Too many “what got cancelled too soon” questions, what’s a show that went on too long?
Hard mode: no The Walking Dead
Big bang theory. It was absolute garbage.
I think I’d like to point out that they shouldn’t have had even one season. It’s so fucking offensive.
Haha! These people aren’t neurotypicals! It’s so funny!
By today’s standards, yeah. At the time, too, but the ultimate message was groundbreaking and progressive. Archie was written as a bigot for the purpose of creating conflict and addressing difficult social issues. The actor who played him, Carroll O’Connor, was liberal in his personal politics, as was the producer, Norman Lear.
I appreciate the show for what it was attempting, not because I worship Archie Bunker.
I think you’re thinking of All In The Family? OPs comment was regarding Big Bang Theory…
Got sidelined into a conversation about laugh tracks
Oh God, so terrible. For some reason I seem to remember that either critics or the show promoters sort of hinted that you had to be smart to watch the show.
It’s true, a picture really is worth a thousand words.
I’m on the flip side with that one. I absolutely loved Big Bang Theory, but honestly I can’t stand Young Sheldon. I mean sure the show has its funny moments, but still, why oh why won’t they just let the show die?
Any show that needs a laugh track to tell you when it’s trying to be funny isn’t going to be funny. I actually heard a perfect description of why BBT wasn’t good (to me) a couple weeks ago from the Venture Bros creators. BBT was a show created by people outside nerd culture trying to tell nerds what nerd culture is. And IMO it entirely missed the mark.
It’s a live audience though, not a laugh track
Laugh tracks are an immediate turn off - literally. I remember being curious about a show, and then switching it off after about 30 seconds when the canned laughter kicked in. It told me immediately that the humor would be broad instead of clever.
This doesn’t apply to older shows, though. All in the Family is still one of the best sitcoms ever, laugh track or not.
Edit: I forgot - they never used a laugh track. That was a live studio audience. Sorry!
Big Bang Theory also used a live audience instead of a laugh track
Laugh track is about stupid, I’ll give you that. But still, I grew up watching Married With Children and despite the laugh track (I dunno, maybe it really was a live studio audience), I found the show rather hilarious.
Married With Children had a live studio audience rather than a laugh track. Your dignity is intact my friend!
So did Big Bang Theory
Then the audience sucked too, I guess
I actually really enjoy both… which I guess is unpopular here.
I like how the show is basically a telling of the life of Sheldon Cooper. The two shows combined if you were to put them in order show a lot of character development.
Zabinka.
Why? Did the last season suck? Or did the show run out of ideas along the way?
Note: I am not very well known with the show.
IMO the show was garbage from the first second of the first episode. I didn’t watch more than one or two over the whole span of its production.
It’s weird with Big Bang Theory, when it first started me and my friend circle loved it, thought it was brilliant but yes it did lose something after a few seasons.
But online everyone just seemed to hate it - could it be because we’re British and it just landed better with us…?
It was good the first few seasons, people shit on it because they shit on everything popular, but it WAS a good sitcom, it just never grew up.
Also, I found the depiction of the Indian guy funny at first but it quickly got racist and never got better, they just kept piling on the racism
Their depiction of “nerds” was also offensive and shitty in many of the same ways. But because that’s what the writers told you is nerd behavior and culture, it seemed more acceptable somehow.
Also, I found the depiction of the Indian guy funny at first but it quickly got racist and never got better, they just kept piling on the racism
Interesting. I didn’t like it for a very similar reason. Their depiction of nerds or geniuses or whatever you want to call them was pretty offensive. I could never get into it.
Edit: to be clear, I’m not saying that I’m a genius or even particularly intelligent. I’m not. But the barrage of stupid nerd stereotypes was just obnoxious and offensive.
British TV is, as a friend said to me once, dire. So it would make sense that it landed better there. I mean, clearly lots of Americans watched it, and I know a few that loved it. I just think less of them. 😁
Westworld should have just been an amazing miniseries.
Enterprise needed one more season.
Yeah!! If anyone interested just watch the first season, it doesnt need continuing it was great!
