I hear Riverdale was like that.
I’ll cop shit for this, but The Bear.
Observe that people want beef subs, that beef subs are good, and what needs to improve is the restaurant management and staff stability. You can still innovate with sandwiches and pastries, you don’t need to convert to a fancy restaurant and charge stupid prices for a different daily menu.
What they did in The Bear by converting to a fancy restaurant and alienating their customers was the most boneheaded business move one could possibly conceive of and I despise Lip for squandering mikeys money like that.
Weeds
Happy Days when the Fonz jumped the shark
The Walking Dead. It just became a generic human vs human thing after a while. Then Negan, and then back to boring TV
The Expanse (books, never finished the show) went really hard on this. It was difficult for me to finish because it was all just people being dumb for more than 100k pages with aliens thrown in for no reason.
When it was still new I watched the first season then quickly got bored of the second. Around episode 3. I said to myself “I’m going to start the last episode of this season and if they’re still on this fucking farm then I am never fucking watching it again”
And it was so.
NO idea why everyone else seemed to feel differently about it.
Agents of Shield.
S1 and 2 Sort of a normal seasons - agents dealing with powered people, the fall of Shield S3 Space travel for a bit, more Inhumans S4 Ghost Rider, ghosts and stuck in a computer dystopian nightmare S5 Time travel S6 Space travel S7 More time travel
The reason it fell apart was because the movie and tv rights are not controlled by the same people. The TV asshats shot themselves in the foot and the whole thing became worse and worse.
I bailed out at the S5 time travel plot. I get that it’s set in a comic-book universe, but even that was too big a leap for me.
S7 More time travel
Good grief. Really?!
The entire season was time travel, not just going forward and staying for a bit.
they were doing too much in that series lol, it was all over the place.
Reboot definitely ended up that way. Went from a simple defeat the enemy every week and beat the user in the game cube storyline to a much more serious storyline. Ended up with part of a final season where a man with a gun tries to get back home as an angelic looking super virus tries infecting every system by spreading the word ( mass sprite control ). Only to end on a cliffhanger after the super virus was taken care of.
Did you know they rebooted reboot?
It was live action for some reason, and the live action people became computer animated for some reason.
And for reasons I can’t understand that show exists! Isn’t life interesting and whimsical?
For whatever reason, whenever I saw commercials for that, my brain thought it was a live action Code Lyoko like ripoff. Then again, that was long before I watched Reboot.
Might have to check that out, even if it’s bad.
It’s so bad. I couldn’t even finish the first episode.
Prison Break.
Season one is breaking out of prison. So far so good.
Season two is a manhunt. That’s fair, it’s the aftermath.
Season three is breaking out of prison… again! But this time in Panama. Technically that is the show, so alright.
Season four is a secret shadow organization who can cure all diseases but don’t.
Also there is a post-show film that adds another prison break for some reason. Also I’m learning the show was revived for a fifth season, I can’t say what that’s about.
It was conceptualized as a miniseries and not really intended to go beyond the first season. They didn’t write it to have a plot post season one so it goes off the rails quickly as they tried to capture the original essence that made it popular while winging it on the story. Hell they didn’t even originally write it to have as many episodes in the first season as they ended up having and iirc they even considered just making a movie instead
Season 5 is, you guessed it, another prison. This time in the middle east.
Talks of a reboot/relaunch are being thrown around rn
I feel like an anthology series based around different prison breaks in different eras and countries could be very fun.
Before the original run got cancelled I heard that season 5 was going to be the girlfriend doctor in a female prison.
I say this regretfully: Westworld.
Look, honestly I was into it up until the last episode. I knew the story was twisting and turning a bit too much but I kept watching and very much enjoyed the last season.
I say that it lost sight of its original premise because yes, technically it did. But that doesn’t mean the content wasn’t still great — this is a perfect example of losing your audience by not following the original narrative. I sometimes think the show would’ve been more financially successful had they dragged out the first season into several but I wouldn’t have wanted them to actually do that.
I think S3 of Westworld was enjoyable and had a lot of good ideas, even if it was a tad disconnected from the original island they were from.
