My biggest problem with most of the shows listed is they have to outdo themselves and go on for too long.
Season one: Great premise!
Season Two: Same premise, but TWICE the danger!
Season three: I don’t know, robot ninjas or something?
I miss when shows could just grow in the first season or two, and then you’d only get raising stakes two or three times a year (season finale/premier and sweeps). Otherwise they’re just stories.
These days shows have to justify themselves right out of the gate.
These days shows have to justify themselves right out of the gate.
I miss mid-budget live action scifi shows with strong enough episodic elements that I can actually remember individual episodes. These days seemingly every show feels like an 8-12 movie that blurs together.
Star Trek Strange New Worlds is the closest current thing to an exception. Before that The Orville.
Most other scifi that comes out has to be an “event”.
The Orville had that in the first season or so, after that it went heavy into serialization. I dont think I even finished whatever the last season was because of it.
Hah, yes!
Just finished season 3 of Yellowjackets and White Lotus and I just felt, meh. I’m hopeful for season 4 of both shows but I’ll be living off the honeymoon phase from seasons 1 and 2.
Oh, this is about Riverdale, isn’t it?
Riverdale actually did what I’ve always wished for a boring failure of a show to do, and just completely go nuts.
Oh our boring high school drama show is slumping? How about an organ stealing cult, a superhero, and a guy escaping from the cops in a rocketship!
Its more that they have to keep the money train going, than they have to outdo themselves.
Never got the appeal of these ones. They aren’t bad shows, but they did not do it for me.
Game of Thrones
Lost
Better Call Saul
Peaky Blinders
Breaking Bad
Shit. That’s exactly my list.
- I didn’t even watch GoT long enough to see Emilia Clark in the buff. But, then, I’d read the first two books and absolutely loathed them, and didn’t find the TV series improved the story much.
- I liked the first season of Lost, but the second felt like the writers were like, “oh shit… we got a second season? Shitshitshit…” Like they were just making it up as they went, and the writing and plot was just… bad.
- I didn’t watch BCS because I didn’t like
- Breaking Bad. I mean, I like scenes from BB, but the show itself suffered (for me) from this tendency in the past decade to base entire shows on tense anxiety. Boardwalk Empires was another that used this mechanism, as did
- Peaky Blinders. Great writing. Great acting. But it’s just constant tension, and it’s simply not fun.
It’s like directors got ahold of this one technique and just beat it into every fucking show in the past decade. It’s tired, overused, and you’ll notice it’s a common trait of many of the shows you and agree on. You have to have tension, but I didn’t need every god damned minute to be wondering if someone’s going to get their throat graphically slashed with a straight-edge.
Oh man! You just put to words why I couldn’t stand Breaking Bad, and Boardwalk Empire.
I watched the first simply because a lot of people love it, and I try to watch everything that seems worth seeing. The second I saw some clips from that I really liked, but then I just didn’t stick with the actual show.
In both cases, the series left me on constant edge, in a really bad way.
Now I realize that I kept waiting for the shows to grant me some kind of catharsis, but it just never happened. Or it happened rarely and in ways that quickly gets brushed away as inconsequential.
Y’all are trippin, the gus storyline in Better Call Saul/BB is likely my favorite villain of all time.
Fair enough though, I was scared I was gonna see these shows listed in here and here we are!
You’re still allowed to enjoy them.
How could I after this
Fair point. You probably shouldn’t like or enjoy things that other people subjectively don’t like.
My condolences.
I’m not fond of the perpetual tension. Just awful.
this tendency in the past decade to base entire shows on tense anxiety.
Yup. I call it the “drama of paranoia,” and it’s exhausting after a while. It also gives you a veneer of “prestige” without having to make characters I give a shit about or plots that fit together at all. As a good example of a show that realized this, Mad Men always struggled with a certain early-season plotline until they finally just ripped off the band-aid and said,
spoiler
the “real” Don Draper’s widow handwaves something out with our boy Dick, and literally nobody else gives a shit.
What worked about that show had nothing to do with “ONE BIG SECRET.”
This, plus The Sopranos, The Office, Parks & Rec, IASIP, 30 Rock, etc.
I get that they’re well liked, and they are the source of lots of meme material, but I could never manage to get through a whole episode.