It really does. The ending wraps everything up perfectly. The seasons after are basically just “and then they went to theme park B and did it again”. There’s nothing lost by only watching the original season.
I mostly disagree on the “they went to park b and did it again” bit, but only mostly. Shogunworld was just a detour and it’s unclear if any of their Hosts achieved sentience. Season 2 mostly focused on the rebellion happening in the first park. The third and fourth seasons are absolutely going to another park and doing it again, but with the twist that the new park is the real world and reversing the roles of hosts and humans, comparing the hosts’ loops to human behavior (which they undermined with Rehoboam, in my opinion).
I give you props for watching it all. I stopped when the shogun stuff started happening. It is nice to know what else happened after, thanks
I loved the show and wanted to see where the story went, but I also completely agree that we didn’t need anything after the first season, really.
It’s all so perfectly self-contained. I’d love to be able to watch it again if MAX wasn’t a steaming pile of crappy content.
Movie-web.app
You’re welcome.
Damn is that useful!
Yeah man someone else on here turned me on to it and it’s most of my viewing now. I’ve had a few hiccups with it pulling up something wrong or not finding a video, but I’d say 80% of the time it pulls up what I’m looking for within seconds in a solid quality
See also: True Detective.
There’s a reason that it’s one of the few shows to be referred to as True Detective (Season One) when people talk about it
It feels to me like the writers of westworld slowly forgot what the show was about or something as it goes on. Like when you come up with an alt universe for a story that ignores the point of the original, like a version of Star Wars where Luke joins Vader that abandons the themes of family and redemption.
SPOILERS AHEAD IDK HOW TO DO SPOILER TAGS By season 3 it just felt like they plopped characters into the plot and wrote them to logical/“cool” conclusions, like “ooo wouldn’t it be fucked up if Halores took over the world and made the humans the hosts in her game” they just really lost the plot later on imo
I’m pretty sure the writers admitted they lurked forums and got really self conscious about how some people predicted the entire plot from like the first episode and wanted to really shake things up but lost the plot themselves.
Any sci-fi series that starts messing with time-travel or random time frames is when it goes really bad. You stop caring for any of the characters and any major death scene is not as convincing as before
Seriously folks - there can be only one and done:
HEROES
Save the cheerleader, save the world and then please - go home. But nooooo…/
Or, you know, have them be HEROS. I kept waiting for them to do something that helped someone that wasn’t a HERO or fight something that wasn’t a HERO. If you took everyone that had powers and put them on Mars, nothing on earth would change.
Honestly, I rewatched season 1 again a couple of years ago and it didn’t really hold up for me. The Niki and Micah storyline just seemed to slow everything down. I don’t know if it the newness factor wore off or if my tastes have changed, but it just didn’t have the same feeling.
Watch series one of Misfits for more (better) Teen Superpower action!
Quick edit: yeah just watch until Nathan leaves
How I met your mother. They saw a cash cow and milked it.
Big Bang theory. It was kinda ok at first, but then it was just bad.
It says something with HIMYM that the season 9 teaser was the kids, all grown up, yelling at future Ted to wrap things up because it’s gone on too long.
I loved himym, all of it, except the ending. Like I get what they went for, but it dismissed all seasons.
The whole last season was trash and then they had the audacity to say “and then he got together with Robin anyway”. Why have him meet their mother when all he wanted was Robin? Just have them end up together and be done with it.
I will say for all of the hate BBT got, they didn’t try to do something bullshit for their ending like most sitcoms had been trying to do (e.g How I Met Your Mother). They created a simple good/wholesome ending.
Scrubs.
I understand that they were trying to create a spinoff. But to continue with the same name and then teasing us with the previous main characters just destroyed what was the perfect series ending.
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I agree, season 9 gets way too much hate for basically being season 1 of a spinoff. There’s a lot to like there and it never really had a chance to find itself before cancelation.
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Honestly, that final season would have been an acceptable sitcom that might have gone on to 3 or 4 seasons if it wasn’t tied to Scrubs.