But, S4 just went too far. I was still kind of okay with the sudden shift at the second half, because the progression did sort of make sense. But, that whole arc after that was just overreach and too many god-like characters in the mix.
I can’t believe they planned on having another season after that. How do you change the world to that degree and figure out some other season to solve all of the plot threads?
The whole writing process stunk of season-to-season short-term bullshit, without an overarching start-to-finish plan for the whole series. This is why Mr. Robot excels and Westworld didn’t.
I wanted to come here to say Westworld. I never managed to finish the last season, I just lost complete interest in it. Great first season though and the second was also still enjoyable.
Can’t disagree more. I do think the clear conflicts between HBO and the executive producers (there’s entire scenes in S4 dedicated to a meta-FU to the corporate demand for telling the violence story and not the maze in field story) led to a more disjointed later seasons than planned.
But rewatching S1 it’s clear that the twist at the end of S4 was planned from the very start, which is just wild, and probably the biggest temporal misdirection in the history of film and TV — fitting from Jonathan Nolan, but still unexpected.
And then if you go and see the original Westworld film, the degree to which they were already starting off with such a different take can be even more appreciated. It goes from a film about a robot rebellion where the robots can talk but literally no one ever asks why it’s happening or even talks to the robot at all to a series of “if you can’t tell the difference does it matter?”
The whole point
The original narrative IS the narrative about it already being a simulation with the ‘guests’ also already simulated. It’s just that it doesn’t appear that way at first because it’s a gradual reveal across multiple planned seasons that’s got its own smaller first season set of reveals along the way. So when you realize the twist in the first season you think “oh, now I’m caught up with the events” and when you see Bernard is a machine of an earlier human you think “oh, this is the exception and not the rule.” But there are details in the first season that can only be explained by the events revealed in the later seasons.
S2 has terrible pacing and I do think there are various issues with how S3-S4 progresses in certain arcs, but the broad plot was very clearly planned from the start in hindsight, but HBO had it out for them (look at how quickly after the cancellation the series wasn’t even available on HBO’s streaming properties), and unfortunately they didn’t get the S5 to reveal just how much had been layered in earlier on.
TLDR
TL;DR: You were always supposed to have been watching the civilization level fidelity test, not original events playing out.
I’ve seen (and loved) the first season fairly recently, but after hearing so many people saying that the show went off the rails I decided early on that I was only gonna watch the one.
Would you say I’m missing out?
If you like Westworld for the setting then stop after the first season.
Are you referring to the western setting of the playground, or the corporate sci-fi setting surrounding it?
The mix of both. From the second season on it’s much more focused on the corpo sci-fi stuff.
I think season two was also really good and mostly still in the park. I’d say it’s worth it, but stop after.
It also has a really stand-out episode, Kiksuya, that is really something special. Definitely worth getting to
Had to scroll way too long to see this answer. It’s the first one that came to my mind.
Dr. Who.
When started, it was a show to teach kids about history.
NCUTI AND whittaker, although its more to blame on the showrunner. Whittaker especially had problems with how the show was being run. ncuti was a weaker show than even whittakers runs. Rani, missy, masters all had such better storylines.
I was talking more about William Hartnell ;-)
First story arc has been about travelling back to the stone age, if I remember correctly.Gist of the show changed rapidly from historic arcs with some thrown in fantasy entertainment to complete SF/Fantasy already during the 60’s.
Hartnell doctor best doctor.
It’s so sad that many of the early episodes have been destroyed.
The group that find old episodes have kind of announced that there’s going to be an announcement soon. People connected to the group but not actually in the group have essentially said that a private collector has died, that they have at least one lost episode and that it’ll be returned to the BBC soon, plus that they’re in negotiation with other collectors who have yet more episodes to acquire them before they die, too.
That would be great news!
The group’s called Film Is Fabulous, and here’s the statement they made:
As mentioned by Sue Malden at our RECOVERED event in May, we are aware of several missing episodes of Doctor Who (Sue stated one [or] two, but there are more than this) in private film collections in the UK. We are liaising with the individuals about cataloguing and preserving their entire collection, including the missing Doctor Who episodes, and ensuring that copies are returned to the BBC. We expect to make a detailed announcement shortly.
