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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Richards" data-source="post: 8057396" data-attributes="member: 508">Not really hate-watched (more like sad-watched), but when I was stationed up in North Dakota in the late 1980s there was a cool show called Crossbow, about the fictional exploits of William Tell.  It was a half-hour show but it kind of reminded me a bit of Kung Fu, where instead of Kwai Chang Caine wandering into a new town in the American Old West and helping someone each episode, it was William Tell in Switzerland doing the same thing.  And the guy who was after him, Gessler, was the Sheriff of Nottingham to Tell's Robin Hood, and that actor was great - it was fun to watch him get his comeuppance at Tell's hand nearly every episode.Anyway, I found the complete series on-line for only $10.00 last year and snapped it up, especially since it included the third (and final) season which had never been broadcast in the US.  So I watched it with my son and nephew, four episodes every Sunday while we ate take-home pizza - we made a weekly event of it.The first two seasons were fine; my son was too young at the time I'd first seen the show to remember much of it and my nephew had never seen it at all, so we were having a good time and I was basking in fond memories.  ("Oh, I remember this one - it's the one where he uses a flute to escape a locked room full of poison gas!")  And then we began season three.Holy cow - what a difference!  I immediately understood why the third season hadn't ever been shown in the US - it was pure and utter crap.  The story lines suddenly didn't make any sense at all.  (Had you been aware there was a "Mad Max" type wasteland parked right next door to Switzerland, filled with dangerous mutants?  Neither had I.)  Also, magic was suddenly a thing; before, what had made the show so cool was it was a historical drama, and everything that had happened in the first two seasons was at least plausible; now we had fairy tale level wizards and an enormously large wind goddess who they - no kidding - once spent an entire half-hour episode convincing to blow this land-ship some crazy guy in the wasteland had invented across a desert.  The acting took on the level of a junior high drama department and every episode we watched, we spent reminiscing how big a difference this third season was from the other two.  It was so bad the lead actor, who played William Tell and had done a fine job of it for two seasons (well three, really - he did what he could with the material he was being given for that third season), apparently didn't even bother showing up for the two-hour series finale; it ended up being a rambling reminiscence by Gessler, basically putting on a one-man clip show.But we forced our way through the third season nonetheless, part of it out of sheer cussedness and a determination to see if any of the four episodes we'd lined up for that particular Sunday could possibly sink any lower in quality than the ones we'd watched the weekend before.  So that's about as close as I've ever gotten to "hate-watching" anything.  Shows I know I'm going to hate I avoid; shows I think might be good and then turn out to be crap (looking at you, Preacher) I generally drop immediately rather than waste my time on.  This was an exception; the series had done such a good job entertaining us for two whole seasons we felt it our duty to watch it until the end.And even that craptastic third season kept the kick-ass opening title sequence that the other two seasons shared.Johnathan</blockquote>

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