The Boys. Season 3. If the season finale had been episode 6 I would have returned, but the final 2 episodes went more Marvel than Marvel being so afraid to kill Homelander or Butcher. It made the plot armor way too had to ignore, and became obvious they were just going to drag things out for multiple seasons.
Mr. Robot. I loved the pilot episode so much, but by episode 3 or 4 it became glaringly obvious to me that the writers didn’t understand computers.
That is a highly unusual comment regarding Mr. Robot
Game of Thrones.
Which one of their many bad decisions?
Anything in the last 2 seasons?
Well, no one else mentioned it, so I will.
Altered Carbon. Season one was solid. I completely bought Joel Kinnaman as a strung-out anti-hero.
Anthony Mackie? Not so much. Falcon? Yes, that guy emanates Boy Scout vibes, but he looked ridiculous having a drink at the bar. I didn’t buy him as the same character for one second. Completely miscast. Flabbergasted at that one decision, though it had nothing to do with the writers.
S2 writing was laughable compared to S1. Cringe as. Mackie did well with what he was given IMO. I rewatched S1 a few months ago though, absolute pulpy banger
Anything that’s been “adapted” in the last decade or so: Witcher? Dog shit. Halo? Hell no. Wheel of Time? Fuck off. Amazon LoTR? Fucking spare me. Disney ANYTHING?!? I’d rather set myself on fire than validate the raping of all my childhood heroes.
Writers are an extinct species. All we have now are cultural vandals.
Most of human history has been this way. People telling and re-telling their own fanfiction or alternate versions of everything from Greek tragedies to the Bible to everything else.
There have been good adaptations. The Castlevania anime was great. The first one at least.
I think the bigger issue is the trend of putting a lot of money and effort into season 1 to make a good impression and try to get loyal fans, then to take all the money out for subsequent seasons and hope the fans stick around.
It’s interesting that you mention the Witcher because I thought season 1 was way better than anything the games did. I could see how the structure in particular might not be for everyone. After season 1 it’s obvious that everything went cheap- the lighting, the costumes, the makeup, the locations, the editing, the sound design, the CG effects, the writing. I normally don’t even have an appreciation for costume design, but by season 3 it looked like they went to Spirit for Geralt’s armor and Kohl’s for Yennifer’s dresses.
Arcane was another one. Season 1 was way better than anything League of Legends did during the few years I played. Season 2 was still… Okay, but the writing was terrible. The backgrounds went from detailed panoramas of piltover to just stylized colored fog. A lot of the characters seem to do things that go against their previously established motives or just do things that don’t actually make sense but are required to move the plot along.
To bring it back to Castlevania- after the original series, the Nocturne series felt like a cheap knockoff. Which was a real shame because it was the same studio and I really enjoyed most of their other work.
There have been some good adaptations though, even ones that did their own thing - like Foundation.
Castlevania is fucking sick tho. Watchmen the series is arguably equivalent to the OG comic in terms of writing and artistic quality.
There are genuinely great adaptations out there.
The Witcher showrunners were going to have Geralt and Yennifer have a child. This was also the decision that made Cavill leave the show, which just cemented my choice to not bother with the following season.
Do what you will with the overall plot line and stories you wanna tell, but god that is such an egregious change that fucks up so much about the character’s motivations since canonically, Witchers are fucking sterile and can’t have kids, but Geralt really wants to be a father. That’s one of the reasons he attached himself to Ciri.
That is beyond stupid, to the point where anyone proposing it has shown they not only don’t respect the source material, but actively hate it. That is like the central feature of the interpersonal relationships in the books.
Wasn’t the same true for sorceresses
Geralt’s mother was a sorcereress. Sterility and birth defects are a side effect of long term magic use and alchemy but not 100%
Okay, I remembered it being a thing but wasn’t 100% sure on the details. Been a while since I read the books. I remember it being a major thing with Yennefer, she was similarly infertile like Geralt and also wanted a child
The sorceresses in geralt’s mother’s generation were made sterile but not in a physical way, she figured out how to circumvent that and have Geralt. So in Yennefer’s generation Aretuza removed the womb from their graduates.
Out of curiosity do you have a source for that? I’ve tried searching but I can’t find anything about this at all.
Finally something I’m qualified to answer!
Family Guy - While more “Flanderization” when all the characters became parodies of their previous selves, the real thing is when all of a sudden every joke needed to be “explained”. i.e. someone trips while running and then one of the character says “AHHH HE TRIPPED AND HE FELL”. Ruined every joke for me, was done with it after that. Kind of one decision, I’m sure someone said “people don’t get the jokes” and ruined the show for me.
House - When they suddenly swapped the cast out. Some people really liked it, for me that was the end of the original premise of the show.
How I Met Your Mother - Lily and Marshall’s baby. Having a baby in a show is always kind of the “Okay the romance story is over and the writers are out of ideas” but it was done so badly. Lily was always an extremely selfish character, and she was insufferable through everything, from making the literal choice to have a child based on some fated chance to shaming Marshall for having the gall to - go to work to support all of them while she did… nothing? Did she even have a job? Constant guilt trips and manipulation, she was the worst character but their relationship was just straight-up toxic when she got pregnant.