The Daily Star doesn’t give a source for this information, and has a somewhat spotty reputation with this kind of thing, but their suggestions for what’s in private hands are: Episode 4 of The Tenth Planet, Episode 3 of The Web Of Fear, and all of Marco Polo.
I’m suspicious because, apart from Power Of The Daleks, those are all the most-wanted finds. And if someone’s telling you everything you want to hear, then you should always pause to go “hmmm”.
Marco Polo, though. It’s a great story, even just presented as a series of telesnaps with bad audio. Imagine if we actually get to see Ping Cho’s dance! And it’s Warris Hussain, so you know that it’s going to be a story which makes the absolute most of its limited resources. People moan about episodes 2-4 of An Unearthly Child, but I think they’re gorgeous. And look at how dynamic the filmed inserts are.
Again, not getting my hopes up, but just imagine if we actually got to see Marco Polo in all its glory.
definitely. Old Who was where it was at. I wasn’t around to see it aired on TV, but I have whatever eps have been recovered. Sadly, not as many as the show deserves.
If only we had some sort of time machine, we could save those lost episodes
ah a rare fellow Hartnell enjoyer :]
Lost.
This assumes they had a plot or purpose to stray from to begin with.
Between the non-nonsensical plot twists, and occasionally running with ideas that coincidentally cropped up in fan forums only the year before, it was pretty clear the writers barely knew more than the audience. Then it came time to end the series, but since they didn’t have a long-range plan, it was clumsy, didn’t resolve all the loose ends, and was generally kind of bad. So they soft-rebooted it for one more season, whose ending was even worse.
iZombie
Original premise: Liv is a doctor is accidentally turned into a zombie. She becomes a medical examiner in order to have access to brains. After discovering eating the brains of murder victims gives her flashbacks and moments leading up to the victim’s death, she helps a detective to solve crimes by pretending to be psychic. A side effect of the brain eating is that she may temporarily acquire skills or idiosyncrasies of the victim. Meanwhile, Blaine, another zombie, is turning rich people into zombies to extort them in return for brains of people he’s killing.
How it went: Pretty much everyone in the main cast is a zombie (or were-zombie), there’s an evil corporation, an entire city full of zombies, a good guy private military contractor that turns into a bad guy private military contractor, and etc. that I won’t spoil any further. And eating a brain pretty much makes you take on that person’s entire personality wholesale.
The thing is, it was great! It ended pretty strong without wearing out its welcome or getting too absurd plot-wise. Meanwhile everyone in the cast is clearly having fun with the over-the-top, flanderised personality mechanics, and it’s just fun to watch.
How does izombie fit the question the OP is asking?
Because it started off as a crime-a-week police procedural, and by the end, that element of the show was basically the B-plot (if that), thereby fulfilling the criteria of going off the rails and/or losing sight of the original premise?
My all time favorite guilty pleasure, as it’s very easy and light fun to watch.
It became even more a favorite because I watched it while I just arrived in Vancouver. One night I’m watching an episode where someone looks up at a building balcony through binoculars and I had to rewind Immediately and pause, pull down the blinds to my right, and I see that same damned balcony right across the street in front of me.
That was quite awesome and made the show a favorite with me, I’m constantly looking for known places
There is a phrase for that, it’s called “Jumping the Shark”.
Watched that! People really were sweating the Fonz’s fate. :)
Lost
My favorite abandoned plot was Michael’s son. Weird kid that has weird things happen around him, like multiple birds killing themselves by flying into the windows of whatever building he’s in.
Then puberty hit that poor child actor like a sack of bricks, and the show runners just decided to write him out and never bring up that plot again.
I still hate that show for making me sit through 7 seasons or whatever of cliffhangers and then answer none of them
J J Abrams doesn’t do plots
Also, his favorite writer, Damon Lindelof. Most of this guy’s career is finding ways to ruin film and television plots.
he ruined trek, by setting precedents of his show(lens flare, flashy scenes, ,etc) for nutrek which was captured by the horrid showrunner kurtzman.
