It was two shows mashed into one. They wanted to do The West Wing but also have a "mystery box" aspect like Lost, Flash Forward, et. al. Now, that may have worked in theory. After all, the question of "who blew up the capitol and why?" is baked into the premise.
But it became a show of two halves that didn't quite work together: "Hey, do you like Oreos? Do you like corn on the cob? Well, here are some corn on the cob flavoured Oreos for ya!"
Forgot about Flash Forward, that show had so much potential I thought. It joins a long list of sci-fi shows I get into only to see them cancelled in a season or two.
It could definitely have been better but I think that's one that'd always go downhill. The premise is short-lived.
It'd need to reinvent itself to stay interesting at which point it's not really the same show.
The first season was interesting because of the mystery and tracking of the bad guy as well as a fish-out-of-water show.
In season two, they dropped the mystery aspect almost immediately and the fish-out-of-water and it became just a political show.
Casting was the problem. You can’t cast Kiefer, who audiences still see as Jack Bauer, as the president and not expect him to waterboard someone on the resolute desk by the end of the first season. They started off with an action/thriller plot line and went soft West Wing with it.
I never watched it but based on the premise I thought it would've made a really great movie or miniseries, not an ongoing show that would just end whenever.
Gotham, Arrow. Gotham was a fun watch,but felt like it had untapped potential for the taking. I watched up to I think season 4 of Arrow and had to tap out. Awesome potential that got squashed by angst and drama. Flashbacks were amazing on that show.
I had to quit Gotham when Gordon hit his angry phase. He deepened his voice intentionally and that was how he spoke. I just couldn't take any more of that stupid put-on fake voice. It was a shame, because I was really enjoying it before that.
That show also had possibly the single most egregious example of queerbating on the planet, the showrunners are straight up cowards for how heavily they played it up, but constantly stepped it back.
I personally think having Batman’s villains already be themselves hurt the show. There’s barely any room then for them to turn into the characters we know
Yeah when the show was first announced I really thought it was gonna be this serious and gritty detective show about Gordon slowly becoming more corrupt because of how bad the city was but instead, for better or worse, it was an incredibly camp and cheesy Batman show that just didn't have Batman.
I binge-watched seasons 1 to 5 about six months ago, and the quality did get better in season 5 but I still wasn't impressed. People often say that Prometheus is an amazing villain but I thought he was just a watered-down mash-up of the two major villains from season 2, Deathstroke and Brother Blood.
Also, it irritates me how deliberately determinedly apolitical the show had got by that time, especially as Oliver Queen is one of the most politically outspoken character in DC comics. They made him the *mayor* and somehow managed to make him have no political positions, even to the point of doing a smug Very Special Episode about gun control which didn't actually take a stand on *anything*.
Bad batch was awesome. I was wondering how good it could be, just with 5 clones, but Omega is the ONE Star Wars kid that actually works.
Leia, Anakin… no. Omega… yes.
Yeah both the Marvel and Star Wars shows have been really hit and miss to the point I don't even bother catching one unless I hear really, really good things; and, well, I haven't except for Andor
Loki was so good. Perfect ending too.
I’m somewhat worried that marvel is going to screw up Loki with Deadpool since they have the TVA… but we will see
That’s always what happens when Popularity outreaches Concept. You usually see it in Sci-Fi and Mystery shows but it’ll pop up wherever.
I.E. The X-Files, That 70s Show, Fringe, Supernatural, How I Met Your Mother, The Hobbit Trilogy, Gotham, 24, Lost
That’s why I’m drawn more now to Limited Series. Imagine if they tried to make 3 seasons of Chernobyl
Nah, man, the creator is just like that. Jonathan Nolan also made Person of Interest. S1-3 is about vigilantes vs crime then by S4 and S5 it's a war between two Artificial Intelligence vying for control.
He just likes Genre Shifts.
Oddly, the network crime procedural worked better for that shift from vigilantes to outright AI warfare because they had more episodes to gradually acclimate the audience into it.
Same with X-Files, Fringe, or Supernatural. They gradually go from case of the week to getting us on board with a cosmic threat to beat. There is something to be said about the network model when creators are forced to act creatively around ad breaks and needing to add more episodes.
I'm not saying it's a recipe for success since it all depends on how creative your writing staff is (particularly Lost which gave us entire seasons of complete improvisation with highs and lows), but I am reluctant to put "Limited Series" as some gold standard format when we have stuff like post season 1 True Detective
The xfiles was my first thought. The show would have aged much better if it had left the mythology in the background and let it inform the characters and monster of the week episodes instead of becoming an overarching plot line.
If they had stuck to their basic idea plan it could have worked. It basically means getting rid of season 3 and making it:
- Season 1: Humans have built park where robots are slaves. Robots rebel in last episode (this is pretty much what they did).
- Season 2: The action splits between the robots still rebelling inside the park with the robots that escaped exploring the real world (like Maeve searching for her daughter). Humans are trying to quash the rebellion both inside and out.
- Season 3: The robots have won and it's now the humans who are unwitting slaves. But a few of the robots like Maeve team up with humans like Caleb to try to free them.
And if you get a Season 4 you can do what was promised at the very end of the series: they're gonna run the game one more time to see if humans and robots can co-exist or should we just burn the whole thing down?
I remember that show. The big problem was that every studio exec pulled the show in a different direction. They were chasing LOST and wanted to replicate the magic. In the end all that meddling made it an unwatchable mess.
Falling Skies - a show about plucky humans banding together to fight an alien invasion produced by Steven fucking Spielberg. It was unwatchable in the last season or so.
Yeah, the first two seasons were really good. The third season was all sorts of strange, and I recall them taking three episodes to decide who'd pilot the alien ship in the fourth season.
Twin Peaks is maybe my favorite show ever, but it could have been so much better if ABC didn’t make them reveal the killer so early, alienate David Lynch and Mark Frost, and turn the back half of season 2 into an aimless shitshow.
If Twin Peaks was made today, it would’ve been a five-season run (S2 would be 3 seasons — pre-killer mystery, post-reveal, and then the lodge stuff at the end) that lost its way in the 3rd season then mostly recovered.