That 70’s Show - Having Donna stay home from college - 4 years of characterization thrown out the window. She was always a strong independent woman and now she’s just apparently throwing away her future? She attends remote classes for a while then it just disappears. Then suddenly Eric has this big revelation later that him marrying her might lead to an unsatisifed future? It was all just very clear that the writers didn’t know how to handle her being gone - a very common coming of age issue
X-Files - The move to California. Enough said.
On a smaller and younger scale it was like this with the Super Friends (justice league).
Superman: “I’m going to punch this asteroid that was on a direct course to destroy metropolis which will break it in half, one half fills the gap in a bridge a train is about to cross and the other plugs a hole in a dam”
superman proceeds to do just that and it pissed very young me off.
That sounds hilarious
super campy and amazing
The Super Friends was a wild show. There’s an episode where they fight the literal fucking Titanic and kill it by tricking it into running into another iceberg. I’m not joking or exaggerating.
can’t wait for the 2070s to see this happen to 9/11
I need to see this.
Happy Days when they had The Fonz water ski jump over a shark.
Yep, I’m old, and yes that is where the term “Jump the shark” is from.
Except that isn’t true.
Yes the show peaked in the ratings the season Fonzie jumped the shark, but the show went on for another 8 years and the later seasons were when the show was better than ever.
Also the phrase comes from an interviewee on the Howard Stern show, talking about Happy Days, 20 years after the show ended.
That is when the show became so dumb I did not watch anymore, and it is what the phrase is from, I didn’t say who coined it or when.
Also, Jon Hein coined the term in 1985, 8 years after the episode aired https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_the_shark
No it didn’t., the later seasons the show got mature storylines and stopped being laugh track crap.
I remember seeing an interview with Tom Bosley, the actor who played Mr. Cunningham, where he points out that there were more episodes of Happy Days after jumping the shark than before, so it was hardly the death knell for the show.
Simpsons also has more seasons after they jumped the shark than before.
Yes, but that is the point it was done for me.
Eureka. The time travel, and that god fucking damn bunker
the 100 after that moment
Wth happened I stopped watching bc I got bored
spoiler
they killed off lexa
Not sure if it counts, but I loved the Lord of the Rings movies. Had high hopes for The Hobbit, but the way they portrayed Thorin completely broke it for me. Didn’t bother watching the other two.
Cue Lindsay Ellis
You didnt miss much. They were very forgettable.
I watched them all but like I never think about scenes and such with the hobbit one like I do the lord of the rings. I mean I think about the animated version from way back.
🎵 Ho Ho, my lad! Below, my lad! 🎶
Dexter. 1 ep after trinity, I stopped. Decided lithgow had a perfect ending.
I rewatched about a year ago, and the only episode I skipped was the series finale, the final episode. As far as I’m concerned my head canon is the real ending.
I was very happy to see both Original Sin, and Resurrection. No, he couldn’t have survived a close-range hunting rifle shot to the chest, but I don’t care. I was just happy to have more Dexter.
Yeah when I first heard about Resurrection I went all Annie Wilkes for about ten seconds but then I was just stoked for more Dexter. I liked the first season but I felt bad for poor Batista.
It really was the peak of what i remember from the show. It does having an intriguing consequence that Dexter starts to be concerned his son will have the same reaction that Dexter did to witnessing his mother’s death and starts monitoring him for signs. If I remember correctly, he’s both concerned that his son will be cursed to be like him, but also excited by the idea of having a bond and mentorship with him through it. But even that gets a bit hamfisted as I recall and ultimately goes nowhere. The show really whimpered out in later seasons.
Jessica Jones. Season one was fucking magnificent. Season 2+ is… A second season of that show. My understanding is, that they changed the writing staff of the show.
The end of season one set up season two to be a hard boiled detective show. That would have been cool. Stand alone episodes with an overlying story arc
Controversial take but Star Trek Voyager.
When I was a kid I loved it, it was my favourite Star Trek. then they introduced Seven of Nine and suddenly it became a borgfest.
I liked it because it was all new alien races, stuff that’s NEVER been in Star Trek before…and then they were like “no ones watching, lets bring in the Borg.”
I think you mean Seven of Fine
As I recall, the first introduction of the Borg was in the Delta Quadrant (when Q tossed the Enterprise there as a lark). So not including them would seem like a huge oversight considering their dominance.
This was also after First Contact came out, I assume that had something to do with it.
There was also still a huge host of episodes that had nothing to do with borg, aside from the occasional “We need to improve this technology because plot reasons, let’s throw some borg nanites in it or something”. It wasn’t wholly focused on the borg.
Disagree
I have the opposite opinion. Voyager was my first trek as a kid as well. Upon rewatching it, the show actually isn’t great until seven shows up. It kinda drags ass until season 4.
Interesting. DS9 would’ve been more to your liking then. The Borg were only in the first episode as one or two scenes to set up Sisko’s character arch. After that, it’s mostly new races, and more advanced development of existing boring races (i.e. Ferringhi, Bajorians).
Not really decisions by the writers, but more losing the good cast members.
Misfits and Being Human UK