I have watched any of those except the first couple of Breaking Bad. It was too real for me so I just couldnt.
I lasted 5 minutes with Peaky Blinders. The loud music drowning out the dialogue did my head in.
Walking dead. I think I finished the second episode. But I’m not even sure about that one. It was utterly boring
Walking dead is the king of spreading 4 episodes of content across 12 episodes. You could watch the season opener, the 2 episodes that close the first half and start the second if each season, and the finale, and not miss anything of substance.
Wait, is TWD available on the anime filler website?
You’ve seen the best. I stopped somewhere in the middle of S3 because it was so bad. S1 was tolerable but honestly only the pilot was good. Kids watched all of it so I’ve got an idea how it went on; like a bad and cheap soap opera
I watched up to the point where they pretended the Asian lad was dead, but actually he was hiding under a bin.
Not because it was cheap, but because I realised I no longer cared one way or the other.
The first few episodes were a slog, but it got much better.
I recomment to give it a try. Maybe start straight from season 2.
Friends.
Seems like everyone likes this show but I dont think I ever watched a full episode.
My humor is more like Scrubs, Seinfeld, IT Crowd.
I love Scrubs and IT Crowd, but Friends also. I don’t, however, like Frasier. People seem to fall into either the Friends or Frasier camp, and never the twain shall meet.
I didn’t cate for either.
I weirdly like both.
But I like a lot of random shit.
Friends or Frasier camp, and never the twain shall meet.
There are quite a few edited ‘Friends without the laugh track’ videos on YouTube showing how creepy and unfunny some of the characters are. Its a bit of a meme theres so many of them.
Oh I want to check those out… Thanks!
Friends had Chandler and Joey bromance, which is a precursor to the Scrubs bromance.
The rest of the show isn’t similar, but that part was spot on.
Yellowstone. With shows like The Sopranos or Sons of Anarchy you know the characters are evil, but you can connect just enough for it to be compelling.
In Yellowstone it feels like they want you to see the characters as the heros, when they are mass-murdering, slave-owning oligarchs. They buy cops and politicians to gain power, but get bent on revenge if other powers don’t “play by the rules”. I didn’t last too long, but everyone else seems to love it.
I watched it for a while, but it just got stupider and stupider with every season. It’s a very American show, and it feels like conservative pandering much of the time (even though the show runner isn’t a conservative from what I hear).
it most catering to conservative circle jerking.
Lost was the tv version of clickbait. 3 concurrent story lines rotated from week to week. Every episode a cliffhanger that you had to wait 2 more weeks to resolve into a nothing burger. Even watching that shit on disc or streaming is annoying as fuck. I might have liked what was going on story wise, but I got too annoyed with the format to get past mid season 2.
Yeah. Lost was when I was intrugued by J J abrams style, and then completely turned off by his inability to tell a story or have a plan beyond the halfway point.
And then they involved him in seemingly every major movie franchise ever for the next two decades… and he kept doing the same crap. Lots of flash and dazzle and dramatic moments that ultimately mean nothing because the characters have no story to tell, no real arc, no consistent rules creating a believable universe for the watcher to be sucked in to - any rules can be thrown out the window anytime a dramatic cliche opportunity arises. Yet he still seems very popular.
There is a recut of it, still available via torrent, called Chronologically LOST. It is every scene, but in chronological order, and only once each. Really cool way to see the show and make sense of it.
Breaking Bad. Just lost interest half way through.
I made it one episode. Extremely well done show about a tragically terrible flaw of American society that frustrates me daily. Didn’t need a reminder of how terrible things are.
Same. Walt is an unlikeable person making bad decisions. I grave up after season 1.
You know what might help you power through?
Will it make my teeth fall out?
I was gonna suggest a little coffee, but yes if your caffeine is contained in a sugary soda it definitely has the potential to rot your teeth.
Most anything in recently years, TBH. I always check out what’s popular with the reasoning that something about it has to be good if so many people like it, and it used to work out pretty well. Not so much in the last 5 or 6 years.
Have you tried Severance or Common Side Effects?
I liked common side effects, but I would rather have had s2 of scavenger’s reign.