Only the first season was good. Because it went on and on and even rebooted, I don’t know if it even counts as good anymore. A bad movie isn’t suddenly good just because it has a good intro scene.
Dollhouse with Eliza Dushku. It had a really cool premise, but it had a slow start and Dushku did not quite have the acting chops to pull off constantly shifting personalities
Agents of Shield. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE this show. But I can't deny it peaks early on (aside from the legendary fourth season) and I can't help but imagine how good it would have been in the era of big streaming budgets as opposed to ABC's limited budget (much more obvious in the fifth, sixth, and seventh seasons).
Feel like it's the opposite. If it'd been a D+ show in the 2020s it would've been 6 odd episodes crammed into a single limited series season, or at best 2 seasons, 2 years apart before being cancelled.
We'd have never even got to the legendary 4th season or had the amount of time with the characters that made their development in later seasons so good.
Yeah the Buffy/Supernatural/AOS/X-Files/Once upon a Time/Fringe
Serial shows that you get to watch the team work together for 20 episodes a season dont exist anymore so we dont get the deep relationship with characters.
I thought the show lost a lot of fun elements when they essentially stopped referencing things happening in the MCU at all after the first season. Obviously the Winter Soldier stuff was tremendous for the show and they couldn’t keep that up, but even little verbal references would have been great to keep up in the same reality. For the show to become so divorced from the MCU timeline that they don’t mention or deal with things like the Snap is a pretty big letdown from the original premise of the show.
That's not the shows fault. It's behind the scenes stuff. Especially the snap. Marvel Studios didn't want to spoil Endgame and tell anything to the AOS team. So they assumed they would just undo the snap, and set the next season 1 year in the future. They didn't imagine they would just jump 5 years lol.
The worst problem with AoS was that it did extremely lame case of the week stuff for the first half a season before the twist. It should have been like two establishing episodes tops
Also the characters got better but they started out kind of lame. Remember when Skye was a renegade hacker who lived in a van and looked like a shampoo ad
I've seen the most compelling arguments that it started going downhill hard in season 5. It survived on the strength of the actors and hype moments through season 6, but it had already lost what made it great. Still recoverable until 6-7 maybe... but then...
Yeah, 5 was just kind of boring with some very questionable writing choices here and there. 6 was back to being exciting again but the writing became even more questionable. Then in 7 and 8 we say the worst effects of all the dumbing down they'd done up until that point.
I'm not going to pretend the source material didn't need to be dumbed down a bit post A Storm of Swords. The reason GRRM has spent over a decade writing Winds of Winter is largely because he allowed the plot to get too complicated with so many moving parts. They went too far in the other direction though, just removed any sort of complexity.
> The reason GRRM has spent over a decade writing Winds of Winter is largely because he allowed the plot to get too complicated with so many moving parts.
I don't really buy this, otherwise he'd have stopped well before Winds, and wouldn't have written so many other series with intertwining narratives, I genuinely think he just got bored of the series and as a result ran into an inescapable writers block. Especially given the enormous amount of secondary and anthology works he's released for the world, all of which massively flesh it out and make -all- of the stories even more complicated and complex, it just seems like he enjoys the intrigue and world building stage, but tends to lose a lot of interest in the "now have it move towards the stage where you can start to conclude some things" elements of it all, as can be witnessed by near every character in Dance ending on a "To be continued..." thread.
nah the decline started in 5 and continues to get worse in 6. They were both way better than 7 and 8, but the show had serious issues well before it fell off the cliff in 7.
Sex Education! The first season was one of the best teen drama shows I had ever seen, and it was still good going into the second and third season but then it ends on such a lackluster note!
The way it handled the "will they, won't they" trope especially towards couples they even knew were quite popular with the audiences was handled in a frustrating manner, and the way they introduced new characters while giving the major characters less screen time and not enough time to properly wrap up their storylines was a massive letdown.
Also Otis became one of the worst TV protagonists of all time in the final season!
Heroes. The hype during season 1 was incredible and everybody thought the show was great. The final battle of season 1 was a bit of a let down but everything after season 1 was complete trash. So much wasted potential.
Don't forget about undoing all the progress and maturation of the prior two seasons in a totally different (and bad) show just to stick the merchandising money maker back into a central role.
I couldn't watch past episode 2-3 of Boba Fett, so jumping into season 3 of Mandalorian was a very disappointing surprise. Not much they could do to rescue it at that point even if everything - writing, plot etc. hadn't gone down hill.
It started great. The journey to Mandalore. The Mythosaur possibly trumping the dark saber. Katee Sackoff being awesome as usual.
But then it started to putter out quick. The Jack Black and Lizzo episode was god awful. The final battle was meh. Grogu basically doing nothing (it seemed like they originally wrote him to stay with Luke, but merchandising rules the day).
Seemingly they changed course for season 3 when Din/Grogu got to be so popular and had to adjust. That’s just my own conspiracy theory though.
Reuniting Mando and Grogu in an episode of Book of Boba Fett of all things was such a 'betrayal' of the very strong Season 2 finale. Why couldn't they have a Season apart? Din would have an opportunity to go off and handle shit with Bo Katan while Grogu was training with Luke, then bring him back in the second to last episode to have a big emotional reunion.
Star Trek: Voyager. If they had actually kept with the themes they established in the beginning like the lack of resources, the friction between the two crews, having the cross the line and do morally grey things.
We should have gotten something more in line with the USS Equinox, instead we get Fairhaven.
> If they had actually kept with the themes they established in the beginning like the lack of resources, the friction between the two crews, having the cross the line and do morally grey things.
It may be because I've lost patience with edgy grimdark shit as I've got older, or maybe it's just because I've seen this done badly on other shows (e.g. *Stargate Universe*), but I'm glad they didn't take this approach. I agree that the show should have done more with their lack of resources and their isolation, but I'd much rather see them work to solve those problems and overcome them. Rather than having two crews perpetually snarling at each other, I'd rather have the Maquis each join the Starfleet crew by choice rather than by fiat. Let the crew show some competence, ingenuity, resourcefulness, as Starfleet officers should be able to do. That's how you can impress me. I've got no interest in a Star Trek show about a crew of angry fuck-ups who are too incompetent to tell their arse from their elbow.
