Worst television show you watched to the bitter end

i liked Last Man On Earth!

Breaking Bad was exactly the sort of thing ppl like, if they like that sort of thing.

I'm still sort of onside with Killing Eve, but if it meanders any more, that may well be my answer a year from now.

My Mother the Car--funny! I was limiting myself to the post-Sopranos world--which wasn't at all implied in the original post, that's just kind of a dividing line in my mind--but if I don't, I'm sure I watched many dubious shows as a kid.

I can't remember if I made it to season two of Breaking Bad. It should have been a one-season show. Get in, tell your story, get out. Ninety percent of shows should be no more than 13 episodes.

yea last man on earth was great imo

Battlestar Galactica is such a fantastic premise, but I wonder if there's any way to do it that wouldn't lose momentum.

Probably BSG for me too. After some point in a show this convoluted, all your hopes just rest on the ending being good. it was not

xp it would take a lot more planning than the writers put into it, but I think it could be done

not completely winging it with the writing while stringing people along pretending you have a coherent overarching narrative that will all make sense in the end would help (see also x files, many others)

actually BSG is the worst I've seen, I don't remember when or how quickly it fell apart but at some point towards the end I realised I actually hated it and just hoped they wouldn't fuck up the ending too bad (it was even worse than I feared)

I think it was the dylan bit that broke me

Weeds. I don't recall details. I have less patience for TV shows now.

I don't generally hate-watch bad shows very long, and certainly not to the end, but there a few shows I liked or loved and that I watched to the end even as they unaccountably spiraled into an inescapable hot garbage vortex. Lost and Roseanne immediately spring to mind.

(And I remembered as I typed that I have the Roseanne reboot and multiple seasons of The Conners sitting unwatched on my DVR so I guess I haven't technically made it to the bitter end.)

But Roseanne is particularly heartbreaking as the first five seasons in isolation are pretty much all-time top...three, let's say? tv for me.

I just started Weeds and read the Weeds thread on this board and accidentally read a spoiler that made me realize I don't want to keep going with the show. not because I know what's going to happen, but because it looks like it will make the show really terrible

The Conners is actually pretty good!

didn't bother to watch the first-season of the Roseanne reboot with her bullshit Trumpism

I think I've watched almost every episode of Becker and I don't think I've liked a single one

lol I liked that show in my 20s buuuuuuuuuuut I doubt I would now.

pseudo-edgy "angry middle-aged guy" show

Love Monkey, buti t was only one season

It’s obviously not bad TV, but I was so sick of The Wire by the time I got to the end of it.

Weeds

Season 5 did ask us to accept a whole lot of non-believable shit from multiple characters

but I did enjoy it if not as much as the previous four seasons

so compared to the first season, why did Weeds suck? or do you all think it always sucked?

I've watched about 6 or 7 episodes and it's fun enough but nothing sucks me into it to where I will watch more than one or two at a time. plus I read about the Shane murder bit and....eesh.

first half at least was fine? i think i did read about roughly where it went bad and i should've listened. i had so much time once. Now I'm just here.

Terrace House. Started out so great and the last few seasons were just absolute toxic dreck.

the show was good but the last season of the magicians sucked a lot, unbelievably aimless

anybody finish Dexter? I stopped after S4 (which I liked, but S5 was not gripping me - then I read summaries of later seasons and...YIKES).

A lot of people say that about s5 of the wire, but not season 3 for some reason.

o fuck I forgot abt Lost but really it only took a nosedive in S6, albeit a brutal and unforgivable one

True Blood, although I skipped an entire season somewhere in the middle and didn't miss anything.

Buffy was a real slog by the end. I only watched a little of season 9 x-files but that was probably too much, and I tuned in for the finale and it was real dumb. Otherwise I don’t tend to stick with shows that have clearly lost it. Got to the end of s3 of BSG and figured it had been a pretty good show but it was becoming pointless.

But I guess Buffy isn’t a good answer given that it kept up a standard of quality for a long while.

