Too many “what got cancelled too soon” questions, what’s a show that went on too long?
Hard mode: no The Walking Dead
Game of thrones. They should have ended it when they caught up to the books. Just leave it unfinished. That’s not satisfying but better than what we got.
I was gonna binge this show after it ended but I can’t bring myself to watch a show that I know has a shit ending, so it will forever be one of those shows I missed
If you’re okay with the head canon, just stop watching when the wall falls. White walkers won, humanity has ended. GG.
It was awesome. Definitely worth the watch for anyone that can get over the ending. Maybe if you know it’s bad going into it you won’t be as disappointed 😂
Yeah, and maybe consider a sequel once the rest of the books came out.
I started reading the series around 2002, when there were 3 books. Martin released book 4 in 2005. In the afterward of the book he said that book 6 was basically already done… book 6 didn’t come out for 6 more years (2011).
It’s been 12 years. We’re waiting on book 7. Given his age, it doesn’t seem like the series will be finished by Martin. Hopefully he actually does know what happens through the rest of the story and has it down for whoever takes up the mantle.
I think he stopped because the show gave us his ending and he knows everyone hates it.
GRRM is a cautionary tale, I’ll never pick up a series before it ends again
The actors would have aged way more than their characters at that point. Especially the kids and the very old characters.
Oh. That makes sense. Damn, wrong timing I guess.
Spoilers ahoy. If you’ve not seen game of thrones, read on to get the disappointment out of the way now
I disagree wholeheartedly. As much as “who’s got a better story than bran” sucked, I think that was likely the ending that was intended in the books as well (and the extreme backlash against it is why we’ll never see the last books). GRRM stated on multiple occasions that he was working closely with HBO and that they knew the general shape of the story he was trying to tell.
I feel like the majority of the problem with GoT was Benioff and Weiss. GRRM wanted at least two more seasons in which to tell the story (and, knowing what we know now, to delay the revelation that he didn’t really have a way to untangle the story he tangled), HBO made it clear that they would keep riding the money train no matter how far the station, but D&D wanted to wrap the series up ASAP so they could work on producing some Star Wars films. That’s why Jon goes from Dragonstone to the wall in a single cut. That’s why the entire war with the nights king that was central to the whole series was over in an episode. That’s why Dani went psycho in her moment of victory. That’s why cersei’s death was so predictable that it’s a cliche in ttrpgs, that’s why cleganebowl was ultimately disappointing, that’s why the resolution to dragons being in westeros was “idk he just left lol”, that’s why the resolution to aryas story was “idk she just left lol” (even after several seasons developing her character as someone who believes that if Starks don’t stick together they’ll be destroyed), that’s why the resolution to the war in the north was “idk the north…won? but also surrendered? lol”, that’s why LRJ didn’t matter at all, that’s why the spider went from being the most politically adroit character on the show to doing a whole musical number entitled “Do You Wanna Do A Treason?”, that’s why littlefinger’s whole trial was “we know he’s a dick just kill him”, and the fact that House of the Dragon is being made by people who want to make it is why its almost as good as the first 5 seasons of GoT
It all comes down to the fact that they wanted the show to just be over, and now it is I suppose.
I personally think of it as “seasons 1-5 happened, then there was a huge, mysterious time jump, and the last 2 episodes of season 8 happened”.
I can see the ending happening, it’s just… Dum&Dumber couldn’t figure out how to get there, and GRRM was too rich and lazy to do what he was supposed to do to get them there.
Actually I think many people agree with you. I can see the ending happening, it’s just… Dum&Dumber couldn’t figure out how to get there, and GRRM was too rich and lazy to do what he was supposed to do to get them there.
I personally think of it as “seasons 1-5 happened, then there was a huge, mysterious time jump, and the last 2 episodes of season 8 happened”.
Isn’t the main sticking point that they segwayed before the books ran out somewhere before Dorn? and/or they had material supplied to them and basically willfully threw it in the trash?
Big bang theory. It was absolute garbage.
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.
my sentiments exactly…
to be honest, i felt like that general view of culture fueled its way into the real world. i have people at work thinking the IT department is just some bastion of antisocial hermits that you can just talk to anyhow, or know automatically what exact issue you have when you say “my computer is not working”.
Nah I shit on it because it was shit, for something that was supposed to be a comedy it wasn’t funny at all, it is subjective of course, I’m sure people did find it funny
Anything with a laugh track immediately turns me off, watch some of the clips with the laugh track deleted and that’s the humour you are left with.
It’s unfair to remove the laughs, fuck up the whole flow and call it bad. If the show had been written to be without a laugh track it wouldn’t come out that way
Nope, I’m British and I hated it.
The newer characters they introduced were just not likeable. Bernadette and the other female lead just dragged the show down. Stuart was shit too. They should have centralised the show on the main characters from the start and actually built on their stories a bit more. Instead they all became flanderised
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. 😁
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!
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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.
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
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.
Westworld should have just been an amazing miniseries.
