Does A Bad Final Year Ruin A TV Show's Memory?

[startrekwatcher]

It depends. I generally don't think a bad final season can ruin a memory of a show or dampen my interest in rewatching it.

TNG had a poor final season but since it was episodic I can still enjoy those excellent middle years. Same for a show like Roseanne I can still enjoy those wonderfully hilarious episodes in its creatively gold period and just forget about the crap comedy it descended into in its final few years. I think it helps because both shows are episodic so no a bad final year doesn't ruin the show's memory. Same goes for The X-Files--it was mostly episodic so the fact that the mythology was an incoherent mess doesn't really ruin the show for me except maybe in a few mythology episodes. Same for Quantum Leap. It also helped that all these series were pretty consistent.

Then what about serialized dramas? Well I still don't think a bad final year ruins a tv show's memory. I think this is so for me because they tend to do self contained season long storylines and therefore you can easily just discard the bad later seasons/stories i.e. the original Melrose Place or DALLAS.

Now here comes the tricky one--what about a heavily serialized show like LOST where everything is interconnected and should be judged how this one Big series spanning story comes together. Then I think it can to a degree because it is essentially being treated as a 6 act story where the payoff comes in that final act and those final pieces help settle the up until then fluctuating story. So yeah the mediocre way LOST was wrapped up left a bad taste in my mouth about the series. A lot of stuff you were willing to wait and see either never got answered or answered poorly. I can still enjoy the middle seasons but knowing it never really came together in the end into one Big Beautiful Picture annoys because it feels incomplete with a bunch of undeveloped or under developed threads that never went anywhere like I think they should have. So it is easier for me when I just view LOST as a series of mini narratives instead of as one Story.

Then there are shows like Heroes and nBSG where there had been several years of subpar storytelling before the final season itself that you had long since become used to it. Now in this case I have no desire to watch the entire series since the mediocre outweighed the good and therefore it isn't worth my time to revisit the entire series but rather to focus on certain sections i.e. the first season of Heroes and the first season and half of season two of nBSG.

And that works out pretty good since S1 of Heroes was for the most part well contained and I tend to think of it as a larger than normal mini-series that told the story it needed in those 23 episodes. And seeing where the mythology went on nBSG you can view nBSG S1 and 2.5 the same way. That way I won't have to endure the love rectangle, a pointlessly drawn out Baltar cult story, wasting Caprica Six, aimless storytelling, boring Cylon adversaries etc etc.

 

[Nardpuncher]

Since it was episodic TNG's final season can be forgiven as the show as a whole was good.

Lost loses because that was a destination show, not really a journey show...and they didn't get to their destination.

 

[Skywalker]

The last season (and especially the last episode) of Lost definitely soured me on the rest of what used to be one of my favorite shows ever.

Seasons Six and Seven of Buffy the Vampire Slayer didn't really tarnish the show for me, though, because I'd stopped watching regularly with "The Gift," at the end of Season Five, and didn't see S6 or S7 in their entirety until years after the fact.

 

[stj]

St. Elsewhere/Roseanne endings that unddi the rest of the series negatively affected my recollection.

Tightly serialized shows that end badly are like any novel with a stupid/bad ending, it ruins the whole thing. That's Lost and even first season Heroes. I loved first season Heroes but they messed up the finale and I've never rewatched it. I always thought BSG was badly written and detested the politics with a passion. But I can't understand why anyone can watch the finale and think God slaying all the Cylons (who don't betray the others to help the humans at least,) is a good finale, even if they pretend the Cylons aren't Muslim stand-ins in a 9/11 series.

Babylon 5 had an excellent finale, which was Deconstruction of Falling Stars, which actually finished the story as much as it can be finished in such a rich fictional universe (it was little bit like life that way.) Sleeping in Light, like the Lost and BSG finales, was death scenes, which is entertaining in a weepy way. There's not really much substance there.

 

[MeanJoePhaser]

Bad seasons/finales are like bad relationships. You want to erase it all from your memory.

It all started with Cousin Oliver.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Lost loses because that was a destination show, not really a journey show...and they didn't get to their destination.

It was a journey show to the degree you were watching for the characters rather than the mythology, and a destination show to the degree you were watching for the reverse.

It was enough of a journey show for me that I was happy with the ending.

As for the topic of the thread, I can't think of any show where only the final season was bad, or a lot worse than any of the other seasons.

 

[Danny99]

The last couple of episodes ruined all of Lost for me. I'll never watch it again.

I got to agree here.

The whole "they're in heaven" idea was just horrible. They had something good going with the Others of the Island, but then when they started focusing on Jacob/MiB and the fountain of life or whatever it was supposed to be, it just became too stupid to follow.

 

[Dream]

^ Even though I've seen the entire show, you might want to put a spoiler warning there since you're revealing major plot points about the very end of Lost. Everyone in this topic has been pretty vague about how shows ended thus far.

I treat show seasons as chapters in a book, so don't have a problem separating good seasons from the bad. That's one of the reasons I'll never own season 2 of Lost while having the rest. I have no interest in rewatching that season. A bad final season doesn't ruin an entire show.

