Worst television show you watched to the bitter end

What’s the worst show you’ve watched every episode of - multi-season shows only, no five episodes and out cancellations.

Tough battle between Sons of Anarchy (which got dumber and more offensive over time) and Las Vegas (always dumb and offensive but just mildly) for me.

Battle Star Galactica. If I’d known, I’d have stopped after they made it off that shitty camp/planet in season two.

I think I watched every episode of Due South. The only part that was good was the second half of the first season, but that handful of episodes was so good I watched four whole seasons in hopes that it would happen again.

pretty little liars, which is mostly a real bore with some outrageously campy intervals

Good question. I don't know if I've stuck one out yet where I felt like it was a waste. I've still watched comparatively fewer than most people (guess: 20-25), but I if I made it to the end, I always felt like it was more or less time well spent. Maybe I've selectively forgotten something.

Star Trek Voyager

My Mother the Car.

My excuse was that I was 8 and loved tv. It was aimed at my demographic. It starred Jerry Van Dyke and I already liked Dick Van Dyke so I kept hoping it would become funny. I was gullible. I was often bored on weekday evenings.

I am still a bit ashamed of watching it. It was very, very bad and I may not have watched all 30 episodes. It was long ago.

Sleepy Hollow? It's not even that bad tbh, but I am generally happy to cut and run.

Expecting a strong showing here for Lost, of course.

Gilmore Girls should be part of this discussion. The last season was OK, but then the revival movies made pretty much everyone who watched them wonder what they'd ever seen in the show in the first place. (Or so I am told. I didn't watch them myself.)

For me, Battlestar Galactica is up there for sure. Mad Men got pretty shitty toward the end but never completely fell apart. Most shows, I give up on when they start to suck.

just watched lost for the first time recently and, while it is flawed in many ways, i didn't ever feel like giving it up and didn't mind how it ended

Despite working in the ad industry, I just kinda checked out of mad men... maybe 4 seasons in? 5?

Never did bother with the last season of Sons Of Anarchy. Hard to believe it got worse than whichever one was mostly set in "Belfast".

I feel like I could count on one hand the multi-season shows I've actually seen all of.

i don't think i've seen seasons 6-7 of gilmore girls in their entirety... and idk, i'm not really rushing to do it. year in the life was so often a parade of everything that sucked about the show

I watched a lot more of House than I should have, but I did eventually give up on it.

I liked Gilmore Girls, it was a comfort show. didn’t see the reboot.

thought Mad Men had a pretty good ending

how did they end it?

Don Draper, cyborg

Last couple of Mad Men seasons felt rushed more than bad, the characters (except maybe Don) remained compelling enough to justify them.

I thought Mad Men was pretty solid to the end, and ended where it needed to.
My benchmark is Last Man on Earth. Relentlessly, cringeworthily juvenile and unfunny, boring, repetitive, endless, but my teenage daughters loved it so I stuck it out with them.

Mad Men could've said what it was trying to say in one fewer season, easily, but it was never bad and the actual ending was superb.

breaking bad

Challop received by the commission.

i even watched the movie. it was shite

I said "challop received", u need to wait for next steps from the ombudsman

I hate-watched Breaking Bad, resented that it was hours of extreme boredom with minutes of terror, and the premise was preposterous, but ultimately it was really moving

ok you all gotta get in the Challop line and wait until your number is called

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.

I'd be curious to know who even watches The Simpsons at this point, particularly the subset of viewers who've stuck it out since the early days. You know there's at least a few.

i havea friend who insists new Simpsons is better than old

his MRI is scheduled for next Thurs

Most recent episode:

Homer and Marge team up with Comic Book Guy and his wife Kumiko to win a trivia contest. After spending time with Maggie, Kumiko decides she wants to have a baby, only for her husband to disagree. But just as Comic Book Guy begins to come around on the matter, the pressure to offer emotional support to a distressed Bart and Lisa sees him fleeing his wife and problems back to his family home.

Do you think they just pick characters out of a hat in writing the scripts?

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

There's also a specific case of shows that are always kind of bad/enjoyable and which, in their later seasons, kind of double down and become eye-poppingly insane; here I am thinking of Continuum and Hemlock Grove but I'm sure there are many examples.

his wife Kumiko

yiiiiiikes

I suppose we'd best mention Arrested Development S5 here too, which apart from Alia Shawkat was absolute misery. I am a rare S4 proponent (original mix) though

Yes I was deliberately making myself not think of AD. I love the first seasons so much but it really shouldn't have come back.

There's also a specific case of shows that are always kind of bad/enjoyable and which, in their later seasons, kind of double down and become eye-poppingly insane; here I am thinking of Continuum and Hemlock Grove but I'm sure there are many examples.

Walker, Texas Ranger

"plane crashed here"

also Family Matters. went from an enjoyable blue-collar family sitcom that managed to tackle some heavy issues (Eddie's racial profiling) and just had the annoyance of the annoying catch-phrase character..... to bat-shit insane when it turned into shit like Stefan Urquelle, or the ep where Urkel shrunk himself and Carl and they were fighting off giant ants.

which is why I love the Key and Peele Family Matters sketch

also, WEird Science the tv show. It was stupid. and I loved it nonetheless. every ep.

who is gonna fess up to watching all of According to Jim?

i havea friend who insists new Simpsons is better than old

his MRI is scheduled for next Thurs

― Looking for Cape Penis house (Neanderthal), Monday, January 18, 2021 10:57 AM (forty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Maybe an argument to defer to: https://deadhomersociety.com/zombiesimpsons/zs1/

Walker, Texas Ranger

Apparently the CW is about to roll out a Walker prequel series starring Sam from Supernatural. I've been seeing ads for it.

Finally we will learn how Walker got his powers

I will occasionally watch a current Simpsons if I'm sitting there with nothing else to do. And there was a two-parter this season or last in which the Simpsons' church gets a new, young preacher who shakes things up, and it was better than I thought the latter day Simpsons was capable of. Mostly part 1, because I remember being disappointed after part 2.

yeah current Simpsons is alright, probably better than most animated shows on TV right now, still nowhere near the 90s episodes

Hannibal! And I sort of documented the experience here! "It's going to get better!" they said! It did not!

some people just hate the best television show, it takes all kinds

I'm in the midst of Hannibal! Just starting the red dragon arc -- should I slog through or cut losses?

I watched Dexter to the end. Unlike normal people, I actually quite liked the final episode. However, pretty much else about that final season was terrible and I had already disliked every other even season (S2, S4, S6); I really hated how -without any explanation- Dexter moved from catching baddies who had escaped the system to interfering with police investigations as he 'needed to be the one to catch/kill the criminal'; thought that giving Dexter a kid was a really stupid decision for the show (didn't seem like they knew what to do with it - the kid was always with a babysitter anyway). Apart from the first season, I only thought highly of the fifth (the whole suspense around the Lumen character) but in the end I really didn't know why I decided to watch this show all the way through at all.

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.

a knock knock joke

The actress was so shocked she divorced him IRL

I watched all of Hannibal despite not liking any of the characters, plots or writing. but it was so gorgeous to look at that I persisted.

I was tempted to mute the dialogue tho just embarrassingly risible.

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