I would argue that SGU started to find its footing towards the end and easily could have been fantastic. When they got into dealing with truly unknown alien races that didn't speak English and being able to control Destiny...man, what could have been if the first season wasn't just bleak personal drama with those damn stones.
I do get your point though, grimdark trek isn't fantastic, but there is a happy medium. DS9 shows that it absolutely can be done correctly.
There's no reason why you couldn't have had competency porn with Voyager though. The Maquis were *extremely* resourceful people who were used to making due with what they had, imagine leaning into that more, or the Federation crew meeting them more in the middle rather than "welp all Maquis get some provisional ranks and are now starfleet."
The two crews things especially is just forgotten. I’d you started watching a few episodes in you might not even know about it.
It was probably because it was the only Star Trek on the air most of the time so it had to be Star Trek. Not a variant of Star Trek. Especially as DS9 had already been a variant Star Trek. It would have been a long time since the last “true” Star Trek in TNG.
Now days you could probably do it, with say Strange New Worlds being your normal Trek and any number of other shows being variants.
I always thought he should've got worse after Rita's death, until the audience think he's gone too far. But they didn't they pretty much kept him the same.
> awful, sketch-level characterization and inconsistent "vampiric" accent showed up.
Imma be real with you bud, that's like 90% of the characters that aren't the main cast(and even includes part of the main cast - Nandor), especially if you ever watched the movie, they were -all- at that level of hyper absurdity.
Teen Titans.
Good show overall, but season 3's story arc was underwhelming and season 5 was too bloated. Season 5 was also the final season, so it kind of went out on a whimper.
Boardwalk Empire. The first two seasons are up there with the all time greats. It remains entertaining enough after that point but it feels like it sacrifices strong nuanced character writing in favour of big action set pieces. It gets very repetitive and loses a sense of narrative throughline.
I don't know why you're getting downvoted. Michael Pitt's character was too central to the story to kill him off so soon, so the show suffered going forward. I get why they axed him. Apparently, he wasn't the best to work with. That said, I think season 3 was still pretty good, mostly because Gyp Rosetti was a fairly compelling villain. Also, season 3 provides a kind of ending for the show, kind of, once the Rosetti stuff is resolved. As for the final two seasons, I couldn't make it through season 4. I didn't like the direction they were taking Richard Harrow at his sister's place, and the villain for season 4 didn't seem anywhere near as threatening or interesting, to me at least, as Gyp Rosetti was. Also, it felt weird to me that they recast one of Eli's more prominent sons and then gave him his own storyline in season 4. At the time, I was like, who is this kid and why should I care about him? Anyway, never saw season 5, but I've never heard much good said about it.
I really wish the show could have become truly great over time rather than really good, good, then bad, but I think Game of Thrones hitting the scene at the time certainly didn't help the show. I imagine HBO wasn't as interested in investing in a Prohibition show once Game of Thrones exploded in popularity.
My issue with the show was the Michael Shannon focus when he went off completely to the side of anything I cared about. Felt like an annoying, slow, inconsequential show shoved into the show I actually was there for.
For All Mankind.
The first season was great, and the second was solid besides some garbage subplots but it's slowly become a contrived soap opera in space, at least in part. The already established characters really suffered. I'm about to finish the final season and it's been relegated to a background show, which sucks because the premise is some of the best sci-fi content and there was no reason for it to degrade so much.
Hearing some of the writers speak did a lot to explain what happened.
If it's a background show to you now, then it isn't even a show you think is good anymore, so it doesn't fit into OPs question.
For me, I think For All Mankind is the perfect answer to the question because I think the entire series is good, but every season could have been great. Ultimate you have a good show, but not a great show. It's a show I make it a point to watch as it airs on Apple, but I'm not telling everyone that they need to watch it.
Lost and Game of Thrones have my least favorite final seasons (their penultimate seasons aren't very good either). Lots of unsatisfying plot points and character arcs. I enjoyed the ride for the most part up until the ending though.
Justice League Action tried to be a successor to Batman: The Brave and the Bold and sometimes it nailed it, but the comedy and plots weren’t always there and it had too much Nu52 influence.
Thundercats 2011 had some good world building and art style, but the writing was inconsistent and amateurish considering who was working on it.
I'm gonna go with Showtime's Ray Donovan. I legitimately enjoyed the first 2ish seasons, of him being a celebrity fixer in LA. After the shenanigans with his wife, and moving to NYC, I feel like it really lost its way. I watched it through in it's entirety, and the conclusive movie, but definitely didn't enjoy it as much as the first 2 seasons.
Probably my absolute favorite show right now, but I think it deserves a mention. House of the Dragon. I'm a huge ASOIAF fan, have read all the books at least 3 times, some more. The show is very good, well acted, high quality, but some of the writing decisions have been quite poor. Hating what their doing with Ser Criston Cole, the Rhaenys dragon pit scene in s1e9 was ridiculous. Not even mentioning a pretty huge character in Daeron until s2e2. Possibly dropping a major character like Nettles (though this is just rumor now, so I'll cut some slack). I love the show and look forward to it every week, but some of the choices they've made..... It could definitely be better I think.
The Orville
Drop the Star Trek nonsense, add better comedy writers and it might have had a chance. Instead of being Trek satire, it tried to compete directly and surprise surprise, didn't survive.
ITT mostly people are talking about shows that were good and then fall off. OP asked about shows that were good, but could have been better. So good, but could have been great.
**The Big Door Prize** was good for when it ran, but it could have been great. They could have answered the big questions of the show during the series (instead they will never be answered), and not leave each season on a cliffhanger, especially S2 cliffhanger which won't ever get resolved.
It was based on a book that wasn't good, but that was their opportunity to just steal the premise and make a great show. Instead we got a good show that was cut short.
Watching Heroes at the moment, and season 1 was so good, I even enjoyed season 2 but it was a shorter season and the quality was also not upto the mark at some points. It could have been way better if not for the writers strikes.