Original Scrubs was one of the best shows ever made in my opinion - great cast and chemistry, genuinely funny whilst also bringing in the drama and tragedy of a hospital and it’s patients, great writing, kept up momentum until the end (the original end not the crap that come after), great acting, one of the most faultless TV shows ever made.
I’m sure most people here would agree that cancelling Game of Thrones once they ran out of source material and waiting for the books to be done (lol) would have been preferable to what we got.
GoT would have exited the cultural zeitgeist a lot sooner than it did, probably to the detriment of future viewer engagement and thus a source of revenue for HBO, which is why they pushed it forward, but still…
The Simpsons is still going.
It hasn’t been good for over a decade or more at this point.
Supernatural
They managed to escalate all the way to God’s grumpy sister.
And then went even further, making the next enemy: The British.
It ends at season 5, as intended, in my,opinion.
I watched up to the end of season 5, knowing that was the real ending to the story.
I thought I would stop after that, but I can’t help myself, I just keep going. I’m on season 7. It’s not as good, but it still has good stuff. It definitely helped that in season 6 they go to the set of their own show and watch the original showrunner get killed. I have to give them credit for that level of self-awareness. I doubt I’ll make it all the way to the end, but I’m still enjoying it for now.
Yeah, there are some good episodes after, but the metaplot got really dumb.
Bruh, they managed to escalate all the way to God himself. Literal God is reduced to a mere human by the benevolent spawn of Lucifer, somehow, and said spawn becomes the new God. Seriously.
Well that’s just the logical next step
Yeah, that show was good for a few seasons and then just got weird.
I was told by a friend; watch all the way up through season 5, then sit for a couple weeks and don’t watch it for a while. Really think about if you want to keep going. Because the writers originally wrote the first 5 seasons to be a self contained story and it worked really well. Then the show was very successful, and they asked them to keep going. What ended up happening was they’d have single or double season long plots that just kinda rolled from one to another and had a bunch of escalation and flanderization going on. Like, in one season the big issue is The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. They deal with three of them, and then Death is the big badass. He’s the one they can’t actually beat. They spend an entire season leading up to him and trying to deal with him.
Then, the very next season, that same super badass, Death himself, is in the way of something they want. Summoning, binding, and killing permanently this mega badass end season boss is all the effort of half of a fucking episode in the next season. The Flanderization is most obvious in Dean, where he goes from a dude who is characterized by typically masculine traits, and emphasizes that masculinity at times, to “Me Dean, me want burger! Me want pie!!”
Yeah that sounds about right. The writing was extremely good, hunting monsters, lots of love, and then suddenly they faced something super big, and made everything trivial after that.
I randomly decided to binge supernatural and caught up during season 15 with only 3 episodes yet to be released.
The timing was almost supernatural.
Westworld. First season was perfect and it concluded perfectly fine.
The definitive answer is Supernatural. Shambled on for another 10 seasons as the reanimated husk of a really good that was written to end after season 5.
House of Cards went on far, far too long. Should’ve ended at or shortly after he became President.
The double tap on the desk should’ve been the last scene.
The Office. Last couple seasons were garbo
cue downvotes from the “still watches The Office on loop” crowd
The last seasons are a lot weaker, I have to agree. I got my hopes up real high when Will Ferrell entered the chat, but he was just a temp :-(.
Still watch that Garbo on repeat though _
I gotta say Will Ferrell was probably one of my least favorite parts of the entire show, right after Nellie and Sound Guy.
Dang, I already loved him from so many other movies. I’ll go with sound guy for least favorite!
After Jim and Pam’s wedding it could of ended, the quality was already going on. The only redeeming thing to me after Steve Carrell left was Robert California and even then I could of done without that.
Should have stopped the show when Michael left, and made a TV movie of Dwight’s wedding.
I still think the way Jim handled being (or technically not being) the best mensch is worthy of being canon.
But Nellie and Robert were just too bizarre. Will Ferrell was just awkward. It could’ve been good but he was just very strange. No one was a worthy replacement. Even Ray Romano would have been weird if he hadn’t gotten scared off.
