TV shows that have gone on for way to long

[FalloutJack]

0_o

Anime like that exists?

I'm afraid so. Most other references to Cthulhu mythos in media have been somewhat respectful or at least disturbing in its own right. (Tribute bands, movies, or even the use of Cthulhu in Scribblenauts FITS in a way.) But uhhh...yeah... Some people in Japan have some pretty Bad McStupid ideas about how to portray stuff. Then again, their adult stuff obviously proves they never had any respect for Lovecraft to begin with...

 

[mikeli4194]

Honestly? I feel like Futurama has been going downhill since it got brought back. Apart from a few good episodes, it just doesn't compare to pre-Futurama cancellation. Part of me is glad it's getting cancelled before it becomes terrible like the Simpsons or Family Guy have become. Better to end on a good note

 

[gim73]

I love how many of these are series that ended a few years ago. Like SG1. Season 9 and 10 of SG1 on their worst days are still better than most of Stargate Universe. And I'd still watch SGU before I bothered with shows like:

Survivor
NCIS
CSI
Americas next top model
Anything involving toddlers and beauty pageants
Any Star Search ripoff
Law and Order

etc...

 

[Risingblade]

<..>

Dr Who...my work here is done *escapes*

 

[Far Right Knight]

Everyone has already touched on major ones (The Simpsons) and of course the tired soap operas and sitcoms. But let me touch on a television drama that is still in high regard.

Dexter.

A show that started its decline in season 3 and managed to do a little leap in season 4 with a great villain. However, though this season is given mountains of praise, the side characters and other plot lines were all boring and poorly fleshed out. The seasons after sunk to new lows that I never thought possible. Season 5 had a promising start but fell apart with the introduction of Lumen and more derivative and poor side stories. Season 6 was an abomination, Colin Hanks was abysmal and the show had become so contrived it was cringe worthy.

Season 7 was more of the same, though many were deluded into thinking it was an improvement. Again characters made stupid decisions and made full reversals of what their past histories demonstrated (Deb brushing off Dexter being a serial killer, Laguerta acting alone in discovering damning evidence). The ending was so absurd I almost threw my remote at the television, and will now skip season 8.

A show that started with so much promise has devolved into nothing better than network crap like CSI. In fact the writing in Dexter is arguably worse. I think it is quite sad, but apparently Showtime did the same with "Weeds" which I was never able to see.

Entourage was another show that had a strong first two seasons but became near unwatchable at its conclusion.

 

[gim73]

I'm tempted to say FiM, but there's only been 3 seasons so far. Still, things haven't been the same since early Season 2 and Season 3 kinda jumped the shark, though here's to hoping they can turn it around for Season 4. It's still entertaining at this point I'd say, but something's been missing for the most part since "Lesson Zero" and it feels like they ran out of ideas at some point down the line.

Seth McFarland shows definitely qualify. He's a one-trick pony (no MLP reference intended), and his style went stale a long time ago.

Reality TV. All of it. I hate speaking in absolutes, but I cannot think of a single Reality TV show that was even remotely interesting in at least the past five years. It's probably the biggest reason I don't watch TV anymore besides a select few cartoons every once in a great while (unless it's pony season, in which case it's usually only once a week). Everything about RTV feels incredibly fake and is often reliant on very low forms of comedy or very petty drama that does not appeal to me in the slightest. It's like Flash-drawn cartoons - they can be done well, but instead it is almost always done in the cheapest way possible with very little effort or passion put into it so the producers and network can make a quick buck.

EDIT: According to some of the above comments, some soap operas have gone on to have nearly 5-digit episode counts. Yikes; talk about eye candy! Is it even humanly possible to actually watch the whole series of one of those within the span of a year - scratch that, 5 years?

FiM hasn't been around that long, and I'm actually glad its been around so long. So many shows get cancelled before even getting a chance nowadays. Jumping the shark is debatable, Season 3 had the same amount of good, bad, and mediocre episodes when compared to the other seasons despite being shorter. Will be interesting to see where it goes from here.

OT: Reality TV. All of it. Its reached its over saturation point. Its embarrassing, and it needs to die, immediately. Duck Dynasty is proof of this.

Also lots of Shonen Anime... Jesus Christ anime fans, One Piece? I laugh when anyone holds that show up on a pedestal. Granted, it has its moments, and utilizes interesting tropes and characters, but its current episode is listed as... 597. Are you kidding me? Naruto, Bleach, and so many others have this problem. I realize it wouldn't be this way w/o the fillers, but its no excuse. Brevity guys!