Enterprise needed one more season.
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
Am I the only person that enjoyed season 2 of True Detective?!
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…/
Gonna disagree, we needed more Heroes, but from a writing team with a vision and purpose. Or at least one that understood the character driven nature of the first season was it’s selling point, not just the half baked superhero action. The '07 writers strike really screwed that show.
Season 1 rocked but I’m still bitter that Hiro saying “Nissan Versa!” is stuck in my mind so many years later
Wait what!? Shit I ended up buying a nissam versa as my first car years later. I always wondered why I chose that car
I can only judge by what was done - not could have been. From the first episode of the second season, it was clear lightning wasn’t gonna strike twice.
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.
Watch series one of Misfits for more (better) Teen Superpower action!
Quick edit: yeah just watch until Nathan leaves
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.
Supernatural
They managed to escalate all the way to God’s grumpy sister.
And then went even further, making the next enemy: The British.
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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.
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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.
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…
Or at least wait for enough coherent fan theories and just use them.
The annoying thing is, watching House of the Dragon now, it didn’t have to be that bad, clearly they can do good stuff with minimal source material, but the GoT writers didn’t have it in them.
GoT should have just never happened in the first place, and we should have gotten 5 more seasons of Rome instead.
Westworld. First season was perfect and it concluded perfectly fine.
I just watched season 4 and I believe the plot is good. It adds to the overall arc.
Problem is that after season 1 the show runners decided to make it even more mindfucky. It became an exercise in intellectual masturbation and got convoluted for the sake of being convoluted. Shame.
I only watched season 2 and I found it terrible. To me the conclusion will always be season 1’s finale.
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.
Past season 6 I just treated it as Supernatural: The Whatthefuckever Story
Dexter
I felt seriously betrayed by that show, I’d loved it for so long. I could’ve probably forgiven everything but the last two minutes.
I gave up getting invested in shows after that.
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Heeeee’s a lumberjack and he’s okay…
Agree, and I didn’t even hate season 5 as much as the rest of the world. The last season was frankly painful.
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!
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.
Every single reality show that went longer than the first commercial break.
Whoever birthed the genre lived too long.
Survivor is good, but thats really a long drawn out game show more than a reality show
well, it use to be, the recent seasons are the husk of what use to be good, thankfully AU Survivor kind of keeps the spirit going.
I didnt mind 41-43. Its changed, though. No one cares if you can build a shelter or feed the tribe, its just social game, social game, social game… and a lot of the time its just who doesnt like who and not a lot else
Literally no show has ever needed 40 seasons. Not even double digits can work. Sorry, absolutely nothing is worth watching that much of.
well, thats like, your opinion, man
Yeah whenever people say this they kinda forget that there’s a lot of pretty good reality TV. Deadliest catch, antiques roadshow, survivorman, price is right). None of them are the wire or anything, but I’d certainly die on the hill of them being valuable and decent television.
I feel like everyone bitching about reality TV is always just picturing wife swap, the Kardashians and real housewives when they say that.
The Price is Right counts as reality TV?
I absolutely love the first few seasons of Alone. I can’t vouch for the rest because I haven’t watched them yet, but that’s some amazing survival type reality TV.
Yeah there’s a decent amount of pretty cool reality TV subgenres.
Scrubs: one of the best medical shows ever made. The last season was just a waste of everyone’s time.
Frasier: After Niles and Daphney got together the writers were stalling the inevitable end.
The Son: Two seasons was two too many. Who TF thought it was a good idea to have Pierce Brosnan play a Texan?
What are you taking about? The final season/episode ending with JD walking through the hall remembering everyone he saved and lost was great. Was there some sort of fake season you are thinking of?
The last season should really just be viewed as the spin-off that it is.
And for that it isn’t anywhere close to scrubs, but even if it didn’t work imo there are worse things on tv.
Game of thrones. Just pretend last 2 seasons don’t exist and you’re good.
I disagree, the issue with Game of Thrones is that they tried to end it too early and ruined the characters and story in the process.
You just explained why the last 2 seasons sucked which goes in line with what was said above
It doesn’t seem like you disagree lol
The Walking Dead for sure. I couldn’t make it through the second season.
Also Fear The Walking Dead. I actually really liked that show for the first 3 seasons or however many it was until they changed showrunners. After that it really became a slog and I didn’t finish it.
Scrolled way to far to find this.
I kept on for way too many seasons as I knew people in production and would periodically be asked about the most recent episode. Once it became apparent Norman Redus was the single life line to a viewing audience that thing trailed on like the zombies they were supposed to be killing.
Very glad I don’t see anyone badmouthing the later seasons of Community. S4 was meh, but S5 and 6 are top-tier. I wish Elroy and Frankie had more episodes.
I’m still waiting for the movie.
Community was very aware that it couldn’t just keep doing the same thing all the time and even had meta humour to that fact that’s why it did so well in those last two series.
Sorry, but the Yahoo season of Community was painfully bad, despite the presence of Keith David.
