Series You Initially Loved, Then Abandoned and Never Finished

[amybrickwallace]

 

Same.

[Faulkner]

I’ll concur with Scandal as well. When it was working, it was great, trashy primetime soap, but I think somewhere along the line Shonda thought she was making some lofty dark prestige drama that had something real to say about race, feminism, and social justice, and it all fell apart. It just burned through mindless story like a five-alarm fire and achieved the unthinkable: making Joe Morton intolerable to watch.

[I Am A Swede]

Great topic!  

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These are some of the shows I've experienced this with.

ER

The Big Bang Theory

Law & Order: Special Victims Unit

Heartbeat

LA Law

Six Feet Under

Melrose Place

[Gray Bunny]

@Faulkner Fun topic! 

 

- Beverly Hills, 90210 (*obsessed* with it as a kid, then lost interest middle of the 6 season... parents were gone, Kelly was on coke, 20-year-olds were already owning nightclubs, etc. just lost its luster)

- Revenge (the final season, with 3/4ths of the characters dead, and then Emily's father being alive all along.... No. Though I watched the series finale)

- Have And Have Nots (I liked the first year or two, but it was like trainwreck TV, and then it became too much a waste of time with little enjoyment) 

- 3rd Rock from the Sun (I loved it for the first two seasons, and then completely tuned out. I think I was just busy in life) 

- Family Matters and Step By Step (they were both getting old and tired, especially Family Matters, but when they both moved to CBS for their final seasons, I probably caught like one episode and noticed Step By Step was starting to suffer the same Family Matters syndrome with children disappearing. The youngest son was suddenly gone, a la Judy Winslow, Telma Hopkins, etc.)

- Bates Motel, sort of.  (I'll put this one up here because I lost interest by the 4th season, but then it was announced the 5th season would be its last, and I so I watched the final season and it was GREAT; glad I tuned back in.) 

- I *might* be adding Nashville to this list, as this 6th and final season is pretty lackluster and a shell of its former self. I'm 5 episodes behind and in no rush to catch up. But, since I've made it this far, I'm sure I'll eventually see it through to the end. 

- Providence (I liked the first season and started on the second year, but due to lack of time and a growing lack of interest, stopped)

 

::tear:::

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 to all those who mentioned Melrose Place, but I understand. It became a clusterf*ck during the 5th season, and the 6th was dreadful. The 7th final year was a decent reinvention of itself but by then, FOX was looking to get out of the primetime soaps, and Heather Locklear's salary could apparently pay for seven pilots to be shot. 

 

[All My Shadows]

The Walking Dead - I gave it up partway through season two when I realized it was basically going to be the same plot on repeat forever and ever, amen.

Pretty Little Liars - also about partway through the second season. It just was moving too slow, and I was already watching season 2 while maybe season 4 or 5 was airing, and I knew that what was on TV was barely advanced from what I was watching online, so I figured - what's the point?

Game of Thrones - I stopped after the third season. It wasn't worth the trouble anymore just to be able to say that I watch it.

Shameless - My love affair for this show and its characters is well-documented on the thread here, but I'm over it. I think I'm two seasons behind? Maybe? Once it blew up a bit and got more attention, it seemed like the show just chased the worst kind of persona, ignoring all of the great things it had been in favor of trying to be a scripted Jerry Springer (which isn't a bad thing, but it's not what this show was).

Orange is the New Black - season 2 was its peak, season 3 was a letdown, and I have no interest in or plans to watch the rest

[Khan]

 

You weren't alone, lol.

 

Frankly, I never bought the explanation that that season was merely Roseanne's dream and/or way of coping with Dan's death.  I believe Roseanne (the star, not the character) meant for that year, with all of its madness, to be part of the show's canon, for lack of a better word.  It's only when the show's core audience rejected the post-lottery episodes -- which were horrendous and unfunny on their own, never mind how they stacked up to the prior eight seasons -- that she reversed course.

 

For me, though, the damage had been done; and the final season is the main reason why I'm not giving the new episodes a chance.  It's simply too hard for me to shake the memory of those final, godawful episodes.

