Worst Season Ever?
- Thread starter DeepSpaceWine
- Start date
I agree completely. It's so bad I find it hard to believe TV professionals were willing to put their names on it.
Perhaps i need to rewatch it, It has been years...
Of course, right about now I would take a bad SF show, as right now I think Dr. Who is the only SF show in production...
Nowhere Man
Commodore
I think I can safely say Smallville Season 10 along with Season 8.
Hogwash. While they're jarringly comedic compared to how mostly serious the previous seasons had been, I loved "X-Cops", "Hollywood A.D.", and "Je Souhaite". They were tremendously funny, original, and entertaining. There were also some strong, more dramatic episodes like "En Ami" and (as you mentioned) the season finale.
No season with episodes like "The Measure of a Man" and "Q Who" (two of the best in the series) can be the worst of the series.
The season doesn't hold together very well as a whole, but neither do most seasons of the wildly inconsistent "Xena: The Warrior Princess". This one deserves way more credit than you're giving it. Season 6 has its fair share of clunkers, but at the same time it was impressive because of how satisfyingly it paid off previous seasons with some lovely meta references to the show's past.
The reference-heavy episodes were not only fun for their allusions, but also because of their confident storytelling and acting. I believe they demonstrated how the experience of the past seasons had made the actors and writers comfortable enough to try some new things that worked wonderfully. For example, "When Fates Collide" beautifully wrapped up the Caesar story line, and the great blatantly anachronistic farce of "You Are There" (one of my favourite episodes of this series) was a charming love letter to devoted Xena fans. The same could be said for "Soul Possession", which was the best and most inspired of the silly 'reincarnation' episodes. Pity about the dull, pretentious, gratingly melodramatic series finale. I think "Soul Possession" should have been the last episode.
And DevilEyes, I know you'll love my picks just as much as I loved yours
because my choices for worst seasons are seasons 6 and 7 of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and season 4 of "Angel". I think season 6 and 7 basically took "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" to hell absolutely eviscerating all the goodwill built up by the previous seasons with the appallingly ill-conceived Buffy and Spike 'romantic' relationship, along with the relentlessly ugly, depressing, or just plain boring story lines.The Xander and Anya break-up, the attempted rape, The First, the lameass 'potential' slayers, Buffy working for a fast food joint, the pointless and overrated musical episode, and the limp, unconvincing Kennedy relationship were just some of the atrocities committed against this series in those seasons. I'd already lost interest in the series earlier with the Glory nonsense in season 5, but these seasons made me regret ever watching it in the first place. There were a few bright spots like the Trio, but it was mostly just a completely infuriating waste of time.
As for season 4 of "Angel", I didn't watch the series until last year, but if I had been watching it when it was first broadcast, I'm sure I would have quit the show in the middle of this season. Its consistent awfulness just exhausted me. The Connor-Jasmine arc is one of the worst, most disgusting story lines I have ever seen in any medium and every minute of it made me cringe.
It would have been a shame if I'd quit because of that season, since season 5 rebounded from 4's lows quite nicely. Seasons 6 and 7 of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and season 4 of "Angel" should be in an official dictionary or encyclopedia somewhere as definitions of "jumping the shark", right under the original "Happy Days" episode.
Just goes to show that one persons terrible season is another persons favorite. While I will agree with you that Buffy Season 7 was pretty bad (I only really liked the first five and last five episodes of that season) I absolutely adore Angel season 4, each twist and turn had me on the edge of my seat.
Now Angel Season 5? That one made it hard for me to be a fan. We went from hardcore serialized storytelling back to episodic monster of the week crap. There's only a handful of episodes that I liked and I really missed the Hyperion. I never cared for the new set up at Wolfram & Hart, it reeked of Joss trying to appease the networks to keep his show afloat.
I thought it was uneven but strong far from bad--up there with the best of Trek and sure beats the pants off a lot of sci-fi shows like any season of V, The Event, any season of Fringe, Lost S2 and S6, Heroes S2-4, any season of SGU, any season of Caprica, Invasion S1, Threshold, Persons Unknown, Haven, Eureka, Warehouse 13, The Dresden Files, Surface etc.
It was the first tv show to do the season long mystery arc that piled on questions that so many shows would go onto do in their storytelling approach i.e. Lost, Heroes, V etc but actually did it well. B&B wisely realized that it shouldn't be dragged out beyond season 3 and as a result all the questions raised got answered and answered satisfactorily.
If anything it is the perfect example of why there should be shorter tighter seasons because the unevenness was caused by episodes that strayed from the arc material--Extinction, North Star, Chosen Realm, Doctor's Orders, E2--that helped pad out the season to 24. Other than that it was well-plotted, incorporated a nice sense of mystery, managed to tell an epic story on a tv budget with lots of characters to add to a multi-perspective approach, great production values, memorable visual images, exciting battles, generated a visceral sense of urgency. The Big Three each got a nice character arc. The only thing I didn't care for was the Trip/T'Pol romance.
Sorry, with the long breaks in between season blocks I lose track and think they are separate seasons. I agree with your assessment and the last round of episodes that recently started airing have been much better. Just as the show gets cancelled, it gets good.
True and it really didn't have to be--the writers introduced a lot of interesting ideas--the problem was that the writers suffered from ADD and couldn't stick with one or two long enough to develop them into something interesting. Instead, they couldn't help but jump from one thing to the next dropping the thread relegating it to a forgotten plot point--and that was the whole of the season. They threw everything into the mix except the kitchen sink--time travel, Nathan's spiritual awakening, Angela in charge of the Company, Sylar being a Petrelli, Sylar being a dad, Sylar being a good guy, Sylar being a bad guy, a Sylar/Elle romance, Peter absorb Sylar's dark side then it is dropped, Nathan and Jessica romance etc.
