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.
It was awesome. Definitely worth the watch for anyone that can get over the ending. Maybe if you know it’s bad going into it you won’t be as disappointed 😂
Yeah, and maybe consider a sequel once the rest of the books came out.
The actors would have aged way more than their characters at that point. Especially the kids and the very old characters.
Oh. That makes sense. Damn, wrong timing I guess.
Isn’t the main sticking point that they segwayed before the books ran out somewhere before Dorn? and/or they had material supplied to them and basically willfully threw it in the trash?
Big bang theory. It was absolute garbage.
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”.
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
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.
To me it wasn’t that they were making fun of them because they were smart, it’s because they weren’t neurotypical. Several of them would be considered to have ASD if they lived in the real world and that’s treated as the butt of a joke. It disgusts me.
Nah I shit on it because it was shit, for something that was supposed to be a comedy it wasn’t funny at all, it is subjective of course, I’m sure people did find it funny
Anything with a laugh track immediately turns me off, watch some of the clips with the laugh track deleted and that’s the humour you are left with.
It’s unfair to remove the laughs, fuck up the whole flow and call it bad. If the show had been written to be without a laugh track it wouldn’t come out that way
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
British TV is, as a friend said to me once, dire. So it would make sense that it landed better there. I mean, clearly lots of Americans watched it, and I know a few that loved it. I just think less of them. 😁
I think I’d like to point out that they shouldn’t have had even one season. It’s so fucking offensive.
Haha! These people aren’t neurotypicals! It’s so funny!
By today’s standards, yeah. At the time, too, but the ultimate message was groundbreaking and progressive. Archie was written as a bigot for the purpose of creating conflict and addressing difficult social issues. The actor who played him, Carroll O’Connor, was liberal in his personal politics, as was the producer, Norman Lear.
I appreciate the show for what it was attempting, not because I worship Archie Bunker.
I think you’re thinking of All In The Family? OPs comment was regarding Big Bang Theory…
Got sidelined into a conversation about laugh tracks
Did you know he was the inspiration for Cartman on South Park? The creators were fans of all in the family and thought it was too bad that you couldn’t write character like Archie anymore. But then they realized if they made it a cartoon kid they could.
It’s true, a picture really is worth a thousand words.
Zabinka.
Why? Did the last season suck? Or did the show run out of ideas along the way?
Note: I am not very well known with the show.
IMO the show was garbage from the first second of the first episode. I didn’t watch more than one or two over the whole span of its production.
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.
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!
Laugh track is about stupid, I’ll give you that. But still, I grew up watching Married With Children and despite the laugh track (I dunno, maybe it really was a live studio audience), I found the show rather hilarious.
Married With Children had a live studio audience rather than a laugh track. Your dignity is intact my friend!
So did Big Bang Theory
Then the audience sucked too, I guess
Seriously folks - there can be only one and done:
HEROES
Save the cheerleader, 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!
Wait what!? Shit I ended up buying a nissam versa as my first car years later. I always wondered why I chose that car
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.
I can only judge by what was done - not could have been. From the first episode of the second season, it was clear lightning wasn’t gonna strike twice.
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.
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 actually disagree with this. The spinoff had a lot of potential with some amazing castings (in hindsight).
If it had just been JD returning to Sacred Heart after a few years (let’s say Kim died and now he and Blonde Doctor have sole custody) as “The New Dr Cox” it would have actually been a good show. Go back to the first few seasons where the stars of the show are the interns but we can’t stop wondering what is going on with that cool ass resident. Cox is still Chief (or whatever Kelso’s role was), and so forth.
And honestly? JD and Elliott and Turkleton and Carla needing to come to terms with prioritizing their families over their work would be an interesting arc. Same with Cox trying to reconcile his responsibilities with his need to Heal. All from the perspective of the interns who don’t truly understand what they are fighting over.
Instead, it very much hit the reset button with Cox having run the hospital into the ground, everyone lost all their character progression, I think Kelso was back, etc. It actively undid like the last three or four years of the show.
Honestly, that final season would have been an acceptable sitcom that might have gone on to 3 or 4 seasons if it wasn’t tied to Scrubs.
Supernatural
They managed to escalate all the way to God’s grumpy sister.
And then went even further, making the next enemy: The British.
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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.
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Well that’s just the logical next step
Yeah, that show was good for a few seasons and then just got weird.
I was told by a friend; watch all the way up through season 5, then sit for a couple weeks and don’t watch it for a while. Really think about if you want to keep going. Because the writers originally wrote the first 5 seasons to be a self contained story and it worked really well. Then the show was very successful, and they asked them to keep going. What ended up happening was they’d have single or double season long plots that just kinda rolled from one to another and had a bunch of escalation and flanderization going on. Like, in one season the big issue is The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. They deal with three of them, and then Death is the big badass. He’s the one they can’t actually beat. They spend an entire season leading up to him and trying to deal with him.
Then, the very next season, that same super badass, Death himself, is in the way of something they want. Summoning, binding, and killing permanently this mega badass end season boss is all the effort of half of a fucking episode in the next season. The Flanderization is most obvious in Dean, where he goes from a dude who is characterized by typically masculine traits, and emphasizes that masculinity at times, to “Me Dean, me want burger! Me want pie!!”
Yeah that sounds about right. The writing was extremely good, hunting monsters, lots of love, and then suddenly they faced something super big, and made everything trivial after that.
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…
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.
- The Office (US) could have ended at the proposal in the rain.
- The Office should have ended at the wedding in Niagara.
- Dear god why didn’t The Office end when Michael left?
I dunno, upon subsequent rewatches, I’m glad we got Robert California.
Just sad we didn’t get a Stargate crossover episode…
Edit: Why the downvotes? Robert California is in the OG Stargate movie lol
I still haven’t finished it . Didn’t like the direction and then they butchered Andy’s character and growth. I did watch the finale which i loved.
There is no excuse for what they did to Andy. Robert California is good, though, and it does have one of the best finales I’ve ever seen.
Andy’s actor was paid to take over, then left to go do movies. I blame everyone but the writers for how that turned out.
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.
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Agree, and I didn’t even hate season 5 as much as the rest of the world. The last season was frankly painful.
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’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.
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?
Every single reality show that went longer than the first commercial break.
Whoever birthed the genre lived too long.
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?
Weeds should have ended at the burning of Agrestic.
That town was a character, and the most compelling one in the series.
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.
Sorry, but the Yahoo season of Community was painfully bad, despite the presence of Keith David.
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.
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