Breaking Bad
Rick and Morty. My taste in humor just changed and it and other similar shows don’t do it for me anymore
Breaking bad, narcos, the office, friends.
Banshee. There’s only so many times you can watch a guy get the absolute piss bashed out of him
The sopranos. I got halfway through season 2 and decided I just didn’t give a shit about finishing it.
I feel like it was a show that was greatly helped by the once a week group viewing era.
Walking Dead, House of the Dragon
Stranger Things. Gave up after the first season. It just felt like the show was trying too hard to feel like something nostalgic from the 80s without any of the substance or writing the things from the 80s it was trying to mimic had.
The walking dead. A good show with high production value I will admit.
But I found it to be souless morbid and honestly disgusting.
Better Call Saul. I tried, i truly tried, but i just couldn’t get through the first few eps. It was super shit.
Amerikans.
Like really y’all that addicted to the honey‽ Everybody is fucking everybody and only the two main characters know and can talk about it?
Prison Break
My biggest problem with most of the shows listed is they have to outdo themselves and go on for too long.
Season one: Great premise!
Season Two: Same premise, but TWICE the danger!
Season three: I don’t know, robot ninjas or something?
I miss when shows could just grow in the first season or two, and then you’d only get raising stakes two or three times a year (season finale/premier and sweeps). Otherwise they’re just stories.
These days shows have to justify themselves right out of the gate.
These days shows have to justify themselves right out of the gate.
I miss mid-budget live action scifi shows with strong enough episodic elements that I can actually remember individual episodes. These days seemingly every show feels like an 8-12 movie that blurs together.
Star Trek Strange New Worlds is the closest current thing to an exception. Before that The Orville.
Most other scifi that comes out has to be an “event”.
I miss mid-budget live action scifi shows with strong enough episodic elements that I can actually remember individual episodes
Kamen Rider.
The Orville had that in the first season or so, after that it went heavy into serialization. I dont think I even finished whatever the last season was because of it.
The most infamous example of this is Supernatural where the first few seasons were very episodic and exactly what you described. Then, after season 5 it keep escalating until dudes are fighting off the end of the world for the 6th time lmao
Hah, yes!
Just finished season 3 of Yellowjackets and White Lotus and I just felt, meh. I’m hopeful for season 4 of both shows but I’ll be living off the honeymoon phase from seasons 1 and 2.
Oh, this is about Riverdale, isn’t it?
Riverdale actually did what I’ve always wished for a boring failure of a show to do, and just completely go nuts.
Oh our boring high school drama show is slumping? How about an organ stealing cult, a superhero, and a guy escaping from the cops in a rocketship!
Its more that they have to keep the money train going, than they have to outdo themselves.
Never got the appeal of these ones. They aren’t bad shows, but they did not do it for me.
Game of Thrones
Lost
Better Call Saul
Peaky Blinders
Breaking Bad
Shit. That’s exactly my list.
- I didn’t even watch GoT long enough to see Emilia Clark in the buff. But, then, I’d read the first two books and absolutely loathed them, and didn’t find the TV series improved the story much.
- I liked the first season of Lost, but the second felt like the writers were like, “oh shit… we got a second season? Shitshitshit…” Like they were just making it up as they went, and the writing and plot was just… bad.
- I didn’t watch BCS because I didn’t like
- Breaking Bad. I mean, I like scenes from BB, but the show itself suffered (for me) from this tendency in the past decade to base entire shows on tense anxiety. Boardwalk Empires was another that used this mechanism, as did
- Peaky Blinders. Great writing. Great acting. But it’s just constant tension, and it’s simply not fun.
It’s like directors got ahold of this one technique and just beat it into every fucking show in the past decade. It’s tired, overused, and you’ll notice it’s a common trait of many of the shows you and agree on. You have to have tension, but I didn’t need every god damned minute to be wondering if someone’s going to get their throat graphically slashed with a straight-edge.
Oh man! You just put to words why I couldn’t stand Breaking Bad, and Boardwalk Empire.
I watched the first simply because a lot of people love it, and I try to watch everything that seems worth seeing. The second I saw some clips from that I really liked, but then I just didn’t stick with the actual show.
In both cases, the series left me on constant edge, in a really bad way.
Now I realize that I kept waiting for the shows to grant me some kind of catharsis, but it just never happened. Or it happened rarely and in ways that quickly gets brushed away as inconsequential.
Y’all are trippin, the gus storyline in Better Call Saul/BB is likely my favorite villain of all time.
Fair enough though, I was scared I was gonna see these shows listed in here and here we are!
You’re still allowed to enjoy them.
How could I after this
Fair point. You probably shouldn’t like or enjoy things that other people subjectively don’t like.
My condolences.
I’m not fond of the perpetual tension. Just awful.
this tendency in the past decade to base entire shows on tense anxiety.
Yup. I call it the “drama of paranoia,” and it’s exhausting after a while. It also gives you a veneer of “prestige” without having to make characters I give a shit about or plots that fit together at all. As a good example of a show that realized this, Mad Men always struggled with a certain early-season plotline until they finally just ripped off the band-aid and said,
spoiler
the “real” Don Draper’s widow handwaves something out with our boy Dick, and literally nobody else gives a shit.
What worked about that show had nothing to do with “ONE BIG SECRET.”
This, plus The Sopranos, The Office, Parks & Rec, IASIP, 30 Rock, etc.
I get that they’re well liked, and they are the source of lots of meme material, but I could never manage to get through a whole episode.
I’ve never been able to make it through an entire episode of Community, for the same reason. It’s memeable, but I just don’t find it funny at all.
I have watched any of those except the first couple of Breaking Bad. It was too real for me so I just couldnt.
I lasted 5 minutes with Peaky Blinders. The loud music drowning out the dialogue did my head in.
Big Bang Theory
Lost was the tv version of clickbait. 3 concurrent story lines rotated from week to week. Every episode a cliffhanger that you had to wait 2 more weeks to resolve into a nothing burger. Even watching that shit on disc or streaming is annoying as fuck. I might have liked what was going on story wise, but I got too annoyed with the format to get past mid season 2.
Yeah. Lost was when I was intrugued by J J abrams style, and then completely turned off by his inability to tell a story or have a plan beyond the halfway point.
And then they involved him in seemingly every major movie franchise ever for the next two decades… and he kept doing the same crap. Lots of flash and dazzle and dramatic moments that ultimately mean nothing because the characters have no story to tell, no real arc, no consistent rules creating a believable universe for the watcher to be sucked in to - any rules can be thrown out the window anytime a dramatic cliche opportunity arises. Yet he still seems very popular.
Lost went on far too long and they backed themselves into a corner by saying that the big secret was what nobody had guessed, but this was right around the Internet getting popular to talk about tv shows, so everything good had already been suggested. If it had been me, I would have just picked the best one and gone with that…
There is a recut of it, still available via torrent, called Chronologically LOST. It is every scene, but in chronological order, and only once each. Really cool way to see the show and make sense of it.
Unfortunately, mid season 2 is where it finally stops having enormous fluff and starts picking up pace. Fair criticisms though
