Tv Shows that Started Out Good and Got Worse As they Progressed

Lost definitely. And I say that as someone who was admin on some of the biggest Lost forums. Those whole 'flash sideways' and 'flash forwards' things. Ugh. Also Jack is the worst character in TV history. I can't even rewatch it as it makes me angry.
 
Star Trek: Voyager. Started out okay, got good for a short bit, then spiralled downward.
Star Trek: Enterprise. Never really got going and then that ending. Yikes.

Voyager started out awful but got slightly interesting whir thye brought in 7 of 9. This show did give us Year In Hell which ia arguable one the best trek episodes of all time, In fact. The series might have been better served had Year of Hell been the pilot episode and base the series the events consequences of that episode. It would been a far better series.

sStar Trek Enterprise should nested The Who Xindi and time temporal war storylines na instead given us the Earth Roman War and the founding of the Federation a the main story.
 
Sarah Connor Chronicles - great first season, don't know what happened for most of season 2. The only good season 2 elements were Shirley Manson and that episode on the submarine. Too bad, there was some potential there. They had a talented cast and a good story line to start with.
I thought the SF elements were good, & the Robot Chicken parody was great! I guess If I like something, for whatever reason, I may be, in some cases, be blind to its weak points. I watch very few TV shows, so most parodies lack the punch they should have. Very few now movies, also.

I too, watched Andromeda, & enjoyed the continuing story, until about s3 or s4, when things began, as I recall, to change drastically. The 1st Nietzschean was replaced by another, which was o.k., but other changes also. I really want to finish the series, but 1 episode every three months seems like too much. I thought the [what is it called? the relationships and conflicts between the characters] was more than just good.

Falling Skies had those aliens that I really wanted to see better; tried pausing, zooming, etc. They were cool! Never even occurred to me to google them. Liked the series' plot, though some sub-plots seemed bad.
 
*sticks head above parapet*
Dr Who? Both the original run and the revival
*ducks down before the missiles arrive*
Regrettably, I agree.
I liked the Ecclestone series and there are a few other episodes but not enough for me to be a fan any longer. Jodie Whittaker is doing her best but most of the stories have been pretty dire. I like Rosa Parks, but it tried to cram in too much and wasted time all in the same episode.
 
Regrettably, I agree.
I liked the Ecclestone series and there are a few other episodes but not enough for me to be a fan any longer. Jodie Whittaker is doing her best but most of the stories have been pretty dire. I like Rosa Parks, but it tried to cram in too much and wasted time all in the same episode.

I would have rather they had Paul McGann then Christoper Ecclestone in the first season of the new show.
 
Star Trek: Voyager. Started out okay, got good for a short bit, then spiralled downward.
Star Trek: Enterprise. Never really got going and then that ending. Yikes.

Star Trek Voyager began it spiraling from the first episode . It got bit more interesting with the 7 of 9 coming aboard. But what the should've does is make it like A Year in Hell, and have then struggling for survival, that would made a better series.

Stare Trek Enterprise . They really screwed that one up. They should have nixed the whole Xind concept and Temporal war storylines and gone straight to the Earth Roman War and the founding off the Federation .
 
That would have been my choice as well. Then they could have brought Richard E. Grant in much earlier.

Christopher Ecclestone is a very good actor, but he just did work as the Doctor.
 
I thought the SF elements were good, & the Robot Chicken parody was great! I guess If I like something, for whatever reason, I may be, in some cases, be blind to its weak points. I watch very few TV shows, so most parodies lack the punch they should have. Very few now movies, also.

I too, watched Andromeda, & enjoyed the continuing story, until about s3 or s4, when things began, as I recall, to change drastically. The 1st Nietzschean was replaced by another, which was o.k., but other changes also. I really want to finish the series, but 1 episode every three months seems like too much. I thought the [what is it called? the relationships and conflicts between the characters] was more than just good.

Falling Skies had those aliens that I really wanted to see better; tried pausing, zooming, etc. They were cool! Never even occurred to me to google them. Liked the series' plot, though some sub-plots seemed bad.

In the case of Andromeda, the biggest mistake they made was deeded to shorten the story arc the re-establishment of the Commonwealth , they eded it with season 2 and thats when the shod began to go downhill.

Falling Skies , Lost it's way after the second season.
 
Another one for me was Jericho although this one for a different reason - this one got cancelled so the last season was really short and felt really rushed. It actually really annoyed me because Michael J Straczynski was attached and had a proper arc planned out - he really helped get series started with carrying out the multi season arcs so it sucked.

The JMS series was Jeremiah. JMS only lasted 1 season and quit. Jericho was a different tv series, with a similar premise but not run by JMS. Both programmes only lasted 2 seasons before cancellation. :)

Andromeda It's fist two seasons were brilliant,This is a show which should have been another Babylon 5, but what happened?

Essentially, either Kevin Sorbo happened or the network happened. It's a little difficult to work out which way it went.

Basically, Andromeda was developed by Robert Hewitt Wolfe from notes left by Gene Roddenberry. Wolfe's previous credits were writing for Star Trek. He wrote for both The Next Generation and DS9. Wolfe designed Andromeda as an ensemble show with several main story-arcs. Sort of like a more complicated DS9. The main conflict in the show was supposed to have been the conflict between Trance's people and the Abyss. (Some time after the series finished Wolfe published a "Coda", which was a 1-act play that's a conversation between Trance and Harper. It explains Wolfe's original "Andromeda" plot from Trance's point of view. I think it's still around online, but I've got it as a pdf if you want it.)