Thats about it for me, Reality TV clogs up too much space on TV and I defy anyone to argue that 597 episodes is not absurd.

Well, I WOULD put One piece up on a pedestal, because it belongs up there. It's a great series with plenty of character building and relatively little filler. Oh, and it doesn't utilize flashbacks nearly as bad as Naruto, which is at about 560 episodes as well. Now Bleach, they screwed up their continuity so much with filler that I don't even respect it anymore.

 

[Drops a Sweet Katana]

If I had my way, the TV landscape would be a lot sparser.

I would probably start with reality TV as a whole. Shit like Survivor (is that still even a thing?), Amazing Race (Again, does that even exist anymore?) and The Apprentice is just a seething miasma of artificial drama with fake people in some overblown, overproduced perversion of an approximation on human interaction as made by some higher-up Shoggoth in a boardroom. Seriously, fuck that shit.

I'd then move onto the spawn of reality TV: the 'talent' shows and the 'life and times of one of you organisms' garbage that the History Channel seems content to spew forth under the guise of 'history made everyday'. Fuck off. No one gives a ha'penny jizz about what some hicks in some backwater swamp are doing with themselves. I don't know how this worhtless shit passes for entertainment.
As for talent shows, while they can, on rare occasions when the planets align, the heavens open and hell freezes over, turn out some genuinely talented people, its primary goal seems to be providing random idiots a means to embarrass themselves on national television, and to make one question the value of a human life. This was fantastically demonstrated last year on Britain's Got Talent, when two monumentally talented (well this is assuming they weren't lip syncing. It would be incredibly upsetting, but I wouldn't be at all surprised by it) 16 year old opera singers were beaten out by someone's dog doing tricks. Whatever god is out there, it has a sick and twisted sense of humour.

The next course of action would be to have the History Channel, the Discovery Channel and the National Geographic Channel summarily executed for polluting their broadcasts with insultingly pandering shows about hicks in swamps, hicks making moonshine, hicks fishing for catfish, hicks in another swamp, cold hicks in planes, cold hicks in trucks, cold, wet hicks on a boat, warm, wet hicks on a boat and various other permutations. Most likely I'd spare the specialised channels like Discovery Science, Discovery History and maybe NatGeo Wild, if I'm feeling merciful, since they still retain, for the most part, their original focus. History Channel, however, will taste my limitless wrath for basically homogenising everything and turning all of its underlings into copies of itself. While it wasn't unforeseen, with bullshit like the DMZ on the now disbanded Military History (replaced with H2) where they decided to air the same bullshit as History, like Ancient Aliens and Pawn Stars, on Military History.

There's more that I could list but I'd just get mad and probably end up rending existence in twain. Best to avoid that.

 

[omega 616]

I would say soaps 'cos no matter what the soap the story lines are always repeated. A new person will be nice for like 6 months IRL then they start being a little weird, it keeps escalating by them start being more bitchy, more back stabbing etc till they end up murdering somebody, then a friend/lover is torn about whether to out them or hide there secret ... which they do for 6 months IRL but all the time getting more panicky about it, while the murderer calms them down or convinces them not to. Finally on an xmas special they either get arrested or kills his friend and runs off.

Not to mention there is 1 person a year coming out as gay. A handful of people are cheating and the rest are back stabbing so much the knife trade can't keep up.

Now the one that's going to get me a tonne of people shouting at me.

Dr Who! This fucker definitely is a time lord, he just wont piss off! It's been going 50 years! I bet it has spanned EVERY form of picture format!

It's like a sci-fi soap but the cast is changed every time the director has a hot meal.

 

[drh1975]

Aside from what everyone else has said, like the Simpsons, South Park and "reality" TV, I'd have to say Bones. I used to like this series when it was a crime drama. But then it devolved into equal parts soap opera and Toyota commercial. At least House had the decency to end after eight seasons. Bones is coming back for a ninth.

 

[Cowabungaa]

Now, the show hasn't reached this point yet but I've got a gut feeling, and as a massive fan this pains me to say, that there's one show that seems to be getting closer to this point:

Mad Men.

I'm just not sure where they're going now. Most characters are just jogging in place for the last few episodes, heck for most of the season. Only Don and Peggy, and Campbell very slightly, seem to be developing somewhat. I'm just not sure what they want to do with the show.