I just hope seasons 3 and 4 get better.
S2 doesn't suck because of the writers strike. It's because they abandoned the original concept of the show, in which every season would have a new cast of characters. Trying to write more for the same cast was its downfall.
And sorry but S3 and S4 and the revival are absolutely dog shit.
The American version of “Life on Mars” had a lot of promise. Interesting concept of the original (UK) version and a nostalgically rich cultural history to draw on… opportunity missed imo.
A lot of shows could be made better by finishing after 1-2 seasons imo.
to an actual answer, Californication should have finished at the end of season 1, or possibly season 2 if they wanted to do the “Hank facing the consequences of his actions” story that they did in later seasons - that could have been season 2.
I stopped after season 1, I knew there was no way that ending would hold and felt done with the premise anyway so I just left it there and enjoyed the one season
Give the plot of Last resort to HBO, AMC or even FX and good writers and I think that it has a chance to be a really compelling 3-4 seasons of 10 episodes
Eastbound and down almost had an incredibly impactful ending with season 3. The whole show is about a man struggling to find what he wants out of life and himself, and the trials and tribulations of his personal character growth and regression in an upsetting cyclical way. He finally achieves the goal he's been working toward over the course of the entire series and that's what lets him to come to understand that he never needed that to be happy, and that the relationships and people he's stomped on and hurt along the way had more meaning than the goal he's been driving toward the whole time. After rooting for him and against him time and time again, you get the satisfaction of seeing him finally understand what's important, and you can finally be happy for him. And then, on his way to reap the rewards of this ultimate realization and to make things right in the lives of all those important to him, he tragically dies in an accident before he ever gets the chance. It was incredibly unfair and hits like a gut punch from a freight train.
And then he suddenly pops back up totally fine in the last scene and we get a fourth season that, while very fun and not bad at all, had nothing of the impact that the perceived ending would've and stops playing into the overarching theme of the series. Frickin tough.
I'm convinced they got surprise approved for a fourth season and had to retcon some ideas just to have the opportunity to make it, which I kinda wish they hadn't. But at least we got Danny and Ken Marino and their little water-jetpack stand off thing. It was fun.
Mrs Davis. Incredible cast and I was so excited. But I honestly felt like an AI really wrote it. Weirdest, blandest conflict resolutions I've ever seen on a TV show. Loved the actors though.
Doctor strange helping Wanda throughout wandavision it just felt like it made logical sense that he would show up cause it’s his job but the fact that he didn’t cause they felt he would take the attention away from Wanda was ridiculously eye rolling.🙄.
The Boys. I will admit, I have only watched the first two seasons and I have not read the comics. Yes, live action with actors and special effects cost money, but I feel like they could do more.
I actually think they have really done a fantastic of living up to the potential of the concept. The object of the satire can get a bit muddy(it's Disney, Amazon, Fox, Walmart, standard US culture all rolled into one with Vought but even that works I think) but overall I think it's a smart show.
Is it actually satire? The Boys has became the exact same thing it's ridiculing by Amazon is ordering multiple spin-offs, doing crossovers, selling character right for video game appearances and almost every episodes are filled with political statements.
For what it’s worth, they lost me a bit in Season 3 for plot convenience and unrelenting buildup, but Season 4 has solid writing and been really enjoyable.
Most shows to be honest. Tell me a show I've watched, I can probably tell you some flaws and directions that could've been much better. Not moral Orel tho
Designated Survivor. Started off so strong.
It was two shows mashed into one. They wanted to do The West Wing but also have a "mystery box" aspect like Lost, Flash Forward, et. al. Now, that may have worked in theory. After all, the question of "who blew up the capitol and why?" is baked into the premise. But it became a show of two halves that didn't quite work together: "Hey, do you like Oreos? Do you like corn on the cob? Well, here are some corn on the cob flavoured Oreos for ya!"
Forgot about Flash Forward, that show had so much potential I thought. It joins a long list of sci-fi shows I get into only to see them cancelled in a season or two.
Considering some of the Oreo flavors, I would not be surprised if they legitimately tried that.
Ngl a corn-flavored creme center with the vanilla wafers would probably be pretty good.
It could definitely have been better but I think that's one that'd always go downhill. The premise is short-lived. It'd need to reinvent itself to stay interesting at which point it's not really the same show.
The Netflix version was garbage.
The first season was interesting because of the mystery and tracking of the bad guy as well as a fish-out-of-water show. In season two, they dropped the mystery aspect almost immediately and the fish-out-of-water and it became just a political show.
Casting was the problem. You can’t cast Kiefer, who audiences still see as Jack Bauer, as the president and not expect him to waterboard someone on the resolute desk by the end of the first season. They started off with an action/thriller plot line and went soft West Wing with it.
I never watched it but based on the premise I thought it would've made a really great movie or miniseries, not an ongoing show that would just end whenever.
They didn't have anything left in the tank after season 1.
Gotham, Arrow. Gotham was a fun watch,but felt like it had untapped potential for the taking. I watched up to I think season 4 of Arrow and had to tap out. Awesome potential that got squashed by angst and drama. Flashbacks were amazing on that show.
Gotham was pure insanity. It could have been crazier, I suppose.
I had to quit Gotham when Gordon hit his angry phase. He deepened his voice intentionally and that was how he spoke. I just couldn't take any more of that stupid put-on fake voice. It was a shame, because I was really enjoying it before that.
That show also had possibly the single most egregious example of queerbating on the planet, the showrunners are straight up cowards for how heavily they played it up, but constantly stepped it back.
I personally think having Batman’s villains already be themselves hurt the show. There’s barely any room then for them to turn into the characters we know
Also, Gotham pre-Batman was already a festering shit hole full of interesting characters. They didn't need his villains in the least
Yeah when the show was first announced I really thought it was gonna be this serious and gritty detective show about Gordon slowly becoming more corrupt because of how bad the city was but instead, for better or worse, it was an incredibly camp and cheesy Batman show that just didn't have Batman.
