Finally something I’m qualified to answer!
Family Guy - While more “Flanderization” when all the characters became parodies of their previous selves, the real thing is when all of a sudden every joke needed to be “explained”. i.e. someone trips while running and then one of the character says “AHHH HE TRIPPED AND HE FELL”. Ruined every joke for me, was done with it after that. Kind of one decision, I’m sure someone said “people don’t get the jokes” and ruined the show for me.
House - When they suddenly swapped the cast out. Some people really liked it, for me that was the end of the original premise of the show.
How I Met Your Mother - Lily and Marshall’s baby. Having a baby in a show is always kind of the “Okay the romance story is over and the writers are out of ideas” but it was done so badly. Lily was always an extremely selfish character, and she was insufferable through everything, from making the literal choice to have a child based on some fated chance to shaming Marshall for having the gall to - go to work to support all of them while she did… nothing? Did she even have a job? Constant guilt trips and manipulation, she was the worst character but their relationship was just straight-up toxic when she got pregnant.
That 70’s Show - Having Donna stay home from college - 4 years of characterization thrown out the window. She was always a strong independent woman and now she’s just apparently throwing away her future? She attends remote classes for a while then it just disappears. Then suddenly Eric has this big revelation later that him marrying her might lead to an unsatisifed future? It was all just very clear that the writers didn’t know how to handle her being gone - a very common coming of age issue
X-Files - The move to California. Enough said.
On a smaller and younger scale it was like this with the Super Friends (justice league).
Superman: “I’m going to punch this asteroid that was on a direct course to destroy metropolis which will break it in half, one half fills the gap in a bridge a train is about to cross and the other plugs a hole in a dam”
superman proceeds to do just that and it pissed very young me off.
The Super Friends was a wild show. There’s an episode where they fight the literal fucking Titanic and kill it by tricking it into running into another iceberg. I’m not joking or exaggerating.
can’t wait for the 2070s to see this happen to 9/11
I need to see this.
That sounds hilarious
super campy and amazing
Happy Days when they had The Fonz water ski jump over a shark.
Yep, I’m old, and yes that is where the term “Jump the shark” is from.
I remember seeing an interview with Tom Bosley, the actor who played Mr. Cunningham, where he points out that there were more episodes of Happy Days after jumping the shark than before, so it was hardly the death knell for the show.
Simpsons also has more seasons after they jumped the shark than before.
Yes, but that is the point it was done for me.
Except that isn’t true.
Yes the show peaked in the ratings the season Fonzie jumped the shark, but the show went on for another 8 years and the later seasons were when the show was better than ever.
Also the phrase comes from an interviewee on the Howard Stern show, talking about Happy Days, 20 years after the show ended.
That is when the show became so dumb I did not watch anymore, and it is what the phrase is from, I didn’t say who coined it or when.
Also, Jon Hein coined the term in 1985, 8 years after the episode aired https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_the_shark
No it didn’t., the later seasons the show got mature storylines and stopped being laugh track crap.
Not sure if it counts, but I loved the Lord of the Rings movies. Had high hopes for The Hobbit, but the way they portrayed Thorin completely broke it for me. Didn’t bother watching the other two.
You didnt miss much. They were very forgettable.
Cue Lindsay Ellis
Controversial take but Star Trek Voyager.
When I was a kid I loved it, it was my favourite Star Trek. then they introduced Seven of Nine and suddenly it became a borgfest.
I liked it because it was all new alien races, stuff that’s NEVER been in Star Trek before…and then they were like “no ones watching, lets bring in the Borg.”
As I recall, the first introduction of the Borg was in the Delta Quadrant (when Q tossed the Enterprise there as a lark). So not including them would seem like a huge oversight considering their dominance.
This was also after First Contact came out, I assume that had something to do with it.
There was also still a huge host of episodes that had nothing to do with borg, aside from the occasional “We need to improve this technology because plot reasons, let’s throw some borg nanites in it or something”. It wasn’t wholly focused on the borg.
Disagree
I have the opposite opinion. Voyager was my first trek as a kid as well. Upon rewatching it, the show actually isn’t great until seven shows up. It kinda drags ass until season 4.
I think you mean Seven of Fine
Interesting. DS9 would’ve been more to your liking then. The Borg were only in the first episode as one or two scenes to set up Sisko’s character arch. After that, it’s mostly new races, and more advanced development of existing boring races (i.e. Ferringhi, Bajorians).
Jessica Jones. Season one was fucking magnificent. Season 2+ is… A second season of that show. My understanding is, that they changed the writing staff of the show.