I hope they can come up with some interesting developments and characters arcs but right now it seems to get a bit directionless.

Supernatural - (didn't they deal with the apocalypse already?)

Definitely this one. After the whole apocalypse arc everything else just seemed insignificant and pointless. Also didn't the writers originally want to end Supernatural with season 5? Everything up until the last 5 seconds of season 5's finale seemed like they were wrapping everything up, especially with the prophet's monologue at the end.

They did indeed. To be fair, season 8 made up for it, aka "That one season that was made on crack." I'm just glad I can enjoy Jensen's booty more, but I can get where people who aren't that into Supernatural are coming from.

I don't take it all that serious to be honest, Supernatural is very much B-level schlock. Though it must be said, very well-acted and sometimes well-written B-level schlock. And we would never have had The French Mistake had it been cancelled after S05.

And dat bootay.

 

[teebeeohh]

simpsons
weeds was really good for 3 season and they even ended that with burning the whole thing to the ground, it was really good and everything past that is shit
stargate because they completely wasted the Ori, while they were false gods they were easily powerful enough to be actual gods and the show never did anything with that except dodgy CGI.
how i met your mother
voyager, i really really like voyager but i always felt they were hanging around the gamma quadrant to long for it to appear really dangerous.

and i have to disagree with supernatural, sure season 6 was kinda shit but seasons 7 and 8 were a lot better and by that point you like the characters anyways(otherwise why are you still watching?)

 

[Shodan1980]

Maybe I'm being obtuse or it hasn't made it over here yet but what is FiM? Is it My Little Pony?

OT for me Dexter went on too long after season 2, it just seemed so ludicrous that people would side with the creepy weird guy over the guy they'd worked with for years at the slightest say so with not a second of doubt over some ludicrously weak "evidence".

True Blood seems to be descending below campy guilty pleasure fun to ludicrous nonsense (one episode fairy war wtf?) though I've not seen the fifth season onwards yet so maybe it improves.

For a few of these shows I think its more us changing as people rather than them becoming intrinsically worse. I still stand by South Park, it's short production cycle allows them to be incredibly topical and the ratio of good to bad episodes seems as similar as its always been, but as you age you become less enamored with toilet humour. And there are an awful lot of people that still adore the Simpsons, they can't all be wrong.

I worry Community may be going on too long, the first few seasons are gold but the fourth season seemed a bit of a dip in quality and with Jeff going off campus they're in danger of drastically changing the dynamic and ruining it. Still brilliant, I just worry. Plus is there any possible romantic coupling they haven't done? Abed and Britta and they've got the set I think.

 

[Trueflame]

There are so many. South Park, which I love, has been in decline and barely funny since roughly season 10. Same goes for Simpsons and Family Guy, but as I watched those shows a lot less and cared for them a lot less, for me the difference isn't as obviously noticeable.

How I Met Your Mother. Up until season 7 it was still good, but season 7 and 8 have been downhill. They're much better when you can watch the episodes back to back without the weekly delay, but they still aren't up to the level of earlier seasons. Ted just keeps muddling along with his love life, Barney and Robin are back, then they aren't, then they are, and so forth, and as much as I love the two of them and many of their moments together, they're simply better when they're apart and only pining for each other. It's pretty much a rule of tv shows that characters aren't as good once they are in a relationship. Marshall and Lily were both great, but as the seasons go on and they become more and more of a single amorphous mass and more and more like caricatures of themselves, they've gotten worse. Same with Barney and Robin, because when they're together they become just another couple and seem to lose most of the qualities that make them so great as individuals, probably all for the sake of solitary gag moments. And now that the mother has actually been introduced? Can she live up to 8 years worth of expectations? Not in the least.

Dexter has been going downhill, Parks and Recreation seasons 4 and 5 weren't quite as good as seasons 2 and 3, Futurama hasn't been remotely the same since it was cancelled the first time, season 4 of Archer wasn't nearly as good as the previous three, and so on. Also, it was mentioned before and it's the only long running anime and manga I actually keep up with: One Piece. The manga is still good, although it's hard to really stay excited about a handful of pages every week or so, but the anime has become absolutely horrible for at last the past 200 episodes. I feel like in the early seasons each episode contained a lot more events and seemed to have a more mature and interesting tone and perspective, while all the new episodes have too many endless scenes of people shouting, screaming, standing still and gasping, and all those usual horrible anime cliches.