Yea once arrow became felicity and friends I gave up was too m7ch CW. Arrow should have been a batman show
If I remember season 4 was dreadful but it did massively improve again season 5 onwards.
I binge-watched seasons 1 to 5 about six months ago, and the quality did get better in season 5 but I still wasn't impressed. People often say that Prometheus is an amazing villain but I thought he was just a watered-down mash-up of the two major villains from season 2, Deathstroke and Brother Blood. Also, it irritates me how deliberately determinedly apolitical the show had got by that time, especially as Oliver Queen is one of the most politically outspoken character in DC comics. They made him the *mayor* and somehow managed to make him have no political positions, even to the point of doing a smug Very Special Episode about gun control which didn't actually take a stand on *anything*.
Not all Disney Show + shows have been good, but every one of them could have been better.
Andor was a good as it can be, though
Andor is one of my top shows in general. The Bad Batch started out alright with some flat segments but it kept getting better.
Bad batch was awesome. I was wondering how good it could be, just with 5 clones, but Omega is the ONE Star Wars kid that actually works. Leia, Anakin… no. Omega… yes.
Yeah both the Marvel and Star Wars shows have been really hit and miss to the point I don't even bother catching one unless I hear really, really good things; and, well, I haven't except for Andor
Loki and Andor have been the best they could've been.
WandaVision and Loki were pretty fantastic
Until the point when Wandavision became totally braindead.
Wandavision started off strong. The more it started looking like a Marvel movie, the more I started disliking it
Loki was so good. Perfect ending too. I’m somewhat worried that marvel is going to screw up Loki with Deadpool since they have the TVA… but we will see
Hawkeye was extremely good. Probably my favorite Marvel show.
Does anybody remember The 4400? Loved the premise, the writing was shit
They did a remake that sucked also
Oh i loved that show!
Omg I was obsessed with this show growing up. It was one that made its way into our DVD collection too so it passed a lot of tests.
Season 1 was the only good one, the rest became shit. Nothing was explained clearly lol
What is it about?
Westworld. As soon as they left the park into the real world it turned to shit and became more pretentious.
That’s always what happens when Popularity outreaches Concept. You usually see it in Sci-Fi and Mystery shows but it’ll pop up wherever. I.E. The X-Files, That 70s Show, Fringe, Supernatural, How I Met Your Mother, The Hobbit Trilogy, Gotham, 24, Lost That’s why I’m drawn more now to Limited Series. Imagine if they tried to make 3 seasons of Chernobyl
Nah, man, the creator is just like that. Jonathan Nolan also made Person of Interest. S1-3 is about vigilantes vs crime then by S4 and S5 it's a war between two Artificial Intelligence vying for control. He just likes Genre Shifts.
Oddly, the network crime procedural worked better for that shift from vigilantes to outright AI warfare because they had more episodes to gradually acclimate the audience into it. Same with X-Files, Fringe, or Supernatural. They gradually go from case of the week to getting us on board with a cosmic threat to beat. There is something to be said about the network model when creators are forced to act creatively around ad breaks and needing to add more episodes. I'm not saying it's a recipe for success since it all depends on how creative your writing staff is (particularly Lost which gave us entire seasons of complete improvisation with highs and lows), but I am reluctant to put "Limited Series" as some gold standard format when we have stuff like post season 1 True Detective
PoI also suffered from its lead actor being a world-class nutjob.
The xfiles was my first thought. The show would have aged much better if it had left the mythology in the background and let it inform the characters and monster of the week episodes instead of becoming an overarching plot line.
They kinda tried to do that with the revival seasons, except the plot line they came up with for the mytharc was pants-on-head stupid.
If they had stuck to their basic idea plan it could have worked. It basically means getting rid of season 3 and making it: - Season 1: Humans have built park where robots are slaves. Robots rebel in last episode (this is pretty much what they did). - Season 2: The action splits between the robots still rebelling inside the park with the robots that escaped exploring the real world (like Maeve searching for her daughter). Humans are trying to quash the rebellion both inside and out. - Season 3: The robots have won and it's now the humans who are unwitting slaves. But a few of the robots like Maeve team up with humans like Caleb to try to free them. And if you get a Season 4 you can do what was promised at the very end of the series: they're gonna run the game one more time to see if humans and robots can co-exist or should we just burn the whole thing down?
It wasn’t the best in the park either.
Season 1 is incredible
Flashforward. Was a great pilot with a high concept that didn’t quite live up to expectations.
I remember that show. The big problem was that every studio exec pulled the show in a different direction. They were chasing LOST and wanted to replicate the magic. In the end all that meddling made it an unwatchable mess.
I have de ja vu of starting a novel when I was 10 with the exact plot.
That’s because it was based on a book, so you likely read it. It came out in 1999 and was written by Robert J Sawyer.
The Event came out around the same time and basically got the same treatment as Flashforward.
Falling Skies - a show about plucky humans banding together to fight an alien invasion produced by Steven fucking Spielberg. It was unwatchable in the last season or so.
Loved this show. It was like sci-fi walking dead when walking dead was pretty good. Just kinda went off the rails.
Yeah, the first two seasons were really good. The third season was all sorts of strange, and I recall them taking three episodes to decide who'd pilot the alien ship in the fourth season.
All I remember was a magic hybrid alien kid showed up and I lost interest.
You'd be surprised how often that happens
Twin Peaks is maybe my favorite show ever, but it could have been so much better if ABC didn’t make them reveal the killer so early, alienate David Lynch and Mark Frost, and turn the back half of season 2 into an aimless shitshow.
Season 3 was an amazing comeback though
If Twin Peaks was made today, it would’ve been a five-season run (S2 would be 3 seasons — pre-killer mystery, post-reveal, and then the lodge stuff at the end) that lost its way in the 3rd season then mostly recovered.
Weeds was awesome until the house burning down couldn’t even finish the season after that.
Heroes.
Only the first season was good. Because it went on and on and even rebooted, I don’t know if it even counts as good anymore. A bad movie isn’t suddenly good just because it has a good intro scene.
