I'm not just talking about jumping the shark after a good run. But also shows which start out strong and somehow mysteriously take a turn for the worse. Like monkey crack, it's entertaining at first until it starts looking for something to fling. Mutant X. Granted, this one started out with a lot of copyright issues so had its problems hardwired right into it. But in my opinion none of the following seasons were as entertaining as the simple cool mutants vs Mason Eckart's suited thugs in the first season. Andromeda. WTF? Any other shows that in your opinion went down the wrong turn in the road?
Sliders and SeaQuest. Both had strong first seasons, and then both were ruined by moronic writing and unecessary cast changes.
^^Agreed about Earth Final Conflict. A decent show for four seasons that was ruined by a horrible fifth season.
Heroes, Teminator: SCC, and Chuck all had good first seasons and managed to become unwatchable shit in season two.
You must not have liked Twin Peaks much. He first appeared in the second episode!!! In my opinion, the show was only getting better until the murder was solved. The show plummeted to the state of being near unwatchable almost immediately, before instantly regaining it's footing for the last episode. weird
I don't know if Heroes was always bad and it took me a little while to see that or if it went bad towards the end of its first season. Stargate Atlantis also comes to mind as a show that ended up really dropping the ball.
This could be a new Fox special to air along When Animals Attack. Your mileage may vary. I also liked seasons 2-4, 4 being particularly awesome.
Heroes E:FC - first season ending was AMAZING but then it just went to faeces BSG - when they did "I Borg" and Helo betrayed humanity. Show was finished for me at that point, once the writers were no longer being true to their premise. If you're a Jew in 1940 Germany and you can wipe all the Nazis out of existence by pressing a button there is no way IN HELL you are NOT going to do that. If you're one of the last of only a few thousand humans left after the death of TENS OF BILLIONS and a race of psychotic, evil robots is using ALL ITS ENERGY AND WILL to hunt you down and exterminate you.......well, you're going to be even quicker in doing it. MooreRon basically committed the cardinal writing sin here. He gave his characters magic/ultimate power while they were in THE WORST predicament of their lives and then had to come up with a reason for them intentionally NOT using it. This single episode showed me he did not know what he was doing and showed me any sense that he was treating his show as a "real world" was now over. Liberal moralizing may work in 1980's TNG but for me, at this point, BSG was done.
It's been awhile since I've seen that episode, but I thought, after some debate, everyone basically agreed to go through with the plan and Helo sabotaged it for the sake of his cylon girlfriend. Seemed like a pretty believable rationale to me, considering how sympathetic he (and others) had become towards some of them. I do think his punishment was a little light, but otherwise I was fine with the story.
Millennium had a first season that, five or six episodes shorter, could be called brilliant. In its second year, new executive producers Morgan and Wong retooled it into a silly adventure show, filled with nonsensical religious babble and an attitude that was no longer serious about violence. Attempts to reverse the damage done in the third season only went as far as was possible given the mess left behind after the previous year, and the show was unsurprisingly cancelled.
My perennial favourite. Given what Robert Hewitt Wolfe revealed he had planned for the show's five-season arc, I'm sure if he had stayed in charge the series would have developed the cult following that surrounded B5. He really had a good handle on the show's epic metaphysics and a pretty solid character arc for all of the leads, as well as an impressively fleshed out space opera universe. Sure, the first season was cheesy, had a hammy lead, low production values, poor SFX, occasionally terrible dialogue* and can charitably be described as uneven, but then, so can B5's first season. Hewitt-Wolfe getting kicked out and the series descending into schlocky Hercules in Space adventure, well... yeah. Damn, damn shame. *However, Tyr Anasazi's exclamation "They were playing Wagner. It's the most fun I've had in about six months.", (when referring to fighting a bunch of robots) is a pretty awesome line in context. But then, Tyr in S1 got most of the show's best lines.
Ha, fair enough. I guess I should amend that and say when Bob's face started showing up in doorknobs I lost interest. I liked the first season. I have no problem whatsoever with shlocky SF that has fun with itself and doesn't aspire to realism - I guess Hollywood just beat that into me. Like Mutant X, it started with a clear and simple formula that was entertaining for what it was. I guess that's why I mentioned those together. Great SF? No. Entertaining for a Saturday afternoon? Of course!