Wasted Potential: Series That Went South After the First Entries

I’m with Noah Antwiler on this: Highlander was the endpoint for the whole thing. Everything else should have been a prequel if you just had to capitalize.

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God, that first season was so good. It’s like they fired every single person writing it after season one.

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I think Heroes suffered from the writers strike. The thing that also made reality shows look so enticing to producers.

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Heroes also suffered from too much fanservice. They brought back Sylar as the Big Bad over and over again because he was such a (justly) popular villain… but it didn’t serve the story at all to do so.

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Nope, I could have skipped that and been perfectly fine.

I remember finally watching Jaws: The Revenge, a year or so ago, just to say I saw them all (though Jaws 3D I caught only through Rifftrax Presents), and afterward I wondered why I wasted my time. I could have watched something from my wishlist, something from Ozu, for example, something that would have mattered to me. But noooo, I had to be a completist.

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TV shows that started great but lost the mission:

Alias
Castle
Game of Thrones (up to a point… I still like it overall.)
Heroes
How I Met Your Mother (brilliant up to the last season and then… not.)
Night Court (ran too long)
Northern Exposure (again, last season was a mistake)
The X-Files (again, ran too long)

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Dollhouse kind of went off the rails, but my theory is that Whedon knew it was being cancelled so he crammed in the rest of the planned 5 years of story arc. Sort of what the movie Serenity was.

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The two awesome flash-forward season finales are what save that show from mediocrity in my mind.

I lost interest in this one after the first season, when it stopped being a Kolchak-style monster-of-the-week show and instead became a protracted UFO soap opera.

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X-Files was the first of the big “mystery box” shows where there’s an involved mythology, lots of questions to be resolved, and you can’t miss any episode and still know what’s going on. It seldom works. This show and Lost are two examples of the genre that built up anticipation for the reveal they could never possibly live up to. (And both had to do it long after their original creators had lost interest and moved on.)

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Twin Peaks would like a word with you.

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I hated the X-Files because it’s stupid to have a show with a skeptic and a believer where the skeptic is always wrong. It annoyed me so much.

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It’s the :yin_yang: to Scooby Doo.

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The original Scooby Doo anyway. These days there are actual ghosts in the show. Another thing ruined.

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That’s galling as well, though it does sit firmly within the realm of magical thinking that audiences love. You even see this in the original Kolchak, with Vincenzo always thinking Carl is being irrationally credulous, and yet Carl is always correct.

There is something toxic in re-affirming this kind of thinking, especially nowadays when it’s harder than ever to get people to agree on actual facts.

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The Walking Dead (the graphic novels) quickly became a drag to me after a strong first installment. Too much “message”, not enough zombie mashing for my liking. I gave up after the fourth TPB.

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I was glued to the set when X-Files started its run - turn off the phone, don’t answer the door, no interruptions please when X-Files is on.

After a while, however, it wore me out, they teased and teased until I got tired of being teased and getting few answers, and quit on it. The first movie is where it kind of ended for me. But before that, the monster of the week stuff, in particular, I loved it. They even did well with comedy, “Humbug” in the second season was hilarious, one of my favorites.

But it was also an ‘of its time’ type show. I’ve never had the desire to go back and re-watch them.

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The first season of Flight of the Conchords was amazing and hilarious. The second season felt forced. I gave up on it halfway through. Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement are incredibly talented, but they had to come up with a ton of new songs in a few months when the first season used their repertoire of songs they had been performing for years.

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I’ve also given up on a number of series over the pandemic hiatus. When they finally returned, I discovered I no longer cared. These series include:

  • Money Heist
  • Another Life
  • Killing Eve
  • Riverdale
  • Chilling Adventures of Sabrina

I also gave up on Dark Matter after the good first series turned to junk in the second series. I would have dropped the new Lost In Space as well, except that it was the series finale, so I finished it out of a sense of duty.

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Similar. Somewhere around season 3 or 4, a friend hounded me into getting caught up on TWD. The first season or two of “survivors vs. the horde” was interesting. When the zombies became nothing more than a complicating factor in extended skirmishes between groups of people living in various states of moral ambiguity it got old in a hurry.

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