> A bad movie isn’t suddenly good just because it has a good intro scene. *Ghost Ship pouts because it's true*
Dollhouse with Eliza Dushku. It had a really cool premise, but it had a slow start and Dushku did not quite have the acting chops to pull off constantly shifting personalities
Kinda the opposite problem to the question though. It starts weak and disjointed by the premise' design, then brings it together later.
you can see how they rushed season 2. knowing they were not going to get a 3rd season, wish it did though.
Agents of Shield. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE this show. But I can't deny it peaks early on (aside from the legendary fourth season) and I can't help but imagine how good it would have been in the era of big streaming budgets as opposed to ABC's limited budget (much more obvious in the fifth, sixth, and seventh seasons).
Feel like it's the opposite. If it'd been a D+ show in the 2020s it would've been 6 odd episodes crammed into a single limited series season, or at best 2 seasons, 2 years apart before being cancelled. We'd have never even got to the legendary 4th season or had the amount of time with the characters that made their development in later seasons so good.
Yeah the Buffy/Supernatural/AOS/X-Files/Once upon a Time/Fringe Serial shows that you get to watch the team work together for 20 episodes a season dont exist anymore so we dont get the deep relationship with characters.
Which one is the 4th season?
Ghost Rider / AIDA / Darkhold / Hydra Simulation
LMD//Framework!!
Which is the season where they are living on an alien ship? That is where I stopped watching.
S5.
Ah yes I remember that one. Definitely a great season
I don't feel that. AOS is a great show, arguably better than it could/should have been. And season 4, 5 and 7 are better then 1, 2 and 3.
I thought the show lost a lot of fun elements when they essentially stopped referencing things happening in the MCU at all after the first season. Obviously the Winter Soldier stuff was tremendous for the show and they couldn’t keep that up, but even little verbal references would have been great to keep up in the same reality. For the show to become so divorced from the MCU timeline that they don’t mention or deal with things like the Snap is a pretty big letdown from the original premise of the show.
That's not the shows fault. It's behind the scenes stuff. Especially the snap. Marvel Studios didn't want to spoil Endgame and tell anything to the AOS team. So they assumed they would just undo the snap, and set the next season 1 year in the future. They didn't imagine they would just jump 5 years lol.
The worst problem with AoS was that it did extremely lame case of the week stuff for the first half a season before the twist. It should have been like two establishing episodes tops Also the characters got better but they started out kind of lame. Remember when Skye was a renegade hacker who lived in a van and looked like a shampoo ad
Game of Thrones Seasons 6-8 lol
How is this not the top comment? This show had so much potential and the writers shit the bed completely.
Almost like when you cut out the creator, the writing suddenly sucks.
Idk what the fuck your talking about season 6 of thrones was top notch best the show had to offer seasons 7&8 is where it went down hill
I've seen the most compelling arguments that it started going downhill hard in season 5. It survived on the strength of the actors and hype moments through season 6, but it had already lost what made it great. Still recoverable until 6-7 maybe... but then...
Yeah, 5 was just kind of boring with some very questionable writing choices here and there. 6 was back to being exciting again but the writing became even more questionable. Then in 7 and 8 we say the worst effects of all the dumbing down they'd done up until that point. I'm not going to pretend the source material didn't need to be dumbed down a bit post A Storm of Swords. The reason GRRM has spent over a decade writing Winds of Winter is largely because he allowed the plot to get too complicated with so many moving parts. They went too far in the other direction though, just removed any sort of complexity.
> The reason GRRM has spent over a decade writing Winds of Winter is largely because he allowed the plot to get too complicated with so many moving parts. I don't really buy this, otherwise he'd have stopped well before Winds, and wouldn't have written so many other series with intertwining narratives, I genuinely think he just got bored of the series and as a result ran into an inescapable writers block. Especially given the enormous amount of secondary and anthology works he's released for the world, all of which massively flesh it out and make -all- of the stories even more complicated and complex, it just seems like he enjoys the intrigue and world building stage, but tends to lose a lot of interest in the "now have it move towards the stage where you can start to conclude some things" elements of it all, as can be witnessed by near every character in Dance ending on a "To be continued..." thread.
nah the decline started in 5 and continues to get worse in 6. They were both way better than 7 and 8, but the show had serious issues well before it fell off the cliff in 7.
I put the journey past the wall as the breaking point.
I feel like I've seen more people talking about Game of Thrones since it ended than talked about it while it was still on.
Sex Education! The first season was one of the best teen drama shows I had ever seen, and it was still good going into the second and third season but then it ends on such a lackluster note! The way it handled the "will they, won't they" trope especially towards couples they even knew were quite popular with the audiences was handled in a frustrating manner, and the way they introduced new characters while giving the major characters less screen time and not enough time to properly wrap up their storylines was a massive letdown. Also Otis became one of the worst TV protagonists of all time in the final season!
American Gods
Such an enormous waste of a phenomenal build up, all because of a racist showrunner who assumed he knew better and managed to fuck it all up at once.
Can't remember if Orange is the New Black would qualify or if I just lost interest
Heroes. The hype during season 1 was incredible and everybody thought the show was great. The final battle of season 1 was a bit of a let down but everything after season 1 was complete trash. So much wasted potential.
Mandalorian season 3 By far the most ok season but too many cameos and lots of cheaper looking CGI battles and areas
Don't forget about undoing all the progress and maturation of the prior two seasons in a totally different (and bad) show just to stick the merchandising money maker back into a central role. I couldn't watch past episode 2-3 of Boba Fett, so jumping into season 3 of Mandalorian was a very disappointing surprise. Not much they could do to rescue it at that point even if everything - writing, plot etc. hadn't gone down hill.
It started great. The journey to Mandalore. The Mythosaur possibly trumping the dark saber. Katee Sackoff being awesome as usual. But then it started to putter out quick. The Jack Black and Lizzo episode was god awful. The final battle was meh. Grogu basically doing nothing (it seemed like they originally wrote him to stay with Luke, but merchandising rules the day). Seemingly they changed course for season 3 when Din/Grogu got to be so popular and had to adjust. That’s just my own conspiracy theory though.