In summary, everything invariably gets worse as time goes on. And yes, I am really glad Breaking Bad is ending in this season. That's the way it should be, a show should tell a story and end on a high note, not start telling a story, see how well things are going, and stall for as long as possible before concluding it.

 

[Elvis Starburst]

I agree with anything McFarlane related. American Dad was great, Simpsons was funny (and still can be entertaining) and Family Guy was good when I actually found it funny. Now, anything he is still working on could probably fade away slowly and it wouldn't shake the whole world. I think the Simpsons could at least end first. Or Family Guy (preferably)

Er, McFarlane actually has nothing to do with the Simpsons. That's all Matt Groening.

I still stand by my choices XD (True though, thanks for pointing that out)

 

[Mr.Squishy]

Family Guy, South Park and especially The Simpsons. They've all crossed beyond whatever freshness they may have had and are flat-out not even pretending to NOT be animation vehicles for politically incorrect shock-value comedy (and nothing else). SpongeBob SquarePants qualifies too for growing increasingly retarded like what happened to Johnny Bravo (any wonder kids are getting dumber?).

More locally, there's this soap opera in Norway that has aired for way too fucking long and was over-advertised when I was a kid - "Hotel Caesar". It's clocked in at 2500+ episodes as of May 2013, having aired since 1998. Truly grotesque.

Norway tends to produce shit "entertainment" with 'Hotel' in the name, like "Hotel Caesar" and "Paradise Hotel". Caesar is pretty fucking horrid, I agree wholeheartedly, and it's basically a self-parody at this point. Sweet christ.
And yeah, spongebob has decided to go for a spin down retard road at mach 5.

 

[Mistilteinn]

NCIS and CSI are well past their expiration date. NCIS started to lose my interest around four seasons ago...actually, scratch that, it was probably closer to the season after Jenny died. They just revealed waaaaay too much of the characters personal lives, and it became less 'crime drama' and more 'drama'. The characters just lost a lot of interesting aspects of themselves because they told so damn much. It's especially annoying when entire episodes are focused on only one character, and the case-of-the-week becomes the filler between the character spotlighting, rather than the other way around.

As for CSI, well, once Grissom left I think everyone knew it was going downhill. Now it's just painful to watch.

Get rid of Hawaii Five-0, too. It's just...bad. And as much as I would love to say all reality television (at least the competitions like Idol and Talent), admittedly, the first couple seasons tend to be alright, but that's as far as it should go. Shit like Toddlers or the increasing number of reality-romance crap, however, needs to go away right now.

 

[Kommand]

Let's see here:

The Simpson's
Every Seth McFarlane show

 

[KoudelkaMorgan]

Its funny that I see so much love lost for The Simpsons and Supernatural here, yet they are 2 of my favorite shows. Supernatural imo has gotten better since the crapocalypse. They even have 2 more seasons to go apparently.

If you watched the finale recently you should know that next season could be very interesting seeing how the immigrants cope with their exile.

And come on, no love for Castiel or Crowley?

Simpsons still makes me laugh, unlike Family guy.

I adore American Dad. Even the Cleaveland Show is pretty good on occausion.

Two and a half men I actually like MORE now that Angus and Charlie aren't on it much/at all.

Big Bang Theory I didn't like at all originally, but now that they have Bernadette and Amy I find it watchable.

As for what I think needs to end immediately:

American Idol. The Voice is better in every way. I could create a whole thread to enumerate and elucidate this fact but meh.

Big Brother/The Bachelor(ette)/Amazing Race/Survivor. I can see why Survivor was popular for a while, but really, people actually still watch these shows in huge enough numbers to matter?

Preemptive cancellation requested for "Does Someone Have to Go?" Its horrifying that this is what TV has come to. Anyone at that company that didn't IMMEDIATELY give notice the day they learned about the show is a complete idiot. No company in their right mind would do that, and no employee would stay with it. Everyone on that show may as well pray that they become the newest celebutard reality star because no legitimate business will hire them after that show ends.

Didn't they already have a show with a similarly sickening premise? Where contestants essentially applied for jobs with big name companies in the hopes of not staying homeless? Wasn't it cancelled after like 2 episodes?

Dexter. I watched about all of the first season, and more recently most of the latest season. Not seeing the appeal. I'd rather just watch Death Note.

 

[Dangit2019]

Maybe I'm being obtuse or it hasn't made it over here yet but what is FiM? Is it My Little Pony?

Yes.

... I already contributed earlier to this thread, and I just wanted to answer this simple question.