 

[Skywalker]

Lost loses because that was a destination show, not really a journey show...and they didn't get to their destination.

It was a journey show to the degree you were watching for the characters rather than the mythology, and a destination show to the degree you were watching for the reverse.

Actually, I was watching primarily for the mythology and only a couple of characters (namely Sawyer, Locke, Ben, Desmond, and a couple others). The rest of the characters I really couldn't care less about. It was the island and the mystery surrounding it that interested me.

 

[Goliath]

We all have favorite TV shows that ended with horrible final seasons (sometimes more than just the last one!). Does it spoil your memory of what came before, and drag down your memory of the entire show?

Absolutely.

I once saw this show called Star Trek. Its third season was so bad, I've never watched it again.

 

[Quinton O'Connor]

To answer the original question, it certainly can. But to give some examples on disagreeing with those you provided:

I thought SG-1 was terrific for all ten years. I'm not kidding. I think the worst portion of the show was '1.0', as we might now call the first half of its initial year. It had a few good episodes, like the pilot (the new version is amazing), but it had some terrible episodes. I would go so far as to say Season 1 was the only subpar season, but it still had 'Children of the Gods', the one with O'Neill and Carter in Antarctica that I can't remember the name of but was great, 'There But For The Grace Of God' and 'The Serpent's Lair', all of which were outstanding. Absolutely outstanding. That whole series from 1-10 and both telefilms (someday, somehow, we will have another) was excellent IMO, and I know from years on GateWorld I'm somewhat of a rarity.

DS9 was superb in its sixth and seventh seasons. That's my take on that show, too -- it was great from start to finish. Like SG-1, though, I feel that its initial outings left something to be desired. This is natural. A show is trying to get a feel for itself. Whereas SG-1 quickly decided that humor was to be a key element in all proceedings -- a good avenue for making compelling scripts remain as such without taking the Trekkian path of giving every episode an attempted meaning of extraordinary depth and relevance -- DS9 tackled that relevance headstrong and made for a very blatant precursor to BSG in that sense. But it went for longer, much longer, and I think it was grand. Many say the show fizzled out after the Dominion Occupation Arc. Well, of course it wasn't going to look that good in terms of big-sweeping epic proportions for a long time after that. The goal of those six episodes was to give us a big, heaping helping of that style. But I thought 'The Final Chapter' was also very good and I adored the finale, sans certain aspects. So yeah.

BSG... I know a lot of people who still maintain the fourth season was excellent and some who cite it as their favorite. But yes, I'm aware that there are plenty who think otherwise, to say the least, and many of them are essentially talking about their distaste concerning the final three hours. Well, this is headed in the same direction as the other two shows, so you know what's coming. In fact, I have to echo the sentiments of D Man on exactly where the weak links in that show resided. Bits of 2.5 (not the opening and certainly not the ending, but some of the rest) and then ditto with 3.0 and, again, ditto with 3.5. That stems from the network wanting a more episode approach for a while and the show failing to deliver on those terms, because those weren't the terms Ron D. Moore and David Eick had set up. They just didn't pull it off at all. There is one episode in Season 4 that I loathe -- 'Deadlock' -- and I do royally hate the red herring of Six's baby. All of that feels like an utter waste of screentime now. But apart from that, I liked Season 4 just fine.

So yes, to answer the question once more: it can certainly ruin a TV show's memory for me. Luckily enough, though, I haven't encountered that to a significant degree just yet. TNG had some good episodes in its last year (and it helped that I was like five when it ended, so it's only now in re-watching that I catch all these issues), and it's basically the same situation with Babylon 5. I was ten when that one folded, so I didn't really notice the drop in quality so much. I missed Sheridan, I remember that. But again, as it's been said, it seemed to pick itself back up in, we shall call it, 5.5, so that's a plus.

I think the only show I can really go the whole nine yards and give up to the question for is Sliders. Now, I was a kid while it was on the air, so I didn't realize what I'd come to determine as a young adult -- it was never amazing to begin with. But it had a good enough premise, and its first couple of years had some surprisingly good episodes. A show based solely on parallel universes -- a subject I've always enjoyed in Star Trek and Stargate -- sounds cool on paper and it delivered for some time. But network meddling, behind-the-scenes breakups and all sorts of probing, show-destroying problems reared their collective ugly heads and that last season was just about 100% unwatchable to put it lightly.

 

[Quinton O'Connor]

Gawd, I've developed tldr; syndrome.

 

[startrekwatcher]

Lost loses because that was a destination show, not really a journey show...and they didn't get to their destination.

It was a journey show to the degree you were watching for the characters rather than the mythology, and a destination show to the degree you were watching for the reverse.

Actually, I was watching primarily for the mythology and only a couple of characters (namely Sawyer, Locke, Ben, Desmond, and a couple others). The rest of the characters I really couldn't care less about. It was the island and the mystery surrounding it that interested me.

Same here. The characters were likable enough and they served their purpose well within the sweep of this epic storyline but at the end of the day I tuned in every week for the plot/mythology--and in the final season they just threw it aside and as a result a lot of stuff that initially during the original run that felt like the start of something more to come now feel like they were either dropped plot points or were included just to serve as cool isolated moments/teasers at the time but weren't meant to be sadly anything more. So instead of all these disparate threads methodically coming together some just hang there others have some development but doesn't feel completely resolved.