 

...and Stephanie moved in.

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IMO, though, what hurt AITF the most was the switch, at Carroll O'Connor's insistence, from taping in front of a studio audience, to taping with NO audience and recording the studio responses later.  Norman Lear's shows don't work w/o that live audience for the casts to feed off of.

[Khan]

 

To this day, Ryan Murphy INSISTS "Popular" tanked, because he caved to network pressure rather than remain true to his vision.  Which is NOT a bad argument to make except, how do you explain his OTHER shows (Glee, Nip/Tuck, etc.) dropping off quality-wise at a point when Murphy presumably had more creative control over his shows?

 

 

Exactly.

[All My Shadows]

They're completely ignoring and forgetting the final season, so I think it's a mistake to not watch the new episodes of it. It's like opting to not watch Another World in the mid 60s even though Agnes had successfully offed the entire Gregory family.

[Khan]

 

Oh, Lord, lol.

 

TBH, I found the first, relatively-Urkel-less season of FH to be a watered-down version of "The Cosby Show;" and I think Miller/Boyett felt the same way, which might explain WHY Urkel was made part of the regular cast.  I just wish they hadn't taken him as far as they ultimately did.  (I still shudder whenever I recall the "Urkel Dance.")

 

Ironically, my two favorite episodes of DW, "Carlene's Apartment" and "Julia and Mary Jo Get Stuck Under a Bed," occurred during S6; and I say "ironically," because, aside from those two episodes, I could do without DW's last two years.  Between the absence of Suzanne and Charlene and the proliferation of Bernice (a character I love, but in much smaller doses) and Etienne (a character I'll never love in any dose), there just doesn't seem to be much of a point.

[Khan]

 

That was my main problem with "Scandal" as well.  Too many head-spinning plot twists without adequate time for the characters (and the viewers) to breathe, much less process what just happened.  DALLAS and KNOTS LANDING could be as unpredictable as well, but they also knew how to pace themselves and trust that their viewers would stay tuned even if every episode didn't necessarily contain a "EXPLOSIVE TWIST YOU NEVER SAW COMING!!" kind of moment.

 

 

I can't argue at all with these.  (As far as "90210" was concerned, though, I think what did ME in were those summer episodes.  To me, they were just a step above the "Saved by the Bell" gang at Malibu Sands.)

 

 

Granted, I've never seen TWD, because it's simply not my kind of show.  Nevertheless, even I had trouble at the outset picturing how that particular series could sustain itself for any significant length of time without feeling as if the whole thing were on repeat.

 

 

True.  But it's almost the same reason why I couldn't watch the original "Columbo" with any sense of joy after the bizarre (to put it mildly) episode called "Last Salute to the Commodore."  I could make neither heads nor tails of much of that episode; and what I COULD follow was so rotten that it wound up leaving a sour taste in my mouth for the series as a whole.

[Antoyne]

I forgot to add Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder.

[Khan]

 

Mama Khan tried to binge-watch HTGAWM, but she bailed rather quickly -- virtually, for the same reason that Faulkner and others bailed on "Scandal."  As a matter of fact, I'm not even sure if Shonda's shows are the kind that can hold UP to binge-watching, even though that's probably why they've become so popular over the past several years.

[Antoyne]

I think what actually burned me off was this new inception of Mid season finales. They kill any and all momentum for me honestly and if the show isn't on my DVR, I forget that it's come back.

[Khan]

 

Good point.  It's one thing to split a season in two in order to avoid reruns.  But the longer you stretch out that hiatus, the more you risk people simply moving onto other shows.

 

For reasons I will never understand, I personally bailed on "Monk" and "Psych" around the same time when they were on USA.  However, now that they're on Hallmark Movies & Mysteries, I've been able to catch up and frankly, I'm glad for the opportunity.

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[dragonflies]

I must be the only person who loves the final two seasons of Step By Step the best lol

 

I gave up on Family Matters when they basically destroyed Myra to build up Laura/Urkel

 

I gave up on ER around Season 6, just couldn't stay interested in it.