What Show Should Have Only Had One Season?

[Belen]

Heroes

My wife and I were just discussing last night how we felt betrayed by season 2. We spent season 1 building up the meeting of the heroes and then it all fell apart and they separated again. We wanted to see them become actual superheroes and start teaming up etc!

 

[TiQuinn]

My wife and I were just discussing last night how we felt betrayed by season 2. We spent season 1 building up the meeting of the heroes and then it all fell apart and they separated again. We wanted to see them become actual superheroes and start teaming up etc!

Yeah, I was really waiting for that moment when they'd all team up at the end of Season 1 to fight Sylar, and while we "kinda sorta if you squint" got that, it was way too brief. Part of it is just I don't think shows like that had the budget at the time to do the kind of heroics and special effects that likely would've been what I was envisioning, even though I think they could've done something more than what they gave us.

Edit: Also, I kind of feel like one of the Petrelli brothers should've died in that finale. There really wasn't a sacrifice made there, even though the show was signalling there should've been. Now that I think of it, I don't think I can blame Heroes going off the rails solely on Season 2. I think there were signs that they didn't really have a full vision from the get-go.

 

[MarkB]

My wife and I were just discussing last night how we felt betrayed by season 2. We spent season 1 building up the meeting of the heroes and then it all fell apart and they separated again. We wanted to see them become actual superheroes and start teaming up etc!

A show ahead of its time, in the sense that it wanted to be the antithesis of conventional superhero stories at a time when conventional superhero tropes weren't yet really in the public consciousness.

 

[Gradine]

I think of it slightly differently:

*A show that only needed a single season to tell its story, but kept going anyway.

*A show that was great for its first season, but what followed was so bad that it should not have been made - the world would be a better place if the latter work didn't exist.

My entry for the latter is Shadow & Bone. I don't know if I've seen a bigger drop in quality in show from season 1 to season 2, and I'm including Heroes here.

 

[payn]

My entry for the latter is Shadow & Bone. I don't know if I've seen a bigger drop in quality in show from season 1 to season 2, and I'm including Heroes here.

I liked the stuff with the thieves but yeah a bit of a drop.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Altered Carbon. The second season still hit some interesting subject matter, but it didn't have as strong a story or characters as the first season.

Yeah this was what immediately came to mind for me.

They did a great job adapting the first season, but it cost them $150m, and they clearly massively dropped the budget for the second season.

This combined very, very poorly with trying to jam two books into the season (as @A2Z says). So it ended up going from a moody SF noir in S1, to looking like a bog-standard Canadian sci-fi series with too more lore/plot in the second season.

My entry for the latter is Shadow & Bone. I don't know if I've seen a bigger drop in quality in show from season 1 to season 2, and I'm including Heroes here.

This kind of fascinates me, because I didn't even notice a drop in quality from S1 to S2, let alone a Heroes level one! I've read all the relevant books, some more than once, but perhaps that blinded me to issues here (because I already saw a lot of issues lol).

In the end the shows were screwed because Netflix insisted they start at Shadow and Bone, and not just start at Six of Crows as the showrunner (who seemed very smart and to understand the books/setting very well in all interviews) wanted to.

 

[Gradine]

I liked the stuff with the thieves but yeah a bit of a drop.

In the end the shows were screwed because Netflix insisted they start at Shadow and Bone, and not just start at Six of Crows as the showrunner (who seemed very smart and to understand the books/setting very well in all interviews) wanted to.

Yes; please give me a Six of Crows series, leave the Ravka business way out of it. Shadow and Bone were Leigh Bardugo's first books and it shows; there's a reason they pulled in the cast from the better books in the first place. And even then, they did a really great job with the first sesaon! It worked really well despite seeming like it wouldn't work at all! What happened?!

 

[Mannahnin]

I think you guys hit the big ones, all excellent picks.

I’m going to throw Rome in there. The first season was perfect, a thing of beauty. I didn’t really think we needed a second season, and what they did put out seemed rushed and disjointed.

I still liked season 2, but Rome is a damn fine answer. And always deserves to be talked about more.

Heroes is probably THE answer, though.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

TBH, I watched one of the shows listed so far, like Heroes, Dexter and The Walking Dead, but I can’t think of a single multi-season show I’ve watched where I felt they should have ceased after a single season.

 

[Twiggly the Gnome]

Until the third season dropped twenty odd years later, I would have said Twin Peaks.