I didn’t bother watching it all. I don’t remember exactly when I gave up on it, but I think it was maybe season 4 or so. I completed whatever season I was on and never really laid off back.
Sherlock unfortunately. S1-2 are some of the best TV I’ve ever watched. 3 was okay, and then 4 was completely off the rails, with each episode being about some zany conspiracy. Granted it can’t take all the credit, Doyle did the same.
I actually think that seasons 3&4 ruined the previous seasons. The issues presented in the later seasons were all present before then, but weren’t as obvious.
It’s been awile but was season 4 when he basically became God? Like, I get that he’s smarter than everyone but it turned into him basically containing all human knowledge in his head. “That hair on her scarf is from a Persian blah blah breed of cat only available from X thus proving she’s the murderer” without doing any research, just God-like knowledge kicking around his head.
The worst was the little closed-eye twitching Cumberbatch was doing when “going” through all this knowledge. It was always kinda there, but season 4 was peak “let’s show him doing that for 10min straight.” It looked so ridiculous…
Haha it’s like each twitch represented flipping a page to new info. “He’s accessing his mind palace!”
I’m surprised he didn’t put two fingers up to his temple as well.
Yes it was far less a whodunnit and more of a psychic detective show
It’s so sad! So much potential and then. That.
Rosanne, the 90’s sitcom starring Rosanne Barr and John Goodman. One of the many “living room set with a couch in the middle” family sitcoms, this one about an Illinois blue collar family, the Connors, and their life and times trying to make ends meet. Eight seasons of this premise making acclaimed TV, and then in the ninth season, they win the lottery, go on all these outlandish adventures, Dan cheats on Rosanne, etc. The series finale reveals the whole show is a story being told by Rosanne Barr, and that the last season was mostly bullshit, they hadn’t won the lottery, Dan had died of his heart attack in the previous season, and the show ended on a “wtf was all that?” kind of note.
I think I’ll also mention Lassie, which is just kinda weird. Non-Americans might not even know what I’m talking about. It’s a show about an unusually intelligent rough collie named Lassie. Most folks who are familiar with it know it by its first incarnation, where Lassie is a farm dog who spends her days with the farm boy named Little Timmy. Little Timmy goes on precocious little adventures and often gets into trouble, and Lassie has to help, sometimes by fetching objects but often by fetching the adults to help. And everyone pretends that they can understand Lassie’s barking. Here is a stereotypical exchange from the show:
MOM is in kitchen. LASSIE enters
Lassie: Bark. Bark. Woof.
Mom: What is it girl?
Lassie: Bark. Bark.
Mom: Timmy fell down a well?! Where?"
Lassie: Woof. Bark bark.
Mom: On Old Mister Knickerficker’s ranch? Well let’s go!
Note: You know how Darth Vader didn’t say “Luke, I am your father” or Captain Kirk never said “Beam me up, Scotty?” Yeah, Timmy never fell down a well. He fell off cliffs, into rivers and lakes, down mine shafts and into quicksand, but never into a well.
The thing is, after several seasons, Lassie just…became a forest ranger’s dog. And other than “show about a smart, fluffy dog” it had basically nothing in common with it’s original run. And then for it’s last few seasons, it became an anthology series where Lassie roamed around on her own having random adventures of the week.
Roseanne really went off the rails more than her show did.
Most folks who are familiar with it know it by its first incarnation, where Lassie is a farm dog who spends her days with the farm boy named Little Timmy.
That’s the second incarnation. Before Timmy, lassie belonged to a slightly older kid named Jeff. Then one day Jeff’s parents randomly decided to drop everything and move to England. They couldn’t bring lassie with them for some reason so they gave her to Timmys family. I assume Jeff died about 10 minutes after he got off the plane with no lassie to save him from his own misadventures.
He fell down the airplane toilet 39 minutes into the flight and with no dog to alert anyone he drowned in the blue water.