I really expected S6 to be where they saved the very best stuff in terms of exploring certain characters they had just barely touched on and tying up all the loose strings. And for all those who keep going on and on about the characters let me point out that I didn't think the writers crafted character arcs that were all that interesting or rewarding except for maybe Ben and Jack. Most of the time they were plot devices or were given botched arcs. I can't really say the character arcs in S6 were that much better than the plot stuff.

 

[Goliath]

Gawd, I've developed tldr; syndrome.

I feel your pain.

 

[Jack Bauer]

Not really. If you liked the vast majority of the series then I don't see how a bad final one could ruin it. Several bad years at the end of the run, yeah I do see that since you're left with a extremely bad taste in your mouth like you just vomited. A bad final season is like a little bit just came up.

 

[Quinton O'Connor]

Gawd, I've developed tldr; syndrome.

I feel your pain.

That's an awesome emoticon and I didn't know it existed!

 

[TheBrew]

No. Because I still enjoyed the earlier stuff and if I didn't like something, I could always go back and rewatch the stuff I liked.

It's like saying that Star Trek 5 ruined Star Trek 2.

 

[Nardpuncher]

No. Because I still enjoyed the earlier stuff and if I didn't like something, I could always go back and rewatch the stuff I liked.

It's like saying that Star Trek 5 ruined Star Trek 2.

But as I said earlier a show like Lost where you are waiting for an ending that answers questions the show put forth and an episodic show where the ship flies off into the sunset are different types of shows.

 

[TheBrew]

No. Because I still enjoyed the earlier stuff and if I didn't like something, I could always go back and rewatch the stuff I liked.

It's like saying that Star Trek 5 ruined Star Trek 2.

But as I said earlier a show like Lost where you are waiting for an ending that answers questions the show put forth and an episodic show where the ship flies off into the sunset are different types of shows.

True and a bad ending can diminish an overall series, but great episodes will still be great episodes.

 

[PKTrekGirl]

Warning: LOST spoilers ahead! Not that I can imagine anyone who cares about LOST not having seen or read about the finale by now.



I tend to enjoy highly serialized shows the best (DS9, B5, nuBSG, LOST, Buffy, Angel, etc). And I have noticed that with those types of shows, the series finale is absolutely critical to my opinion of the show going into the future.

For the past decade, DS9 and B5 were my two favorite shows ever - nothing else ever came close. And both had excellent series finales that still make me sob to this day. Both shows had their ups and downs in terms of episodes and seasons. But both of them gave us satisfying and logical closure. The finales gave us answers and resolution - not more questions and 'wtf's.

In recent years, LOST finally became a serious challenger to DS9 and B5 - the first show ever that had even come close. And going into the final episode of LOST, I was thinking that LOST could unseat either B5 (#2) or DS9 (#1) or both and become my favorite show of all time.

But in ONE episode, the writers managed to so terribly botch this show that I haven't watched a single episode of LOST since the finale. And believe it or not, it wasn't even the whole series finale that did it. In fact, I was reasonably on board with them until the last 20 minutes! But that last 20 minutes of LOST was so mind-numbingly TERRIBLE that I was left shocked and stunned with disbelief....and grief. Killing off Jack for no reason and pulling Hurley out of their asses as 'the one'; and that stupid reunion in the after-world (Sayid with Shannon rather than with Nadia? ) was lame, lame, LAME. And I wasn't too crazy about making Richard Alpert mortal again either, but admittedly that is more of a personal preference than a botched plot point (he is my favorite LOST character). But killing Jack and leaving Hurley at the helm, with BEN as the second in command????? Is that even a remotely credible ending to ANYONE? Especially given that Hurley was not exactly the brightest crayon in the box, and Ben, up until the very end, was manipulative and disloyal? And given that for 5 solid years, it was clear that the show was about Jack's journey to faith? And that with his death, the final message of this show became "even with faith - or rather ESPECIALLY with faith, life's a bitch and then you die"?

These writers just couldn't RESIST the ego trip of giving us one final mind f**k. But they did it at the expense of a satisfying ending to the series, which in my view, was a HUGE mistake. They tried to show us one more time how 'clever' they were...and ended up showing us only how clueless they were about how critical the issue of closure is to an audience. Months later, I'm still angry about the ending of LOST - because in 20 minutes, they turned the logical and satisfying conclusion they were headed for completely on it's head and opted for a stupid-ass mind f**k instead.

Because of the ending, LOST, to me, is now sort of 'lost' in the netherworld. I am not sure where to put it - even months after the finale. I was so sure that this show would end up unseating B5 and DS9 that now, I have no idea what to 'do with it'.

Maybe it will end up being #3 eventually. Or maybe further down the list. But in the end, it wasn't the last season that let me down. It wasn't even the whole series finale. It was the last 20 minutes of a 6 season show that managed to nearly destroy everything they had built for 6 years.

So...does a bad final season ruin a show? For me, no. But a series finale certainly can. Especially if the show is highly serialized.