Oh I definitely stuck with House M.D. until the end, idk if it got really bad per se but the final season I definitely only watched because I wanted to see how it ended

I can't remember if I made it to season two of Breaking Bad. It should have been a one-season show. Get in, tell your story, get out. Ninety percent of shows should be no more than 13 episodes.

Breaking Bad didn't even get to the end of the first season! Writers' strike hit about ep seven.

Last two seasons aren't as good as the first three, and Better Call Saul is way better, but it's a ludicrous thriller from the start, hard to hold it continuing to be ludicrous in the search for thrills against it.

not completely winging it with the writing while stringing people along pretending you have a coherent overarching narrative that will all make sense in the end would help (see also x files, many others)

X-Files was and remains dope as long as you just watch the standalone episodes by good writers, and avoid all the ones that have anything to do with the overarching alien conspiracy plots.

all the ones that have anything to do with

there are like two that mention that stuff a bit which are v good, but you can either ignore the mentions or skip those eps for safety. great show.

I am only partway into season 6 but if I survive through season 8 i can sat with confidence that LA Law will be the worst show I have watched to the bitter end

you guys dont even know

in season 5 corbin bernsen’s character Arnie was fucking his former secretary in the CRAWL SPACE and they fell through the ceiling into the boss’s office ~inflagrante delicto~

it’s truly the dumbest show i’ve ever seen

modern tv is fkn fassbinder by comparison

I have watched every single episode of Mulaney. I am the one person who has done that.

I like his standup. I love the one nutball skit he writes whenever he hosts SNL. And I love Martin Short. After the second or third awful episode of Mulaney, the utter lack of anything funny or even slightly appealing about it became a source of fascination to me, and I had to see it through to the end. I regret nothing, but I also wish the show never existed. It’s all a rich tapestry.

I liked Last Man On Earth, but Will Forte's character was so annoying that it was sometimes hard to watch.

And I watched Dexter to the end just for closure, but it wasn't that bad.

There's another category of shows, several of which have been mentioned itt (X-Files and Gilmore Girls particularly), that I love a lot and have rewatched huge swaths of several times over but which I never finished watching because I could see a bitter end in sight and I knew I just couldn't bear the pain. It's almost like I'm physically incapable of watching them self-mutilate (I rewatched both again somewhat recently with the intent of actually plowing through and I didn't get any further than I'd gotten before).

xp I was gonna say Dexter was easily the worst show I watched to completion but I actually skipped season 7

I don’t regret watching X-files to the end fwiw!

Doc Martin. The family liked it so we kept watching. Miserable annoying bastard.

where u get to in X-F OL

I'm usually pretty good with abandoning series that I don't like. I abandoned Picard and Discovery last year and I think I made the right call. I can think of two series that I regret watching all of:

Torchwood - two bad seasons followed by a pretty good 5-episode mini-series, followed by a very bad American season.

House - season 3 was tired, season 4 gave the show fresh life with more characters and more comedy; at the start of season 6 there was a two-parter about House being in rehab with Lin Manuel-Miranda that was the low point of the show. It never got good again although I watched all 8 seasons.

I think Lost was redeemable up until the last season. BSG reboot had its good moments until its last half-season too.

Discovery's third season was way better than the previous two, so I'm glad I stuck with it even though the second season especially was pretty bad. Seems like it suffers from the same "Star Trek series curse" as TNG, DS9, and Enterprise, where they don't become constantly good until season 3,

I stopped watching Red Dwarf after the first two episodes of series VIII. Seems like everyone else stopped watching as well as there wasn't another full series for another 13 years.

I've still only seen the X-Files up through maybe S7 and I regard 3 to 6 maybe as some of my fav television of all time.

Maybe.

This thread reminds me that I actually watched through all of Heroes, lol (not that recent revival season though)

I honestly though BSG was good up until the last few episodes, and the ending didn’t bother me too much.

Oz got pretty terrible in the last two and a half seasons, but I couldn’t stop watching

Always worth mentioning fairly long-running shows that just continued to get better and better, or at least never remotely feel like dipping in quality, like Veep

Veep got so drastically & immediately inferior that I jumped ship early in the first written-by-Americans* / shot-in-Los-Angeles season, dropping back in for the final.