Also kind of wish that common side effects was live action with animated elements, I think that would have been cool visually.
Can’t get past the trailers or previews. Awful.
Common Side Effects
premise sounds nice, but I just tried watching the first episode and couldn’t get past the first minute. The artstyle is so… annoying? Hard to describe, but I absolutely can’t stand it
The new version of Lost in Space just has people in danger constantly and then making the dumbest decision in that situation possible.
Same with ‘suits’, I really liked it in the beginning, until it was just too painful to watch. Each storyline was set up in a way that there was one path for the protagonists to take that would lead to certain disaster, and lo.and behold, at the end of every episode that path is exactly the path they took.
This happens until you start wondering if you’re just looking at the dumbest lawyers or astronauts in existence.
It’s such lazy writing, but it seems like almost everything is written this way these days. Characters make the dumbest possible decisions, and refuse to talk to each other or share important information.
Game of Thrones. To me it just came across as torture porn. Just a series of awful things happening to people from one scene to the next. The schtick about different kingdoms and families vying for the throne or whatever was just the backdrop and context to rape, abuse and murder, which was the star of the show.
I love fantasy but that show didn’t do it for me in the slightest. Not interested in checking out any of that guy’s books either.
The Umbrella Academy: in the first couple of episodes like nothing happens and everyone is very sad.
You dodged a bullet. It just keeps getting worse until the final season which is the absolute worst
Yeah, last season was so boring and unsatisfying.
There were so many ways that show could have gone which would have been good.
You forgot…“stupid”
Like what the fuck was up with that Lila and five arc. Like what the fuck.
Game of Thrones - I’m not good with seeing sexual violence and it felt like it was happening every five minutes.
My Dress up Darling - I understand why people would like it, but I don’t understand why it was so huge. But I’m getting old.
Beastars - my friend and I watched it in one day and it just didn’t do anything for us. I found most of the characters kind of a annoying.
My Hero Academia - I mean this in the best way possible, but I could see myself loving this if I was a kid.
Mushoku Tensi - I know people love this one. I watched the entire first season and I found the protagonist so revolting. I didn’t care that he was a cute kid now and gets better and what have you, I thought he was gross.
Friends - I could never get it. I found it boring and unfunny.
Stranger Things - I actually really enjoyed the first season, but I got tired of the kids as they got older. It felt like it was shifting into a teen drama and I found myself skipping through it before I let it go.
YOU - Weird guy stalks a girl. Glad someone enjoys it, but I got tired of it real quick.
It makes me happy to see others shit on Friends.
When it first aired, my mom was a fan and it would regularly be on in the living room, which was the crossroads of my childhood house - you had to go through it to get anywhere else. Which meant that Friends was impossible to ignore. Walking by, the highest praise I could conjure was, “Wow, that laugh track is doing a lot of heavy lifting.”
At the time of its popularity, I never heard anyone else dislike it. When the show ended, I felt alone in not being sad about it. Since then, I can’t tell if people look back on it with nostalgia or if they are truly still amused by the bland, low-fruit, celebration of stupidity that makes up most of that show’s humor.
The theme song was good though.
At the time of its popularity, I never heard anyone else dislike it.
We were out there… What a terrible show.
Friends was created in a different time for media.
Part of it fulfilled the parasocial relationships we see in modern social media. People developed real relationships with these fake characters.
Second is that most television had to have broader comedy because they had larger audience. Over 10% of America watched Friends regularly. I can’t think of any show nowadays that even approaches that.
Definitely agree on Stranger Things. Season 1 was actually really good, but they kept ramping everything up in later seasons and it lost all of what made S1 good.
I tried watching My Hero Academia with a friend and it was rough. Basically every trope that made me burn out on anime was dialed up to 11. My friend tried to explain that it was satirizing those tropes, but I couldn’t handle it.
I was sort of with you on My Hero Academia as I’m currently watching it for the first time. Parts of it were good and it was enjoyable for the most part watching it as an adult. Dragon Ball Z doesn’t hold up as well but I still love it as I grew up with that.