Yeah one of the worst in Trek and tv. It just had lengthy stretches of mediocre or bad episodes with the occasional bright spot like Before & After, Futures End and Scorpion.Not really...
I'd never been so close to quitting a Trek series as I was in season 3. Neelix reached the peak of annoying. Neelix/Kes' break-up was so awkwardly handled, the Delta Quadrant couldn't have been any more bland, the aliens any more commonplace, the stories any more campy/silly or outright dumb, technobabble overkill was in full swing i.e. The Swarm, Sacred Ground etc.
If it hadn't been for the news that spring that they were doing an overhaul, bringing back the Borg, adding a new Borg character and dropping the original finale for a big Borg extravaganza I would have washed my hands of it.
Season Seven of Smallville for me.
S:AAB was a very good show with writers having to operate without a logical bible-the bane of too many scifi shows. The pancakes episode alone redeems it, IMO.
As for the Star Trek seasons mentioned-I look on it like the old saying:
A bad day at the beach beats a good day at the office.
I wouldn't classify any ST season as "bad"-some could have been done better, maybe, but there's nothing out there as a season to be ashamed of.
Wouldn't know about Buffy/Angel-I tried to ignore those when they were on.
Last season of XFILES? Yes, I agree, sad stuff. At least Doggett could act...
As for B5-sorry, I disagree with whomever posted that. S5 wasn't as intense but episodes like Day of the Dead(?) and Sleeping In Light were quite good....
As for the Star Trek seasons mentioned-I look on it like the old saying:
A bad day at the beach beats a good day at the office.
I wouldn't classify any ST season as "bad"-some could have been done better, maybe, but there's nothing out there as a season to be ashamed of.
Wouldn't know about Buffy/Angel-I tried to ignore those when they were on.
Last season of XFILES? Yes, I agree, sad stuff. At least Doggett could act...
As for B5-sorry, I disagree with whomever posted that. S5 wasn't as intense but episodes like Day of the Dead(?) and Sleeping In Light were quite good....
S
Stone_Cold_Sisko
Guest
I think the question is better posed as "what's the worst season of a generally solid show", because if a show's just sh-t all the way through, well not many people will have watched it and there's nothing to discuss.
Of the shows I actually LIKED... Babylon 5 Season 5, TNG Season 1
I'm sure one of the later Voyager seasons were crap too but I never watched on eall the way through.
Of the shows I actually LIKED... Babylon 5 Season 5, TNG Season 1
I'm sure one of the later Voyager seasons were crap too but I never watched on eall the way through.
I'm going to take issue with Eureka, but other than that, sure, ENT season 3 was better than most of what you mentioned in some ways. (Personally I find ENT season 2 to be the weakest year of that show.)
Oh, hell no. Lots of shows did that earlier. There was of course Babylon 5 which did series-long arcs in the 90s with satisfactory resolution, not to mention scores of old serials. A few seasons of the original Doctor Who contain only a single serial for the entire year. Deep Space Nine of course did the arc-heavy approach years earlier as well, although it still interspersed a few standalones at that time.
I'll give the Bs credit for finally jumping on the story-arc bandwagon, even if the end result clearly showed it wasn't their preferred medium, but let's not overstate the novelty of it.
Yes, I made that mistake as well. Fortunately I have since rectified it.
I'm not talking about doing season long arcs--I'm talking about doing a season long arc that accumulates a bunch of questions or only gave us pieces of a puzzle or doing non-linear storytelling--what LOST took to the nth degree.
I'm sure the true answer is something to do with Stargate or Andromeda, but of the shows I was willing to actually watch, my pick is Heroes S4. Just when you didn't think the show could get any worse...
S2 and S3 at least had some intriguing ideas, even if they were thrown at the screen like a Jackson Pollack painting.
S2 and S3 at least had some intriguing ideas, even if they were thrown at the screen like a Jackson Pollack painting.
If you think Season 3 of ENT was better than half of the shows you mentioned then you must be crazy. The third season was not epic, it was boring, anti-climatic, cliched and tired. The drama was forced, the tension even more so. To even put Lost over ENT shows me that your tastes are of a form that I will never understand or agree with. Which is fine. Variety makes the world spicy and all that. But wow.
VOY and ENT were both fairly competently done. They were just uninspired and derivative. They never descended to unwatchable-disaster levels (except for individual episodes like TATV, but I mean not as an ongoing thing).
Lost was at another level - its failures stemmed from the ambition of the writers, who simply set up expectations too high by trying to do something that had never been done before, and possibly can't be done on broadcast TV. I wouldn't even mention Lost in this context. A noble failure (and a failure in only some ways; a success in others) is much better in my estimation than a plodding bore (VOY, ENT S1-3), which in turn is still better than barely-watchable nonsense like Heroes S2-3 which in turn is better than unwatchable crap (SG:U, Andromeda). There are many levels of badness out there.
Lost was at another level - its failures stemmed from the ambition of the writers, who simply set up expectations too high by trying to do something that had never been done before, and possibly can't be done on broadcast TV. I wouldn't even mention Lost in this context. A noble failure (and a failure in only some ways; a success in others) is much better in my estimation than a plodding bore (VOY, ENT S1-3), which in turn is still better than barely-watchable nonsense like Heroes S2-3 which in turn is better than unwatchable crap (SG:U, Andromeda). There are many levels of badness out there.
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