* just looked 'em up for the first time, and most of them were former SNL writers who'd put in time on network sitcoms.

probably the prisoner

Alcatraz was only a one season wonder I stuck with to the end. But I used to watch anything back then on my sadly dusty and rusted exercise bike. I can barely remember anything about it other than it was just as daft as Lost.

didn't The Prisoner have only like, 16 episodes

yeah but nine of them were filler episodes added to make it long enough to sell to America

(trufax! but I'm guessing KM was joeking)

I did like the twist of his sister finding out that he was the killer, although for the life of me now I can't remember how that played out.

Didn't she find out they weren't blood relatives and try to seduce him? Or was that before?
It was sooo bad. They pissed away so much audience goodwill for nothing.

Ha! I don't remember that either. Most of what I remember about Deb is people saying what terrible actress Jennifer Carpenter was (I thought she was fine).

her character's gratuitous swearing seemed a bit lazy and overdone, but that wasn't the actor's fault.

I suppose we'd best mention Arrested Development S5 here too, which apart from Alia Shawkat was absolute misery.

This would have been my answer but I actually don't think we made it through S5.

So: Degrassi. Jr High/High are classic, but the later seasons in the 00s 'next generation' reboot were pretty dud. I should've given up but I found it hard to abandon a series that I pretty much grew up with.

No mention of The West Wing yet, (in either thread) I'm surprised.

didn't The Prisoner have only like, 16 episodes

Long enough for a TV series, imo.

I think I watched The Prisoner on VHS with my Dad when I was 13, even then I could tell that it was a really intriguing 6-episode series that was bound to fall apart once they actually had to explain things a bit

for me this has to be friends. many people will query that friends was ever "good" but whatever it was i enjoyed it. i was a child when it started so my faculties were not yet as hardened i suppose. viewing it nowadays engenders feelings of nostalgia in me.

taking as a given that friends was ever "good", and that there are "classic friends episodes" - they occur almost exclusively in the first 3 or 4 seasons. later season are hugely forgettable with lots of painful plots. the absolute nadir: the brief joey and rachel romance.

First two seasons, id have said

The ensemble had gifted performers and those first few seasons were a decent mix of zany and tight

Yes you're probably right

Two and a Half Men is like that too, I've never thought the show was particularly good but some of the episodes in the first two seasons are kinda funny

I don't think I ever made it much further than halfway through Friends. Probably a good stopping point? Inasmuch as I'm still able to say that I enjoy Friends, probably so.

Friends was amazing and I’ve watched many episodes twice. I loved it to the end.

for me the peak of Dexter was the NA meeting in season 2 where he comes forth in front of the group about his dark passenger

Friends is why I asked if you have to have seen every episode - no way that I did, but saw the first and probably the last and the vast majority along the way, just from scheduling and being paired with other good or half-dece American sitcoms of the time.

The only time I really cared about what was going on was the chunk where Monica and Chanandler were secretly boning after someone else's wedding. Rewatched that in '00s repeats too, and still enjoyed it.

Friends cameo poll imo

I have loved every episode of Will and Grace too, even the reboot

Fun fact that I didn't realize until I read Littlefield's book: James Burrows (the director of almost every episode of Cheers) directed every episode of Will & Grace. Which is literally the only thing that has piqued my interest wrt watching Will & Grace (which I still have never done).

Yeah I don’t know for sure that I’ve seen every Friends episode and don’t care to find out, but it feels like I have? Def watched it a lot when it was first airing (for all the criticisms against it, it did feel genuinely groundbreaking then - like, I’m Malaysian and Friends was prob the first time I heard the word lesbian on TV) and then over the years, it became one of those shows that’s always on somewhere - go to a foreign country, and it’s somehow the only show being aired in English, go to a friend’s house and they have it on in the background, and now my stepkid and her friends are watching it on Netflix etc. So yeah... unclear if I’ve in fact seen every episode but it’s entirely possible.

I've seen every episode of Friends. it peaked in seasons 2-4, then had a bunch of uneven seasons but always gems here and there. even the last season has a couple episodes I love