However, just yesterday I finished s03e11 “One For All”. And holy shit was that a gut-wrenching and emotional episode about the legendary hero “All Might”. Seeing this Superman like hero being broken and exposed while the whole world watches was incredible. I won’t say anymore, but it was incredibly moving how that episode turned out. Cemented it as an incredible anime for me so far. I’m looking forward to watching the rest of it, and hopefully I will still enjoy it. But boy did it take a long time of watching and filler episodes to get to this point.
My Hero Academia
I really enjoyed this, but one day I kind of just stopped watching. I think I get bored with anime shows that are set up to go on and on with endless hundred episode arcs.
Stranger Things
The first season really felt like something the creators had been developing for years as a creative idea. The ending with a sandwich left for Eleven was just the right amount of ambiguous to end off the story. The second season felt like a rushed idea pumped out when offered more money where the creators just leaned into full 80s nostalgia by copying ALIENS rather than forging something 80s inspired but unique like the first season.
Friends
I don’t get it either. It’s just vapid interpersonal dynamics comedy. I’ve watched a little and it has the wide and low appeal, it never did anything interesting.
Friends has to be the most overrated TV show of all time. I feel like an insane person whenever I hear people saying that it’s a funny show.
I dont k ow if you watched it when it was new, but today it’s not very funny. In the 90s, it was funny, but comedy has changed a lot since then, and some of the show is not very “woke” if you will excuse the term.
I think there are still funny and quotable moments but i dont think any of it would resonate with a younger audience. Comedy today is so much better and different to then. And a lot of shows that have come along since friends have used plots and jokes from the show and done them to death so it seems unoriginal and derivative.
I think this is all true of a lot of old shows. Tv is just a different beast now.
Battlestar Galactica. Like a lot of the shows people have been mentioning, all it did was raise the stakes every episode. It didn’t feel like it was building anything meaningful, just building up to something.
The most meaningful example of this (spoilers for like a twenty year old show) for me was when they’re in the ship looking for water or whatever and the human cylon just ignores the indicator saying “Water here! Check here!” and the scene just. keeps. going. I swear it felt like half the episode.
Yeah that show is a slow burner vibe thing and i think you were right to stop watching it because you gotta meet it where it’s at - messy, creative, emblematic of the paperback sci-fi classics, not quite so neat as something like Expanse or Star Trek in terms of structure and plot and character taking a backseat to the themes, it’s less Stellaris, more Solaris, less Mass Effect and more No Man’s Sky.
This show to the original BSG is like Primer to Back to the Future.
What helped me through is I just enjoy military dramas so the standalone episodes like the one about the industrial workers and such just kept me engaged in the moment as episodic adventures and so I was in no hurry for a thread to follow, though the arc in S2 and onto the climax in Season 4.
It’s not everyone’s cup of tea but I do find this show beautiful in a way,
and more No Man’s Sky
Speaking of highly overrated things…
I enjoyed episodes that had their own story, like the one with Richard Hatch in prison ship.
Sons of Anarchy
It’s basically a soap opera. Over the top and with no real direction. The writers were pretty much making it as they go using all the old tricks to keep you hooked.
I watched it until season 2. Before I started watching the season finale I realized I didn’t care how it ended and just dump it.
I remember watching that show because people told me it’s good. I was kinda hooked in the first season, then i started to realise that everyone who told me the show was good, was coincidentally a woman. For some reason on youtube a video popped up that said: the ending of sons of anarchy is hilarious. So i watched it and i had to laugh so hard i could never go back to watch it.
I hated everybody in this show except for one person and then they killed them off in I believe the ending of season 1.
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When that show was popular, I had a boyfriend that didn’t seem able to handle the idea of us liking different things. I never cared for zombies, but I’d heard good things about The Walking Dead and gave it a try. I pushed myself to watch the entire first season before deciding, “Nope, I can’t.”
But when I told that boyfriend? Apparently I “didn’t watch it enough.” When I told him I didn’t care for zombie stories, he insisted, “But it’s not about zombies! It’s about the people.” Uhh yeah, it’s about people in a world with zombies. I could watch a million shows about “people” that don’t involve zombies, so why would I keep watching this one that I already don’t like?
Same, only watched the first two episodes and was just bored and weirded out by the writing. Heard much better about the last of us series.
Yeah, for me The Walking Dead were the non-zombie characters, on the run with no expectation of anyone surviving to their next birthday.