Wolfe is listed in the credits as developing the show and as a co-executive producer. Effectively, Wolfe was the head writer. Sorbo was the star and an executive producer. Somehow a conflict developed between Wolfe on one side and the network (Tribune Entertainment) and Sorbo on the other. Wolfe wanted to do his ensemble, multi-arc story. The network (and, to an unclear extent, Sorbo) wanted to do an episodic series with more action. They wanted the series to be less of an ensemble piece and more Dylan Hunt-centric with some changes to the character's wardrobes. The dispute came to a head after the episode "Ouroboros", which was episode 12 in series 2. Neither side would give in and so the network effectively fired Wolfe.

Kevin Sorbo gave an interview at the time, supporting the decision to fire Wolfe, in which he said this:

“Robert is a genius, but was developing stories that were too complicated and too clever for the rest of us to understand,” Sorbo said. “What we now have is a team of very talented people who write standalone stories that can, on occasion, blend together to form a story arc. That simple ‘turn-up, tune-in’ attitude was what was missing. Now we have that, I really feel we’re on track toward making ‘Andromeda’ an outstanding show.”

So the series abandoned the long-term arc plot-lines, and everything became about Dylan Hunt. The series went downhill from there. Aafter the series finished, Sorbo gave another interview in which he suggested that firing Wolfe had been a mistake.

To cut to the chase, I thought it was a big mistake to get rid of Robert Hewitt Wolfe as our show runner. He made a five year vision for the show and they fired him after two years. That’s kind of the studio’s way to sort of keep people in their place for ego reasons, I don’t know. I was hoping we could see his vision through. I enjoyed the darkness of it, the unpredictability of it, and I enjoyed the universe. Being as evil as it was, I wanted to see how Dylan was going to work his way through with the Magogs and the Nietzscheans, and all the other bad people.

So, you can make of that what you will.

Andromeda was a dodgy but interesting series with some good characters that, in my view, failed to live up to the potential of its initial story-line, despite the fact that it ran for 5 years. I think I stopped watching it somewhere after the end of series 3, largely because the plot no longer made any real sense at that point and I no longer cared. Which was a shame because, at the time, the end of season 1 of Andromeda was about the best series end I'd ever seen.
 
Sliders, started out great, but by season 5 the show was unwatchable.

Yes. The show started to slide downhill when the Kromaggs came on the scene. By the time the Prof slid away it was time for me to slide too.

Does Amazon count? I overdosed on Nazi fetishism, blood, head cutting, and gore by the end of The Man in the High Castle's third season.
 
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Not Sci Fi Fantasy, but Spooks was an interesting one.

Started out average, then became really good when Rupert Penry-Jones arrived, then rapidly slid downhill after RPJ left
 
I'm adding my voice to choir on Doctor Who, which I was a huge fan of until this most recent era completely shattered that for me. I was excited for Jodies version. Then I saw the first episode and hated it more than anything. I struggled to not fall asleep. Not one of the characters worked, and the overall tone of the show became a mess. Even the worst of the older episodes still didn't fully kill the love I had for the show, but dear gods was the new stuff sadly awful.
 
New Star Trek series invariably start out average (at best) then kick in to their stride around seasons 2 or 3. The thing is that you usually don't realise how poor the first season is until you see others. For example I loved TNG when it first came on tv, but looking back it's awful compared to say episodes in series 4 or 5. Having said that TOS is probably the other way around, with many of the best episodes in season 1. It's maybe for the best that it ended at season 3, because clearly the writers were struggling with things to screen. I dread to think how the show may have deteriorated into obscurity and ridicule if it had continued up to season 7 like most of the other spin-offs.
 
Doctor Who suffers for the quality of writers. Back in the great days of Who the show had some of the best directors, producers and writers that have ever worked in television. If Jodie had worked for people with the calibre of Terrance Dicks, Robert Holmes and Douglas Adams she would have been a terrific Doctor.
 
Lost definitely. And I say that as someone who was admin on some of the biggest Lost forums. Those whole 'flash sideways' and 'flash forwards' things. Ugh. Also Jack is the worst character in TV history. I can't even rewatch it as it makes me angry.


I agree. I think originally Lost was to be written as a three series show? But it became a victim of it's own success and was dragged out. And out. And out, until it was a shadow of the original programme. If it had stayed at 3 series - maybe even 4 with a push - it would have been great and memorable. As it was, most people I knew (including myself) ended up watching it just to see it through to it's conclusion seeing as we had persevered for so many years.

I'm surprised someone mentioned Breaking Bad. For me the series ended at the perfect time; there was no degredation in quality, and I ended up rewatching the show on boxsets about 12 months after I'd first box-watched the shows. One of the very few times I've gone back to rewatch an entire tv show. And actually second time around it's even better, because you can see all the foreshadowing of things to come. I'd actually go a far as to say it was better second time around.
 
I think the problem with Lost was that the writers didn't know what was going on. They set out to create mysteries without deciding what the mysteries actually were, so basically they were making it all up as they went along. Poor writing!
 

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