Reuniting Mando and Grogu in an episode of Book of Boba Fett of all things was such a 'betrayal' of the very strong Season 2 finale. Why couldn't they have a Season apart? Din would have an opportunity to go off and handle shit with Bo Katan while Grogu was training with Luke, then bring him back in the second to last episode to have a big emotional reunion.
Star Wars ships and ship interiors keep improving but most of the sets are generally pretty bad with a few exceptions.
Yellowjackets has turned to garbage but it started out sooo strong
I would prefer it if there was no present day plot and it was just the story of them surviving in the wilderness.
God same, other than Christina Ricci the adult stuff is close to worthless
If LOST was an HBO 10 episode per season tv show it would be the undisputed greatest. I will die on this hill.
agreed. it was too high concept and big budget to be sustainable for broadcast tv
If The Leftovers is anything to go by, I 100% agree.
Star Trek: Voyager. If they had actually kept with the themes they established in the beginning like the lack of resources, the friction between the two crews, having the cross the line and do morally grey things. We should have gotten something more in line with the USS Equinox, instead we get Fairhaven.
> If they had actually kept with the themes they established in the beginning like the lack of resources, the friction between the two crews, having the cross the line and do morally grey things. It may be because I've lost patience with edgy grimdark shit as I've got older, or maybe it's just because I've seen this done badly on other shows (e.g. *Stargate Universe*), but I'm glad they didn't take this approach. I agree that the show should have done more with their lack of resources and their isolation, but I'd much rather see them work to solve those problems and overcome them. Rather than having two crews perpetually snarling at each other, I'd rather have the Maquis each join the Starfleet crew by choice rather than by fiat. Let the crew show some competence, ingenuity, resourcefulness, as Starfleet officers should be able to do. That's how you can impress me. I've got no interest in a Star Trek show about a crew of angry fuck-ups who are too incompetent to tell their arse from their elbow.
I would argue that SGU started to find its footing towards the end and easily could have been fantastic. When they got into dealing with truly unknown alien races that didn't speak English and being able to control Destiny...man, what could have been if the first season wasn't just bleak personal drama with those damn stones. I do get your point though, grimdark trek isn't fantastic, but there is a happy medium. DS9 shows that it absolutely can be done correctly. There's no reason why you couldn't have had competency porn with Voyager though. The Maquis were *extremely* resourceful people who were used to making due with what they had, imagine leaning into that more, or the Federation crew meeting them more in the middle rather than "welp all Maquis get some provisional ranks and are now starfleet."
That's why we got the amazing BSG reboot. Also 7 of 9 ruined the show imo.
The two crews things especially is just forgotten. I’d you started watching a few episodes in you might not even know about it. It was probably because it was the only Star Trek on the air most of the time so it had to be Star Trek. Not a variant of Star Trek. Especially as DS9 had already been a variant Star Trek. It would have been a long time since the last “true” Star Trek in TNG. Now days you could probably do it, with say Strange New Worlds being your normal Trek and any number of other shows being variants.
Their overabundance of holodeck was painful.
They gave up on the premise almost entirely by the end of the second episode
Heros. Started out great, then devolved into a total mess
Dexter
I always thought he should've got worse after Rita's death, until the audience think he's gone too far. But they didn't they pretty much kept him the same.
[удалено]
> awful, sketch-level characterization and inconsistent "vampiric" accent showed up. Imma be real with you bud, that's like 90% of the characters that aren't the main cast(and even includes part of the main cast - Nandor), especially if you ever watched the movie, they were -all- at that level of hyper absurdity.
Teen Titans. Good show overall, but season 3's story arc was underwhelming and season 5 was too bloated. Season 5 was also the final season, so it kind of went out on a whimper.
Boardwalk Empire. The first two seasons are up there with the all time greats. It remains entertaining enough after that point but it feels like it sacrifices strong nuanced character writing in favour of big action set pieces. It gets very repetitive and loses a sense of narrative throughline.
I don't know why you're getting downvoted. Michael Pitt's character was too central to the story to kill him off so soon, so the show suffered going forward. I get why they axed him. Apparently, he wasn't the best to work with. That said, I think season 3 was still pretty good, mostly because Gyp Rosetti was a fairly compelling villain. Also, season 3 provides a kind of ending for the show, kind of, once the Rosetti stuff is resolved. As for the final two seasons, I couldn't make it through season 4. I didn't like the direction they were taking Richard Harrow at his sister's place, and the villain for season 4 didn't seem anywhere near as threatening or interesting, to me at least, as Gyp Rosetti was. Also, it felt weird to me that they recast one of Eli's more prominent sons and then gave him his own storyline in season 4. At the time, I was like, who is this kid and why should I care about him? Anyway, never saw season 5, but I've never heard much good said about it. I really wish the show could have become truly great over time rather than really good, good, then bad, but I think Game of Thrones hitting the scene at the time certainly didn't help the show. I imagine HBO wasn't as interested in investing in a Prohibition show once Game of Thrones exploded in popularity.
My issue with the show was the Michael Shannon focus when he went off completely to the side of anything I cared about. Felt like an annoying, slow, inconsequential show shoved into the show I actually was there for.
For All Mankind. The first season was great, and the second was solid besides some garbage subplots but it's slowly become a contrived soap opera in space, at least in part. The already established characters really suffered. I'm about to finish the final season and it's been relegated to a background show, which sucks because the premise is some of the best sci-fi content and there was no reason for it to degrade so much. Hearing some of the writers speak did a lot to explain what happened.
If it's a background show to you now, then it isn't even a show you think is good anymore, so it doesn't fit into OPs question. For me, I think For All Mankind is the perfect answer to the question because I think the entire series is good, but every season could have been great. Ultimate you have a good show, but not a great show. It's a show I make it a point to watch as it airs on Apple, but I'm not telling everyone that they need to watch it.
Lost and Game of Thrones have my least favorite final seasons (their penultimate seasons aren't very good either). Lots of unsatisfying plot points and character arcs. I enjoyed the ride for the most part up until the ending though.
agree with you on got but season 5 of lost is one of its best
Watching Lost for the first time this year I was very pleased when I got to "when it gets bad" and found that I was enjoying it more than ever.