The end of season one set up season two to be a hard boiled detective show. That would have been cool. Stand alone episodes with an overlying story arc
Anything that’s been “adapted” in the last decade or so: Witcher? Dog shit. Halo? Hell no. Wheel of Time? Fuck off. Amazon LoTR? Fucking spare me. Disney ANYTHING?!? I’d rather set myself on fire than validate the raping of all my childhood heroes.
Writers are an extinct species. All we have now are cultural vandals.
There have been some good adaptations though, even ones that did their own thing - like Foundation.
Most of human history has been this way. People telling and re-telling their own fanfiction or alternate versions of everything from Greek tragedies to the Bible to everything else.
There have been good adaptations. The Castlevania anime was great. The first one at least.
I think the bigger issue is the trend of putting a lot of money and effort into season 1 to make a good impression and try to get loyal fans, then to take all the money out for subsequent seasons and hope the fans stick around.
It’s interesting that you mention the Witcher because I thought season 1 was way better than anything the games did. I could see how the structure in particular might not be for everyone. After season 1 it’s obvious that everything went cheap- the lighting, the costumes, the makeup, the locations, the editing, the sound design, the CG effects, the writing. I normally don’t even have an appreciation for costume design, but by season 3 it looked like they went to Spirit for Geralt’s armor and Kohl’s for Yennifer’s dresses.
Arcane was another one. Season 1 was way better than anything League of Legends did during the few years I played. Season 2 was still… Okay, but the writing was terrible. The backgrounds went from detailed panoramas of piltover to just stylized colored fog. A lot of the characters seem to do things that go against their previously established motives or just do things that don’t actually make sense but are required to move the plot along.
To bring it back to Castlevania- after the original series, the Nocturne series felt like a cheap knockoff. Which was a real shame because it was the same studio and I really enjoyed most of their other work.
Castlevania is fucking sick tho. Watchmen the series is arguably equivalent to the OG comic in terms of writing and artistic quality.
There are genuinely great adaptations out there.
The 2nd episode of “Man in the High Castle” when you realize they just copied the setting and are going to ignore the key elements (and strengths) of the book.
I gave up on the adaption about 5 min into the second episode.
I enjoyed that show immensely, until the rushed last season. I didn’t read the book though.
I actually liked the series better than the book. And I generally like PKD.
That’s a fair arguement, I can understand your perspective.
I think my negative view of the series is more due to my expectations (I think I started watching it right after finishing Electric Dreams, which I thought was very well done).
I need to go back to Electric Dreams. I’m not sure I finished it, but I remember liking it. Thanks for reminding me!
I started watching ‘The 100.’
I gave up when the folks from orbit decided that they had to massacre the ground dwellers.
This was after a dozen of so other massacres.
I regret sticking with it until the end. Such a garbage ending.
Thanks. It’s nice to know that I didn’t miss anything.
If you haven’t started it yet, look for “Pluribus.” That’s a good SF show
Dexter. 1 ep after trinity, I stopped. Decided lithgow had a perfect ending.
It really was the peak of what i remember from the show. It does having an intriguing consequence that Dexter starts to be concerned his son will have the same reaction that Dexter did to witnessing his mother’s death and starts monitoring him for signs. If I remember correctly, he’s both concerned that his son will be cursed to be like him, but also excited by the idea of having a bond and mentorship with him through it. But even that gets a bit hamfisted as I recall and ultimately goes nowhere. The show really whimpered out in later seasons.
the 100 after that moment
Wth happened I stopped watching bc I got bored
spoiler
they killed off lexa
Doctor who. Every decision after Capaldi.
What do you mean? Capaldi is still the Doctor and no one will convince me otherwise.
😂
The thing is, I love Jodie Whittaker and was so excited for her Doctor. But her companions were so bland. Ugh just super boring. And I couldn’t keep up with the lore for some reason. It just didn’t hold my interest and I was so sad about it. :(
My problems with the show started earlier, still during Tennant’s run. They kept writing scenes where his companion would gush about how great he is, and The Doctor would brag about himself in a way that didn’t feel like a character flaw. I preferred the writing when he would make a good Dalek, when Rose had the realization she’d been kidnapped by a fae creature. Everything’s gotten so chipper and quirky, and I don’t feel like the writing is thought about very deeply.
That’s when they brought on the showrunner for Torchwood. Was it any wonder it got less fanciful and more melodramatic?
I can pinpoint the moment, it was “solitract.” Like, lonely intestines? I think I finished out that season, but haven’t watched any Doctor Who since then. It was just so hand-wavey with a ridiculously dumb name that it demolished my ability to suspend disbelief.