I would watch the Michael session on loop if I wanted to pay for peacock.
Dexter
- The Office (US) could have ended at the proposal in the rain.
- The Office should have ended at the wedding in Niagara.
- Dear god why didn’t The Office end when Michael left?
I dunno, upon subsequent rewatches, I’m glad we got Robert California.
I AM THE LIZARD KING!
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN THAT ISNT REDDINGTON?!”
Such a great actor.
James Spader is a fucking genius. If you haven’t seen it already, I highly recommend watching Boston Legal.
Denny Crane!
Do you want the nature or the sex metaphor?
Just sad we didn’t get a Stargate crossover episode…
Edit: Why the downvotes? Robert California is in the OG Stargate movie lol
I still haven’t finished it . Didn’t like the direction and then they butchered Andy’s character and growth. I did watch the finale which i loved.
There is no excuse for what they did to Andy. Robert California is good, though, and it does have one of the best finales I’ve ever seen.
Andy’s actor was paid to take over, then left to go do movies. I blame everyone but the writers for how that turned out.
Simpsons. Hasn’t been great since Season 12. Maybe glimpses in a few later seasons. But it’s now running on 35 years. Most of the original voices have left as have long gone all the good writers. The remaining can’t voice characters outside their ethnicity. And the show. Just “fart jokes.”
Probably the most brilliant show for a dozen seasons. Now just a husk.
The remaining can’t voice characters outside their ethnicity.
This fucking overcorrection has got to stop. If every fictional character must be portrayed by a person who is as close to being that character in real life as possible, it’s no longer “acting.”
If they banned men from playing women visa versa, Bob’s burgers would get cancelled first and that show is just beautiful
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“stop stop… he’s already dead”. Pretty much how everyone feels about the show.
Yeah on that, notice how everyone quotes the original Simpsons?
Most of the original voices have left. The remaining can’t voice characters outside their ethnicity.
What? The 6 of them are all still there. Hank Azaria gave up Apu/Lou/Carl and Harry Shearer gave up Dr. Hibbert, but the vast, vast majority of characters are still being voiced by the same actors.
I do think that the fact that The Simpsons has been on so long that they had to go ahead and do that is strong evidence that the show has run its course + ought to end, but the re-casting is a symptom, not a cause.
Also not to be morbid, but IMO they should really think about wrapping it up before the main cast starts to retire or pass away. The actor who voiced Mrs. Krabappel already died, and I mean… Harry Shearer is 80 this year, and the rest of the cast is getting up there too. I guess they could always recast or (God help us) try to use AI or something, but yeah, they should try to send it off with a little bit of dignity left I think.
That’s not morbid, so you don’t need to feel bad for bringing it up. It’s a valid, practical concern.
Marge sounds rough lately. Definitely needs to end.
I often wonder who’s still watching it. Like obviously someone is, because it’s doing well enough to keep getting renewed. But what’s the demographic? I don’t know many young people, but I’d assume they’re not watching it. Certainly nobody in my age range ever talks about it (or if they do, then they just say what the people in this thread are saying - it used to be great, haven’t watched it in years), and I don’t know of anyone in the boomer/parent age group who ever talks about it.
Of course, just because nobody I know watches it doesn’t mean nobody at all is watching it. But just like… who are they?
I watch it during lunch sometimes and have kept up with every episode so far. Its not what it was of course back in the day, but I largely use it as semi- background while eating lunch, knowing that if I have to cut things short or divert my attention it won’t matter.
I heard it’s been better recently but I watched an episode like 2 years ago and didn’t crack a smile the whole time, it was terrible. The Simpsons movie was a good bookend to the series I think.
I feel like I’ve been hearing people say it’s improving for the last 20 seasons lol, but every time I watch an episode past about season 12 it’s always been a harsh lesson.
Every time I make an attempt to watch a newer episode, I have to stop simply because of the voice actors. All the main cast sound so undeniably old. It can’t be hidden and can’t be worked around. Hearing these aged actors just keep going, like everyone is pretending it’s not strange, just makes me so sad that I can’t stand it.
