What Show Should Have Only Had One Season?

[payn]

It occurs to me that there's a third, more sinister way to approach this particular prompt: a show that became a cultural phenomenon in part due to its longevity, but you wish it hadn't and had just failed and gotten cancelled after only one season.

I've got a lot of entries here, some of them spicier than others, but my top nominee would be Entourage

Ohhh Person of Interest peee ou

 

[Richards]

Here's one I just thought of: Crossbow. It was a retelling of the exploits of William Tell, and the first season was pretty darn good. (The main villain Gessler, was fantastic.) Season two spent a lot of time with William being reunited with his son, who was a pain in the butt and a very dislikeable character, so it was nowhere near as good. And season three: holy crap! What a letdown! All of a sudden William was in this magic dystopian "Mad Max" kind of world, dealing with wind goddesses and spider demon people and the production value plummeted to grade school play levels - it's no wonder the network that aired seasons one and two in the US never bothered with season three. (I picked it up on DVD hoping for a level of quality similar to season one...nope!)

Johnathan

 

[Ruin Explorer]

A great capstone does not make everything leading up to it retroactively better, and a single bad episode at the end does not retroactively spoil what came before either.

I think it can if it's either:

A) Enough of a stinker that it's actually kind of horrid. Because now whenever you think of the show you think of that (which isn't true of a one-off bad episode, generally).

or

B) Recontextualizes the entire show in a really annoying or stupid way.

The main reason I think people object to the nuBSG ending/last season is that it does B. It takes a show that had vague religious allusions, but was fundamentally a pretty straightforward SF series, and the ending recontextualizes it a very vague-yet-annoying faux-religious, faux-scientific way, turning it from somewhat towards the harder end of sci-fi (for the most part) to essentially pure fantasy. Had the show always been fantasy I don't think an ending like that would have been remotely as off-putting. The ending also features characters acting very well... out of character.

It occurs to me that there's a third, more sinister way to approach this particular prompt: a show that became a cultural phenomenon in part due to its longevity, but you wish it hadn't and had just failed and gotten cancelled after only one season.

I mean, pretty much every reality TV show by that logic, even the few I like.

Actually though an awful lot would genuinely have been better with only one season - Big Brother springs immediately to mind.

This reminds me of how a friend who still watches talks about The Simpsons. By the time the show had ironed out the rough spots, it also was past what people think of as the golden days; and* there's no clear point where it truly 'got bad,' so much as vacillated in quality and in how much of it was filler ever since.

I mean, there is a very clear point when it got bad, which is about/after S10.

It's pretty widely agreed (nothing is agreed by everyone, not even the colour of the sky):

I know I kept watching past that for a year or three, but it was noticeable that even "okay" episodes were thin on the ground after that, and you might get one "good" one per season - and zero "classics". In fact as far as I know, there hasn't been a single like classic-tier Simpsons episode in the last 15 years, maybe more like 25.

And believe me I've asked! In the post-pandemic I really wanted some new Simpsons. I tried just watching it, but it was like, dreadful. Unwatchable. But I figured with over 20 years of episodes I hadn't seen, there had to be some good ones. I looked for guides, and asked on forums and Reddit and just no-one had any episodes after the early 2000s that they recommended except some Treehouse of Horrors (for whatever reasons, a few more recent ones of those have worked).

I was actually shocked. I expected to be bombarded with lists of episodes that people were just too snobby to watch. I expected people to have bunches of favourite episodes from the last 20 years.

But they didn't. Not even the people who were still watching it. It was weird, like profoundly weird to me. How do you watch a show for 30 years and only have favourite episodes from like the first 10? Which is what I was getting told, again, by people who were still watching it! Talk about a living death!

 

[payn]

The main reason I think people object to the nuBSG ending/last season is that it does B. It takes a show that had vague religious allusions, but was fundamentally a pretty straightforward SF series, and the ending recontextualizes it a very vague-yet-annoying faux-religious, faux-scientific way, turning it from somewhat towards the harder end of sci-fi (for the most part) to essentially pure fantasy. Had the show always been fantasy I don't think an ending like that would have been remotely as off-putting. The ending also features characters acting very well... out of character.

For me, the writing just got bad and I want to say even lazy. Which brings up a tangent, when a series starts relying on flashbacks to stuff already well tread (or to retcon in stuff they didnt think of then) a show is about to take a turn for the worse. So, it was clearly awful well before the ending which didnt bother too much becasue the show was already over in my mind.

 

[Reynard]

But they didn't. Not even the people who were still watching it. It was weird, like profoundly weird to me. How do you watch a show for 30 years and only have favourite episodes from like the first 10? Which is what I was getting told, again, by people who were still watching it! Talk about a living death!

I wonder if it is more of a viewer centric thing. Like, if you asked someone who started watching The Simpsons in 2015, but went back and watched the first 20 years later, would they say their favorite episodes are the newer ones?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I wonder if it is more of a viewer centric thing. Like, if you asked someone who started watching The Simpsons in 2015, but went back and watched the first 20 years later, would they say their favorite episodes are the newer ones?

Yeah I was honestly expecting pretty much exactly that - people who only started watching later to come up with episodes they thought were good, but... they didn't, except Treehouse of Horror ones.

 

[Dioltach]

How about "The Medici"? S1 was pretty solid, with Dustin Hoffman and Richard Madden. Not as good as "The Borgias", but compelling and realistic.

Then came S2, and it turned into one of those shows that pretends to be a historical drama but is essentially an American soap opera. The Duke of Milan pops over to Florence for tea without an entourage or even bodyguards, let alone the whole panoply accompanying one of the most powerful people in Europe. His army suddenly appears outside Florence, and nobody's seen them approach. That's alright, though: our hero, having spent the entire episode sulking and brooding, decides that he's going to save the day after all. He gives a compelling speech and shuts the gates. Disaster averted!

We didn't make it to episode 2.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

How about "The Medici"? S1 was pretty solid, with Dustin Hoffman and Richard Madden. Not as good as "The Borgias", but compelling and realistic.

Then came S2, and it turned into one of those shows that pretends to be a historical drama but is essentially an American soap opera. The Duke of Milan pops over to Florence for tea without an entourage or even bodyguards, let alone the whole panoply accompanying one of the most powerful people in Europe. His army suddenly appears outside Florence, and nobody's seen them approach. That's alright, though: our hero, having spent the entire episode sulking and brooding, decides that he's going to save the day after all. He gives a compelling speech and shuts the gates. Disaster averted!

We didn't make it to episode 2.

Oh boy I always wondered if that was worth watching, I guess I'll skip it!

 

[Spectral Anomaly]

Irregardless of the averse affect that their vocabulary has on the cannon of the English language, I ascent to their use because we understood you're intent.

Ahem. Your.

 

[Willie the Duck]

Ahem. Your.

It's not 100% obvious, but it seems like you missed the joke.