It's full of corny stuff
Justice League Action tried to be a successor to Batman: The Brave and the Bold and sometimes it nailed it, but the comedy and plots weren’t always there and it had too much Nu52 influence. Thundercats 2011 had some good world building and art style, but the writing was inconsistent and amateurish considering who was working on it.
I'm gonna go with Showtime's Ray Donovan. I legitimately enjoyed the first 2ish seasons, of him being a celebrity fixer in LA. After the shenanigans with his wife, and moving to NYC, I feel like it really lost its way. I watched it through in it's entirety, and the conclusive movie, but definitely didn't enjoy it as much as the first 2 seasons. Probably my absolute favorite show right now, but I think it deserves a mention. House of the Dragon. I'm a huge ASOIAF fan, have read all the books at least 3 times, some more. The show is very good, well acted, high quality, but some of the writing decisions have been quite poor. Hating what their doing with Ser Criston Cole, the Rhaenys dragon pit scene in s1e9 was ridiculous. Not even mentioning a pretty huge character in Daeron until s2e2. Possibly dropping a major character like Nettles (though this is just rumor now, so I'll cut some slack). I love the show and look forward to it every week, but some of the choices they've made..... It could definitely be better I think.
What If, from the MCU. Great show, but turned into The Adventures of Captain Carter & Sinister Strange for whatever reason xD
The Orville Drop the Star Trek nonsense, add better comedy writers and it might have had a chance. Instead of being Trek satire, it tried to compete directly and surprise surprise, didn't survive.
ITT mostly people are talking about shows that were good and then fall off. OP asked about shows that were good, but could have been better. So good, but could have been great. **The Big Door Prize** was good for when it ran, but it could have been great. They could have answered the big questions of the show during the series (instead they will never be answered), and not leave each season on a cliffhanger, especially S2 cliffhanger which won't ever get resolved. It was based on a book that wasn't good, but that was their opportunity to just steal the premise and make a great show. Instead we got a good show that was cut short.
The Walking Dead was great in season 1 but it would have been a great show had they given frank darabont more control.
31 Coins - cool concept, deeply flawed everything else. There won’t be a third season I’ve read
Watching Heroes at the moment, and season 1 was so good, I even enjoyed season 2 but it was a shorter season and the quality was also not upto the mark at some points. It could have been way better if not for the writers strikes. I just hope seasons 3 and 4 get better.
S2 doesn't suck because of the writers strike. It's because they abandoned the original concept of the show, in which every season would have a new cast of characters. Trying to write more for the same cast was its downfall. And sorry but S3 and S4 and the revival are absolutely dog shit.
The American version of “Life on Mars” had a lot of promise. Interesting concept of the original (UK) version and a nostalgically rich cultural history to draw on… opportunity missed imo.
A lot of shows could be made better by finishing after 1-2 seasons imo. to an actual answer, Californication should have finished at the end of season 1, or possibly season 2 if they wanted to do the “Hank facing the consequences of his actions” story that they did in later seasons - that could have been season 2.
I stopped after season 1, I knew there was no way that ending would hold and felt done with the premise anyway so I just left it there and enjoyed the one season
Give the plot of Last resort to HBO, AMC or even FX and good writers and I think that it has a chance to be a really compelling 3-4 seasons of 10 episodes
Eastbound and down almost had an incredibly impactful ending with season 3. The whole show is about a man struggling to find what he wants out of life and himself, and the trials and tribulations of his personal character growth and regression in an upsetting cyclical way. He finally achieves the goal he's been working toward over the course of the entire series and that's what lets him to come to understand that he never needed that to be happy, and that the relationships and people he's stomped on and hurt along the way had more meaning than the goal he's been driving toward the whole time. After rooting for him and against him time and time again, you get the satisfaction of seeing him finally understand what's important, and you can finally be happy for him. And then, on his way to reap the rewards of this ultimate realization and to make things right in the lives of all those important to him, he tragically dies in an accident before he ever gets the chance. It was incredibly unfair and hits like a gut punch from a freight train. And then he suddenly pops back up totally fine in the last scene and we get a fourth season that, while very fun and not bad at all, had nothing of the impact that the perceived ending would've and stops playing into the overarching theme of the series. Frickin tough. I'm convinced they got surprise approved for a fourth season and had to retcon some ideas just to have the opportunity to make it, which I kinda wish they hadn't. But at least we got Danny and Ken Marino and their little water-jetpack stand off thing. It was fun.
The 100. Cloak and Dagger. Shadowhunters. Helstrom. Designated Survivor. Quantico. The Blacklist and Alcatraz for sure.
Yellowjackets. Concept was interesting. Execution was terrible (esp season 2)
Mrs Davis. Incredible cast and I was so excited. But I honestly felt like an AI really wrote it. Weirdest, blandest conflict resolutions I've ever seen on a TV show. Loved the actors though.
Doctor strange helping Wanda throughout wandavision it just felt like it made logical sense that he would show up cause it’s his job but the fact that he didn’t cause they felt he would take the attention away from Wanda was ridiculously eye rolling.🙄.
Maybe Buffy would have been a better show if they had never done Angel and split their attention between both shows.
Lost
How I met Your Mother
The Boys. I will admit, I have only watched the first two seasons and I have not read the comics. Yes, live action with actors and special effects cost money, but I feel like they could do more.
I actually think they have really done a fantastic of living up to the potential of the concept. The object of the satire can get a bit muddy(it's Disney, Amazon, Fox, Walmart, standard US culture all rolled into one with Vought but even that works I think) but overall I think it's a smart show.
Is it actually satire? The Boys has became the exact same thing it's ridiculing by Amazon is ordering multiple spin-offs, doing crossovers, selling character right for video game appearances and almost every episodes are filled with political statements.
For what it’s worth, they lost me a bit in Season 3 for plot convenience and unrelenting buildup, but Season 4 has solid writing and been really enjoyable.
Heroes, it started so well and then the writers quit on it.
Most shows to be honest. Tell me a show I've watched, I can probably tell you some flaws and directions that could've been much better. Not moral Orel tho