‘Friends without the laugh track’ videos on YouTube showing how creepy and unfunny some of the characters are. Its a bit of a meme theres so many of them.
Oh I want to check those out… Thanks!
I love Scrubs and IT Crowd, but Friends also. I don’t, however, like Frasier. People seem to fall into either the Friends or Frasier camp, and never the twain shall meet.
Friends or Frasier camp, and never the twain shall meet.
I didn’t cate for either.
I weirdly like both.
But I like a lot of random shit.
Fair enough. I find Friends to be incredibly unfunny and can’t stand sitting through a single episode. Frasier, on the other hand, I find to be pretty entertaining (until Niles and Daphne get together, then the wheels start falling off).
Walking dead. I think I finished the second episode. But I’m not even sure about that one. It was utterly boring
Walking dead is the king of spreading 4 episodes of content across 12 episodes. You could watch the season opener, the 2 episodes that close the first half and start the second if each season, and the finale, and not miss anything of substance.
Wait, is TWD available on the anime filler website?
I watched up to the point where they pretended the Asian lad was dead, but actually he was hiding under a bin.
Not because it was cheap, but because I realised I no longer cared one way or the other.
You’ve seen the best. I stopped somewhere in the middle of S3 because it was so bad. S1 was tolerable but honestly only the pilot was good. Kids watched all of it so I’ve got an idea how it went on; like a bad and cheap soap opera
The first few episodes were a slog, but it got much better.
I recomment to give it a try. Maybe start straight from season 2.
I watched the first 2 seasons or so. It felt like all the clichés from all the zombie movies put together in a single show, but worse.
Rick & Morty. Then the whole szechuan sauce thing happened and I can’t look at any content from that show without cringing. LOOK GUYS IM PICKLE RI-stop please it’s not funny.
The “community” is insufferable, but the show is solid. You might like Solar Opposites. The wall substory is amazing. Really good voice actors, can feel the tension and emotions in the voices
The wall substory is a wild ride
There’s a few shows where the fan base have made it so insufferable that I don’t want to even watch the show . But Rick and Morty are King in this category, the worst fans
I initially found that show a bit interesting, but I found myself feeling more and more cringey about what the show was churning out. I outgrew the whole thing just as the sauce thing was happening
It later became well known what an actual piece of shit Justin Roiland is, and I felt pretty glad not to have been stuck in that fandom still feeling like his work was of any importance to me.
Don’t even get me started about the SA scene(s?), especially the grape-man. I try not to judge people too harshly by their choice of mindless entertainment, but if you found that funny, or at least continue to find it funny, I don’t think I can take you seriously.
Really triggered my partners PTSD too, so I wasn’t surprised at all when the Rolland stuff came to light.
Friends
How I met your mother
Big Bang Theory
Bazinga.
The Umbrella Academy: in the first couple of series like nothing happens and everyone is very sad.
You dodged a bullet. It just keeps getting worse until the final season which is the absolute worst
Yeah, last season was so boring and unsatisfying.
There were so many ways that show could have gone which would have been good.
You forgot…“stupid”
Like what the fuck was up with that Lila and five arc. Like seriously …what the fuck.
I liked up to the end of the season with the time travel where they all jumped to different times a few years apart. Think it was season 2. After that, i just didn’t feel the show was coherent or interesting.
Such a shame too. The premise looked really interesting at first.
The Walking Dead. Felt more like the Talking Dead, the pacing was far too slow for me and it didn’t seem like much was happening.
Funny, the Talking Dead was a show that aired after that night’s episode every week back in the day. It was actually a highlight for me; they’d have the actors and effects artists in to discuss behind the scenes stuff. It was very fun watching Greg Nicotero talk shop
Breaking Bad. Just lost interest half way through.
I made it one episode. Extremely well done show about a tragically terrible flaw of American society that frustrates me daily. Didn’t need a reminder of how terrible things are.
Same. Walt is an unlikeable person making bad decisions. I grave up after season 1.
You know what might help you power through?
Will it make my teeth fall out?
I was gonna suggest a little coffee, but yes if your caffeine is contained in a sugary soda it definitely has the potential to rot your teeth.
I gave up on it once, and then continued at a later date. I felt that the mid seasons were a bit of a grind, but the last season goes up to 11 with an extremely satisfying ending.
Most of the popular ones. Especially Game of Thrones. As soon as the incestuous couple threw the little boy off the tower, I was outta there. I’m so tired of shows about horrible people doing horrible things.
I completely understand and it took me three tries to get through the first few episodes… and then the biggest shock is that you end up partly understanding and feel these horrible people. At times, you may even root for some of them. It’s definitely taxing for most of us but that’s what makes it a great show.
Jaime was a great story, till they done him shitty in the end
!So that kid end up basically being the bad guy. Pretty much everyone would have been better off if he died!<
Grimdark stuff is just so infantile. It’s not “realistic and gritty” to have every single character cuss a thousand times per episode and be constantly in and out of clothes
The Mandalorian
Noped out after season 1. They revealed his face during a filler episode, during a boring scene, instead of waiting an episode or two longer for the real gut punch reveal at the end of the last episode.
It was stupid. It killed what would have been one of the best face reveals in cinema history. I had no patience for the show after that. Almost didn’t bother finishing the rest of the season. I don’t really care what their reasons were. Contractual. Whatever. Don’t care.
Walking dead. Only season one was good
I couldn’t make it past the first episode, i thought it was a corny tv version of dawn of the dead with no balls. I saw bits of it as my wife was watching but it only got worse and cheesier
You mean people with little to no firearm experience firing from moving vehicle windows getting headshots was too realistic?
Walking dead. The opening episode is so fucking stupid and poorly written. People were just desperate for any zombie show at the time.
I even asked a fangirl why they watch this shit ass show. She agreed it was shit but says she kept going cause your brain forgets the bad bits and remembers the good.
When that show was popular, I had a boyfriend that didn’t seem able to handle the idea of us liking different things. I never cared for zombies, but I’d heard good things about The Walking Dead and gave it a try. I pushed myself to watch the entire first season before deciding, “Nope, I can’t.”
But when I told that boyfriend? Apparently I “didn’t watch it enough.” When I told him I didn’t care for zombie stories, he insisted, “But it’s not about zombies! It’s about the people.” Uhh yeah, it’s about people in a world with zombies. I could watch a million shows about “people” that don’t involve zombies, so why would I keep watching this one that I already don’t like?
Same, only watched the first two episodes and was just bored and weirded out by the writing. Heard much better about the last of us series.
Yeah, for me The Walking Dead were the non-zombie characters, on the run with no expectation of anyone surviving to their next birthday.
It was also just so goddamn boring. Far too much talking and milling about, not enough walking dead.