Game of Thrones.
Which one of their many bad decisions?
Anything in the last 2 seasons?
I wouldn’t say “unwatchable” but one thing I really didn’t like about the King of the Hill revival was aging everyone up. Mainly because it made Bobby a relatively normal, not very funny adult which eliminated like half the comedy from the show.
Aww man, I thought Bobby was great in the reboot.
I haven’t tried the new one yet, but I was binging the original as prep for it and hit episodes like Peggy drugging Hank with random doses of oral testosterone without his consent, and it was too much. I felt like the show was very thoughtful about issues like bigotry and child care in the beginning, but it eventually devolved into whatever is funny at the moment without thinking anything through.
Battlestar Galactica. I didn’t even really like the show because of the tone anyways… but in the last episode of the first season they throw the female lead in the bed of the male lead who was a “bad guy” for some reason.
I realized they didn’t actually care about plot at that point, and were just going for shock value.
Are you referring to when
spoiler
Starbuck slept with Gaius?
Yah. I assume they had some trick or something to do with it, but i didn’t really care, cause… again, all about shock value.
Well
spoiler
I wouldn’t really describe Gaius as a villain as such overall - at least not a traditional villain, but it wasn’t meant to be shocking. If I recall she said “Lee” during her hook-up with him - it was to indicate she wasn’t over Lee.
I didn’t describe him as a villain, he wasn’t a mustache twirling megalomaniac… he was a self-involved douchebag who assisted in the downfall of humanity not of some malevolent plan… but because he wanted to get his dick wet.
I’d say that makes him pretty bad guy.
And they started the episode with it. No build up or plotting, just “Hey you know this strong independent women youre supposed to empathize with? We threw her in bed with the worst possible person we could create.” That has all the subtlety of those screamy jump scare videos from the late 90s. Cheap and incredibly lazy, meant to invoke a strong reaction… not a meaningful one.
Why do you have to put it on women to make “good” decisions? They don’t have to keep themselves pure, they can do what they want, just like men. You say he just wants to get his dick wet? Sometimes a “strong independent woman” just wants to get her pussy stuffed and she knows the fuc boi is easy.
Maybe what is was meant to invoke wasn’t a strong reaction, but a realization that this is different society where women don’t have to conform to the same sexuality repressing gender norms, and going forward we shouldn’t assume the characters have the same puritanical hangups we’re used to
Yeah, it’s not the “My god, she had sex!” that was the shocking part. You seem to be inferring something that wasn’t in any way implied.
It’s also about the story as much as it is about the characters, if all they wanted to show as that she wanted physical comfort or some carnal release… they could have used any other number of people, or even a wholesale created character for the purpose. Instead they used a character that they’ve made easily reviled and morally dubious.
That is the part I have a problem with. Not her, not even directly him, but the people who put them together for no other reason then “Hey look! What possible circumstance could have pushed these two completely disparate personalities together! It must be exciting, you should keep watching!” It was lazy writing, and sealed my already low opinion of the show.
I never reviled Gaius. I don’t think the audience did either. He was a complete mess and intruiging from day one.
As for Starbuck? Well whilst she may be more of a “goodie”, her personal life was also a complete mess.
“What possible circumstance?”
He was good looking (or good enough for her that night), easy, available, and in her line of sight when she decided she wanted some. Their lack of any future relationship shows she just hit it and quit it.
Male “heroes” bang treacherous ass all the time and no one says shit. Why can’t a “good guy” who’s a woman decide she wants some shady pipe laid?
This was completely in character for her.
I feel like you’re way overthinking that scene. There were a few hint that Gaius wanted to hook up with Starbuck before that scene in the episodes preceding (if I recall) - remember, the fleet at this point think he’s weird and charming. They don’t know his backstory.
Then they hook up and that’s it. It’s over. They never hook up again. The purpose really wasn’t meant to shock the audience at all.
I like to think about stories, and not just assume they’re bland emotionless scenes that exist for no reason except to show that one character was fuckin’.
If that’s the only reason the scene exists, it was pointless and had no reason to exist anyways. Which makes it bad for other reasons.
I’m just telling you that it wasn’t designed to be some major shock scene, or plot point. You’ll forgive me if I don’t recall the overarching details to the wider plot that derive from that scene (I do think Gaius makes a snarky comment about what Kara said later on in public) but it’s hardly some unbelievable twist that Gaius would want to hook up with Starbuck (he is a literal sex addict) and he was charming and popular amongst the crew (at that point).
Not really decisions by the writers, but more losing the good cast members.
Misfits and Being Human UK
